Testing your ideas (2)

Yesterday, I received a solid reminder of the costs and challenges of surveying and testing marketing ideas, especially when you engage in intrusive communications. The question, always, is whether the intrusion's reward is worthy of its cost.

The question is whether our special advertising-supported editorial feature concept, the backbone of our existing print business, could be adapted effectively to leads generated from this blog in the new Design and Construction Report (http://www.dcnreport.com).

You can see the original posting explaining the concept here.

Out of 1,419 survey invitations, 15 answered the question, but disturbingly, six people reported my email as "spam" -- the highest number of spam complaints I've received for a single mailing since I began using Constant Contact about two years ago. (The spam complaints may have resulted in part because I inadvertently selected one of my employees as "sending" the email, and the recipients may not have known her. (She got a surprise on waking up to find dozens of 'bounces' in her email box!)

However, while nine people responded by saying they would welcome publicity only without any cost at all to their organization (hardly of value for our business), three said "yes" to the question of whether they would be willing to pay for the service with a "satisfaction guaranteed or there is no cost" fee, and three said they don't know whether publicity would be of value to them.

Later in the day, Chase observed in an email to me:

"Three leads where people would pay a fee is promising.

"The real question is to determine if the people responding are the real decision makers or not.

"I suspect we would see an average of five per cent close rate from the blog leads. I have no problem working these and as more issues are published the close rate will increase."

The results, obviously biased with responses from people who have a relatively close connection with our business, suggest there is some interest in the concept, but we don't have overwhelming or obvious demand. In other words, I certainly have not hit a home run.

And, to get the answers, I pushed myself into the face of busy people who don't really need nor want the intrusion.

But it isn't a dead loss either. As Chase points out, if we can achieve a five per cent close rate in the early going (that is one in 20), without being a pest or spending too much sales energy on weak leads, we have a viable market -- because this blog and its high Google rankings generates upwards of 20 to 30 inquiries a week. With our average revenue per feature, this indicates a market potential of upwards of $100,000.

In marketing, sometimes we need to push out a little to see what is happening, and sometimes we need to be a little in the face of our current or potential clients. This is certainly not the "Permission Marketing" advocated by Seth Godin, but I think a totally passive approach with no assertion or invitation/call to action is asking for silence when you try out new things.

As well, I appreciate that our business idea probably requires the effective intervention and co-ordination of intelligent sales representatives. The editorial publicity/special advertising feature concept is reasonably simple, but may not lend itself to the "check the box, 'I'll take it'" attitude.

Nevertheless, I'll be respectful and careful before rushing to generate another survey. I need to respect that far too many people resented the intrusion.

Testing your ideas

Yesterday morning, I floated a trial balloon on this blog, suggesting that the Design and Construction Report could be an effective opportunity to associate your interests (as Construction Marketing Ideas blog readers) with our own marketing strategies.

I then presented the idea to our weekly general meeting, and received what amounted to a collective "sigh" from my company's sales team. They effectively told me, "no, this won't work."

Glub. "Brilliant ideas" go nowhere without execution. So, the question is, am I wrong to assume there is a valid marketing correlation between responses and connections from this blog and the marketing of publicity-focused services, or should I push forward and (even more dramatically) invest time, resources, and money in making it happen?

Most of the time, these sorts of questions are aired and responded quietly within our own businesses.

But this blog's foundation is its openness and experimentation -- you can see ideas maturing, tested, and sometimes failing, right in front of your eyes. The result hopefully show you what can work for your own business, and which ideas should be dropped like lead balloons. (That's the second balloon analogy in this posting.)

In practice, most successful business people process dozens, even hundreds, of ideas a year. These arrive through their own experiences, insight flashes, employees, external media publicity and conferences, and sometimes, the initiative of outside sales representatives.

We need to process the ideas quickly and sort them into ones worthy of further experimentation and implementation. Most ideas rightfully end up right in the trash can, but unfortunately, I'm sure, many worthy innovations are not introduced because of inertia, fear, laziness, or simply lack of knowledge.

The question is, how can you sift the ideas effectively and quickly and focus your energies where they will be most useful? I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest these tests are worthy of consideration.

Is the idea you are testing low risk, easy to implement, and not likely to cause too much disruption in existing operations?
This is an "easy to say yes" idea -- but one which probably won't have that much impact long-term.

If you are asking someone else to do something, would you do it yourself? If not, why not?
My sales representatives said "no" to the idea of marketing leads generated by this blog for the Design and Construction Report. I suppose I could force them to do some work here -- but if I'm not ready to do it myself, why should I ignore their resistance?

Can you find quick tests that will validate your assumptions, without burning bridges or draining resources?
A few years ago, a well-placed person proposed a business idea that seemed relevant and valid, but would have required commitments of resources and effort beyond normal levels. We spent months setting up the concept, even developing prototypes. But I hesitated and decided I needed to see how the market would respond. I contracted with a reliable but non-employee representative to work with me for three days to see whether he could sell the idea. It failed, miserably. Maybe the idea should have received a 'second chance' but I realized that we were entering the space of diminishing returns. I dropped it.

Will the idea produce immediate revenue or reduce costs right away, or is it an "investment for the future"?
The former two variables are easy to say "yes" and move forward, the latter requires a much higher commitment threshold (and the risk increases with the investment size).

Can you find a test that will quickly provide you with insights and results at minimum cost and effort?
The three day test described above for an idea we had worked on for months made sense (and the investment in a few days pay for one person proved to be worth every cent), but do you want to spend that much time and effort validating other ideas, at the earlier stages of their development. You need some quick tests and measuring tools to tell you whether to take things further, or drop the idea.

For the idea I posted yesterday, the negative feedback from my staff is a major warning to go slow, if at all.

I can now take things in two directions: Pick up the phone or send some emails to a sampling of potential clients to see their interest (that is, do the work myself, with sampling, one by one), or survey the readers with a quick online poll.

I decided on the latter -- it is fast, easy, and if it works, will provide immediate and actionable leads. And if it doesn't work, I'll know equally quickly, and we can move on to other ideas.

If you haven't already received the survey invitation email from me, you can see it here -- and once you complete the survey, you will also see the results!

The poll

The poll on the right side of this blog invites you to respond to a fundamental marketing and sales question. I sense we all 'know' what the answer will be, but we may be surprised in the details. No need for you to enter any personal information, email data, or the like to respond -- this poll is clearly not scientific. (And unlike the survey resources we use, I don't think there are 'controls' to prevent multiple entries.)

If you have any questions, use the comments function or email me.

The tyranny (and essential need) of measuring

Scarlett Surveys International offers Employee Engagement Surveys. These could be useful -- but so could your own direct communications and connections with your employees.

Client surveys, employee evaluations, web statistics . . . and more are certainly essential these days in business and marketing. Of course your ultimate success is measured by bottom-line results: The "books" and accounting data showing profit, cash flow, revenue per employee and the like. But much more measuring is now an essential part of the picture in any marketing program -- ranging from client satisfaction to the "will your clients recommend you" advocated by Fred Reichheld. The measuring process is aided by new, easy-to-use web based survey tools, which allow you to capture quick results at virtually no cost.

But all of this measuring may have a significant cost -- you may find the measuring exercise distorts your values; confuses your perspectives, and causes you to lose touch with your clients and employees. When everything is turned into numbers, the subjective and subtle hints can be lost and (worse yet) you can get some really strange and unhealthy behaviour as people game the system and act in artificial manners to beat the measuring tools.

Having said this, I am at a loss to offer a better option.

You see, the seat-of-your-pants approach to business, the gut feel and instinct methodology, can work on a small scale, but is hard to replicate going forward, and if you have achieved exceptional success -- or know someone or some organization which has -- through purely intuitive and instinctive approaches -- you may be leaving much money and business on the table by not finding some way to measure and determine the sources of this success.

So what should you do?

• Measure stuff, by all means, but keep it reasonable. If you have a 15 question survey, boil it down to three questions; and ask only the people who really need to know to answer it.


• Make sure that everything you measure has lots of opportunities for comment and subjective communication -- you want to encourage people to speak their minds, to be open, and to share thoughts. Read the comments as much as the survey data.


• Share your results. Be open, but respect privacy. (We for example use an online sales test for all sales job applicants who pass the initial screenings. The person who applies always sees the results -- the only others who see them are me and employees directly involved in the selection process.)
  
• Most importantly, don't get so trapped in the measuring game that you get things like I experienced when purchasing a car. The sales rep said: "Please take the survey call and respond, because I get a bonus for every good result.". Sorry. Measuring should not define the business -- or the client relationships.

Deciding on a new design

Here is a preview of what will likely be the new design/style of our publications and websites. The process behind the change may provide you with insights into effective strategies to incorporate changes in your corporate identity, branding, and client relationships.

First, some background. We've been using our 'old' design for more than a decade, since 1996 when I met designer Ray Levielle and he offered prices and service levels far better than the competition. Through thick and thin, the good times and hard times, he has worked with us at times producing hundreds of pages a month even while serving many other clients.

With month-to-month business demands and responsibilities, and the challenge of not knowing whether a redesign would help or hurt the publications, we never changed it.

But we now have a business planning and management system, and we decided at our late spring planning meeting earlier this year to rethink the design to adapt it more effectively to the combined Internet/Print model. The project still sat on a back-burner -- but now we had an 'action item' regarding the need to redesign the publications.

Two weeks ago, Ray got to work, and presented several design choices. Now I had a different kind of problem. Which design should we use? I polled our staff and contractors. Some of the original design options looked good but would not be feasible with advertising and postal requirements. One logo design looked too close to a competitor's title. Still, I had four apparently good design options.

"Why not ask our readers?" I thought. Previously this choice would have involved much delay, expense and uncertainty. But the online survey simplifies things immensely.

Frankly, the survey-set up of our email provider Constant Contact isn't perfect, especially for a survey requiring readers to select from graphic options. But I patched something together, offering a modest inducement of a free $25.00 subscription or advertising credit to readers who respond; then sent the survey to about 2,000 names on our Ontario database.

Within eight hours, we received 46 responses; and a solid majority (59 per cent) chose the design you see here. Several readers also offered insightful comments.

The impressive thing to me about this process is that I was able to take a challenging business decision and, with reader/client feedback, obtain virtually instant response to something that is highly subjective. While the survey certainly is not scientific, the results here are clear enough to allow us to make an informed decision.

The survey is still live. You can get to it at this URL:

http://survey.constantcontact.com/survey/a07e26ithmqf7uk4esu/start

The Constant Contact survey page. We use this software (and collect a modest referral fee if you sign up for it.)

The use (and abuse) of surveys

Improving online technologies have made it incredibly easy to set up and distribute online surveys. From a marketing (and market research) perspective, we seem to get the best of all worlds -- for a tiny investment in effort and time, we receive virtually instant feedback. It is something of an instant gratification game.

Fair enough. But where do we draw the line. One marketing guru (who I will not name here because, in fairness, I haven't spoken with him) has sent me two 'surveys' in the last couple of weeks. Streaming down the survey, I quickly realized he was engaged in a lead-gathering and data mining exercise. Since most online surveys allow for truly incredible information gathering about who responded, and how each individual responds to an individual question, this data will allow the survey operator's sales representatives to tailor their 'pitch' to the respondents. When the salesperson calls back, the (perhaps unsophisticated) survey participant will, the theory goes, be awed by the sales representative's sensitive and deep understanding and appreciation of the survey-taker's real business concerns.

Yes, this approach perhaps works, but have you noticed the problem underlying this somewhat manipulative approach to survey use. More and more of us are simply refusing to respond to surveys. This doesn't turn off the tap, of course. At 9:30 p.m. in the midst of a family holiday, some guy called our home and tried to engage me in a 'survey'. I am now usually courteous to inbound sales calls (see my previous posting on why), but I gave this guy a blast. My son cheered me!

There is another paradox here, of course. As fewer and fewer respond to surveys, the responses become even more meaningful. Sure, some people complete surveys because they like to or have nothing better to do. But most of the time, people will go to the trouble to complete a survey when they feel a pressing need to respond -- when there is an exceptional motivating circumstance. So, for example, when we stayed at a hotel and service and environment proved to be terrible, we certainly responded to the follow-up survey. (Hilton/Embassy Suites got it right here -- the manager called me back, apologized, and gave us a free night stay voucher -- that worked!)

If, however, you set a survey within a totally voluntary context, you will be impressed by how little most people want to have to do with these things. As an example, in my recent Construction Marketing Ideas newsletter (for which I can track click through responses), we achieved record-breaking interest in the story about the contractor who obtains $10,000 worth of work, in three hours, with a badly-written 'handwritten' note. This is of course a wonderful too-good-to-be-true story. I will follow up on it next week.

I also built in a link to a brief (two question) online survey asking readers to tell us their best and worst marketing experience. Zero response. Nada. Not a thing.

My point is that you should appreciate the power and utility of online surveys -- these things really work -- but also be wary of the irritation factor. But maybe that marketing guru doesn't care about 'irritation'. He knows that the people who bother to complete his survey are hurting enough to respond -- and these are his perfect leads.