Only Once, Part II

As many of you know, this blog is called Only Once because You’re Only a First-Time CEO Once — that’s the general theme of my writings on entrepreneurship and on the email marketing industry (read the initial posting which explains all of that here).

As of today, I am entering into another Only Once because "You’re Only a First-Time Parent Once" as well!  Mariquita and I welcomed Casey Joanna Blumberg into the world at 8:46 this evening.  Everyone is doing well, and you can see our official announcement here. 

Email Marketing Good and Bad:  Case Study Snippets

I had a good meeting this morning with one of our long-time multi-channel retailer clients who is in town for Shop.org’s Annual Summit.  Over the course of our conversation, she relayed two things going on in her world of email marketing at the moment that bear repeating (with her permission, of course).

First, the good.  In a recent study, our retailer hero determined that customers who receive their email newsletters and offers (not even open/click, just receive) spend on average 3x as much on in-store purchases than their non-email counterparts in any given week or for any given campaign.  Talk about deriving non-email or non-click value from your email marketing efforts!

Second, the bad (ok, well, it’s the ugly as well).  Our retailer hero was just nailed by Spamhaus because someone out there complained about a transactional email he or she received from the retailer.  She estimates that the poor Spamhaus listing is costing her millions of dollars a year in lost sales from regular customers.  The email was literally about a refund that the retailer owed the customer (why there was a complaint — who knows?).  What did Spamhaus suggest the retailer do?  Repermission their list around transactional messages — “or else.”  Seems to me that that’s a pretty tough stance to take on rather shaky evidence and with no appropriate dispute resolution mechanism (e.g., one that’s not just tuned to mailers’ interests, but one that’s fair in the broadest sense of the word).  No wonder Spamhaus is being sued, and no wonder the vigilante blacklist providers of the world are losing traction with ISPs and corporate system administrators.  Authentication and real, professionally run reputation systems with ample amounts of representative data, feedback loops, and dispute resolution mechanisms will ultimately win the day over the vigilantes of the world.  Folks like Spamhaus can get things right lots of the time and in fact do provide a valuable cog in the global world of spam fighting, but they’re less great at making amends when they don’t.

So email continues to have its challenges around filtering and deliverability…but how cool is it that marketers are really sinking their teeth into metrics that prove how effective the email channel is for driving sales, both online and offline?

What Convergence Really Means

Rebecca Lieb wrote a great column last week in ClickZ about Advertising Week and how disappointed she was in it.  The article is worth a read for many reasons, but there was one quote in particular that stuck out to me as I re-read it tonight.

Some people talk about convergence as the coming together of old media and new media.  Others talk about digial meeting analog.  Still others talk about the melding of cable, telco, Internet, and wireless.  A brave few even talk about direct marketing and brand advertising.

But Rebecca quoted the head of global advertising for American Express, who really nailed what convergence means in the world of media today — the convergence of advertising and publishing:

“No longer can we view our job as filling gaps between other peoples’ content,” said Scotti. “Soon, there won’t be gaps to fill because everything is content.”

Boy, isn’t that the truth?  And it’s not just the much-hyped world of user-generated content, YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, and blogs.

It’s as much about advertisers getting smarter and becoming content publishers themselves.  Think about any good email you get from a marketer.  What makes it good?  Sure, a nice discount, maybe free shipping, certainly a relevant offer based on your preferences and purchase behavior.  But the other thing that makes it good is the presence of content to surround and drive the marketing messages.  The applesauce around the pill, if you will.

It works.  We see it every day.  And we only see more of it happening in the future as consumers get smarter and more discerning about the brands with which they choose to interact.

Friday Morning Chuckle

It doesn’t get a lot funnier — or weirder — than this.  Harvard’s annual Ig Nobel awards, given by Annals of Improbable Research magazine for weird, wacky and sometimes worthless scientific research.  Nails on a chalkboard, teenage repellent, and a somewhat unorthodox cure for the hiccups.

• Feld Thoughts: Falling Down and Getting Back Up
  Brad’s colorful, quick posting on “how running is like entrepreneurship.”
  (tags: Entrepreneur VC)

It’s a Little Weird When Your Best Customer Experience of the Week is with the Government

Mariquita has been doing a lot of personal admin lately for us.  This week had a little surprise in it.

Verizon continues to be one of the most awful, painful vendors in the history of the universe.
At least their phone network is solid, since any interaction with the people at the company is so bad.  We came to the conclusion this week that they actually do some things which aren’t just the usual bad customer service or outrageous pricing — they have some policies in place that are literally designed to systematically rip off their customers.  The one we ran into was (after 45 minutes on and off hold, of course) that the data plans for Treos are prepaid for a month, but when you go to cancel your data plan, they tell you they HAVE TO cancel it the day you call, even if you have days or weeks left on your plan, and they CAN’T issue a refund for unused days.  But if you complain loudly enough, a supervisor can keep your service active through the end of your pre-pay, or can issue you a refund.  So in fact, they are telling their customer service reps to lie to their customers in the hope that their customers don’t push back so they can keep your money while not delivering your service.

She had a similarly bad experience dealing with our insurance company about car insurance.  State Farm just has a ridiculous set of procedures in place around changing car insurance that cause their customers to jump through hoops several times over for no apparent reason at all.  There have been several stupid things, but this week was needing to take a brand new car to get inspected before insuring it within three days of buying it.  But we had to take it to a specific mechanic on the “approved list” to get it inspected.  That place required an appointment (which meant two trips).  It couldn’t be done at the dealer.  Then the actual inspection lasted about 30 seconds.  Maybe they were just making sure there was an actual car, not a pretend car.  Harry Potter, beware.

And then came the surprise — Mariquita’s trip to the DMV to trade in our old license plates.  She was in and out in under 5 minutes with a prompt, efficient, friendly person handling the transaction with a smile.  Wonders never cease.

It doesn’t take a lot to be great at customer service, just the right mindset and culture.  It’s amazing that Albany (or at least a small pocket therein) seems to have figured that out before some of the biggest companies around.

Choose Voice, Part II

One reader writes to me: 

I am a vice president at a startup that isn’t in great shape.  We have some customers and a product that is meeting some market needs, but we’re way off our plan and don’t show signs of changing our trajectory in a material way.  I disagree with the direction our CEO is taking things, which is ok, but more important, our CEO refuses to listen to me when I try to discuss and debate strategy with her.  One of our board members has asked me what I thought we should do.  I don’t want to be disloyal to our CEO, and I want to seem like a team player who rallies behind the decision even if I don’t agree with it, but at the same time, I feel strongly that we’re going the wrong way and don’t want to be associated with a failed strategy or failed company.  What do I do?

My response:

Honesty really and truly is the best policy.  Always.  It just depends how you go about expressing it.

I talked about this a little bit a few weeks back in my post on Exit, Voice, and Loyalty.  Here are your options when you disagree with the system:  quit your job in protest (exit), express your opinions (voice), or suck it up and follow (loyalty).  I always say — choice voice.

If you and the CEO are at odds about the issues but she is being rational about it, you should try to encourage a broader, open debate with others.  Maybe not the whole board, maybe not the whole senior management team, but a smaller group.  Tell her that you are just concerned for the company’s future and feel like more rigorous conversation is required.  Do it in such a way that it’s her idea to call the meeting and lay out the options.  If the company is truly going sideways and she’s a rational being, she must be thinking about multiple options, even if she has an opinion about one of them.

Now, if the CEO isn’t being rational, you have a different challenge.  If that’s the case, and if you think she’s wrong, and if the company is going sideways, I’d say the likelihood of you staying as a long-term employee of that company with that CEO is low anyway, so it’s worth taking a little more risk. 

But I think you can do it in ways that mitigate your personal risk with the CEO.  One thing you could do is go to one board member and express your concern confidentially, tell the board member that he should force the CEO to call the same kind of open forum I described above.  Another thing you could do is to send an anonymous email to one or more board members expressing the same.  Another is to see how like-minded other senior managers are — and if lots of people agree with you, gang up and either stage an intervention with the CEO, or go as a group to the board.  And if the board just blindly backs the CEO without rigorous debate and laying out options, that should cause you to rethink where you work anyway.

UPDATED:  one executive coach who reads my blog just wrote in his $0.02:  The answer in my view is simple, which I should think you would prefer if it were your organization, you tell the CEO that you are going to the Board with your concerns and then if that does not trigger some more favorable process you do so, albeit, with the CEO’s knowledge.

Doing Well by Doing Good, Part IV

This series of posts has mostly been about things that people or companies do that help make the world a better place — sometimes when it’s their core mission, other times (here and here) when it becomes an important supporting role at the company.

Today’s post is different — it’s actually a Book Short as well of a new book that’s coming out later this fall called Green to Gold:  How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage, published by Yale Press and written by Daniel Esty (a Yale professor and consultant), and a good friend of mine, Andrew Winston, a corporate sustainability consultant.

Green to Gold is a must-read for anyone who (a) holds a leadership position in business or is a business influencer, and (b) cares about the environment we live in.  Its subtitle really best describes the book, which is probably the first (or if not, certainly the best) documentation of successful corporate environmentalstrategy on the market.

It’s a little reminiscent to me of Collins Built to Last and Good to Great in that it is meticulously researched with a mix of company interviews/cooperation and empirical and investigative work.  It doesn’t have Collins “pairing” framework, but it doesn’t need to in order to make its point.

If you liked Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, this book will satisfy your thirst for information about what the heck the corporate world is doing or more important, can do, to do its part in not destroying our ecosystem.  If you didn’t like Gore’s movie or didn’t see it because you don’t like Al Gore or don’t think that many elements of the environmental movement are worthwhile, this book is an even more important read, as it brings the theoretical and scientific to the practical and treats sustainability as the corporate world must treat it in order to adopt it as a mainstream practice — as a driver of capitalistic profit and competitive advantage.

This is a really important work in terms of advancing the cause of corporate social responsibility as it applies to the environment.  Most important, it proves the axiom here that you can, in fact, Do Well by Doing Good.  If you’re interested, you can pre-order the book here.  Also, the authors are writing a companion blog which you can get to here.

New Deliverability Index is Out

Return Path’s semi-annual Sender Score Deliverability Index, which has become a sort of industry standard metric about how much non-spam commercial email is getting snared by ISP filters, is out.  You can read Heather Palmer Goff’s posting about it (and download the report and the metrics) on the Return Path blog here.

Counter Cliche:  Between Permission and Forgiveness

In today’s VC Cliche of the Week, Fred actually takes a Counter Cliche position himself when he talks about how in a startup, it’s NOT usually better to beg for forgiveness than to ask for permission, as the team needs to be aligned and on the same page.  But Fred does go on to say that startups as organizations need to act like mavericks, essentially that the organization needs to break some eggs in the industry in order to make an omelet.

I actually think in most organizations — particularly companies who used to be startups but are growing out of that phase (which is where we are at Return Path now) — there’s something in between Asking for Permission ahead of time and Begging for Forgiveness after the fact.  I’d call it the Courtesy of Notification. 

It comes down to practicality.  Consensus is usually good, but sometimes you just have to forge ahead with your initiative.  A healthy organization is one where most of the players know the rules and framework and mission and are empowered to make things happen.  There are lots of circumstances where "just doing it" makes sense, but making sure that relevant people at least know "it" is happening will save a lot of heartache down the road and probably create a safety valve to make sure there are no radically adverse unintended consequences.

So make sure you think about who in your organization is affected by the things you do, and when charging forward on your own, at least give your colleagues the Courtesy of Notification.

Book Short:  Just One Minute

What The One Minute Manager does for basic principles of management and goal setting, The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey does for delegation.  Both are blessedly quick reads (the classic “airport” book), and Ken Blanchard really nails some of management’s most critical components with simplicity and grace.

I’m a fan of the One Minute Manager school, and it does work well for some of the basics, but it has its limitations in terms of how broadly it can be applied.  My colleague Whitney McNamara‘s words in an email to me a few months back say it all:

OMM has actually been useful.  I have to agree that it’s got a bit of a “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” mystical simplicity thing going, but as you say, simple is sometimes what works best.

It’s really strong in that the basic lessons are at root so simple that they’re easy to forget about day to day…having them articulated in a similarly simple way, so that they stick at the top of mind easily, is nice.

The other side of that is that it presents such a simplified, best-of-all-possible-worlds sort of scenario that I did sometimes find myself wanting to set fire to the OMM’s office building and scream “let’s see you deal with *this* in 60 seconds, buddy”…but on balance a pretty good experience. 🙂

In the end, it’s not that good management is easy — but it can be quick and relatively painless if done well and regularly.