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.

Blogiversary

Next week will mark the one year anniversary of my blog (and for that matter, Brad’s blog).  It’s been a lot of fun, so I think I’ll celebrate by taking two weeks off and going to Europe with Mariquita (well, ok, I was planning on doing that anyway).

Even if no one read OnlyOnce, I’d be happy I’m writing it for all of the reasons I expressed here back in June.  But lots of people do read it, more and more every day.  In fact, an executive at Yahoo! who I met earlier this week actually quoted it to me — as Bruno Kirby said in When Harry Met Sally, “the first time someone has ever quoted me back to me before.”

In my very first posting, which explains the blog’s title and mission, I said I’d try not to be too extraneous with the material I post.  So I took a look through some stats this morning about the last year of blogging:

– Including this, I’ve written 131 postings, about one every three days

– Typepad doesn’t keep stats on blog topics/categories, so this is an estimate (and postings can be associated with multiple categories), but it looks like I’ve posted 6 times about books, 10 times about current events, 4 times about travel, 7 times about blogs, 9 times about “business” (whatever that means), 52 times about email/web/tech, 40 times about entrepreneurship, and 38 times about leadership/management.  So at least I stayed more or less on point.

– I’ve received a total of 125 comments, or less than one per posting (this is NOT a truly interactive medium!)

– I have about 1,000 regular readers, roughly 70% via RSS feed, 20% via email subscription, and 10% via live alerts or just regular web visitors

– My Amazon Associates link has generated about 150 sales for a total of $2,700 and about $170 in affiliate fees to me, which basically covers the cost of my Typepad subscription

Thanks to everyone who reads and comments.  Feedback is always welcome for year two!

Post 4 of 4 in the series of Scaling CPO’s- the other posts are, When to Hire your First Chief People Officer, What does Great Look like in a Chief Privacy Officer and Signs your Chief Privacy Officer isn’t Scaling.

You won’t have a ton of time to engage with the Chief People Officer but there are a few ways where I’ve typically spent the most time, or gotten the most value out or my interactions with them. So, you’ll need to capitalize during those few moments when you do get a chance to engage with the Chief People Officer.

I ALWAYS work with the CPO as a direct report.  No matter who my HR leader is, no matter how big my executive team is, no matter how junior that person is compared to the other executives. I will always have that person report directly to me and be part of the senior most operating group in the company.  That sends the signal to everybody in the company that the People function (and quite frankly, diversity, culture, and a whole host of other things) are just as important to me as sales or product. I guess that’s walking the walk, not just talking. If I’m not serious about diversity, about our core values, and about the people in the company, no one else will be either. So, I always have the CPO as a direct report.

A second way to engage with the CPO is to insist on hearing about ALL people issues. First, I am a very “retail-oriented” CEO, and I like to engage with people in the business—at all levels, in all departments, and in all locations.  So I like know what’s going on with people — who is doing particularly well and about to be promoted, who is struggling, who is a flight risk, who is going through some personal issue (good or bad) that we should know about. This isn’t prying into people’s lives, but a real way to engage with people beyond business and a way to show that you care about them as a person. Even more than just me wanting to be in the know, I want others in the company to have a deep level of awareness of our contributors. For example, in our Weekly Sales Forecast meeting at Return Path, because our head of People knew that I wanted to know about all these details on our employees, they insisted that all the other People Business Partners roll those issues up as well. That means everybody in the room was in the know as well.  It’s not just to have a better understanding of people, there’s a business case for knowing what’s going on at a very detailed level and the number of issues we nipped in the bud, the number of opportunities we were able to jump on to help employees over the years because of this retail focus, has been immense.

I also engage with the CPO as an informal coach for myself and with my external coach.  In an earlier post I mentioned that a great Chief People Officer can—and should—call a CEO out when a CEO needs to be called out.  And that also means that great Chief People Officers engage with CEOs deeply about how they are doing, they help CEOs process difficult situations, and help them see things they might not otherwise see.  Being a CEO is a lonely job sometimes, and it’s good to have a People partner to be able to collaborate with on some of the most personal and sensitive issues.

Finally, I engage with the CPO to design and execute Leadership/Management training.  This is an important skill that a great CPO brings to the company and I have found that it is the best way to create a multiplier effect of employee engagement and productivity. The CPO in your organization needs to teach all leaders and managers how to be excellent at those crafts — and how to do them in ways that are consistent with your company’s values.  This is a tall order for one person to put together so I always took a lot of time, in large blocks of hours or days, to either co-create leadership training materials and workshops with my head of People, or to lead sessions at those workshops and engage with the company’s managers and leaders in a very personal way.  That always felt to me like a very high ROI use of time.

(You can find this post on the Bolster Blog here)

I just did a podcast recording the other day for someone who asked me the biggest mistakes founders make and what to do about them. I divided my response into “early stage” and “later stage” founders. Here’s a summary of what I said about early stage founders.

1. They cling to a “good enough person” or someone who is a good performer but a weak cultural fit because they either feel beholden to that person for their output, or worse, they’re actually afraid of losing them because they’ll miss a milestone or maybe trigger some other departure.
   
   The “what to do” of course is to have courage and make the change! I wrote an essay years ago in Brad Feld and David Cohen’s book, Do More Faster, entitled Hire slowly, Fire quickly, in which I compared a poor cultural fit to a cancer that can infect the whole body of your company. A “good enough” person obviously isn’t quite that toxic, but someone like that can still prevent you from achieving your potential. In either case, the faster you realize what’s going on and make a move, the better off you are.
   
2. They get the balance wrong between “leading with vision” and “listening to customers”. Both are important for founders, but you can’t do too much of either. It’s really easy to get led to a too-narrow Product/Market Fit definition that has you building something awesome that only a dozen customers will be excited about That said, founders also have to listen if enough potential customers people say no. Your vision could just be too far ahead of the market.
   
   You have to get around this by constantly checking your enthusiasm with a mix of cold hard logic. Lots of market traction is great — but is all that traction coming from the same type of customer? Have you run your idea or wireframes by different segments, different buyers, different sizes of company (if B2B) or lots of different demographics (if B2C)? Are all of them equally enthusiastic and willing to buy? A complete lack of market traction when you’re sure your vision right is equally vexing. If literally everyone is saying “no” or worse, some polite but noncommittal version of yes, are you working to shape the vision, or at least shape how you articulate it? Sometimes your vision might be right, but your messaging might be off. Try different ones on for size.
   
3. They focus on fundraising and valuation over business fundamentals. Especially in this day and age, it’s really easy to get caught up in the “more money” hamster wheel. Raise, raise, raise. Finish one round, immediately start working on the next.
   
   In the end, business fundamentals matter — no fundamentals, no business (e.g., no next round). More than that, spend more time caring about your customers and learning and telling stories about how you made their lives better with your product or service. That’s more important to your next fundraise than just blowing through one round of money to get to the next.

Next week: the later stage founder answer (link won’t be live until 12/16/2021).

I hope this post doesn’t gross anyone out or offend anyone. I admit it’s a little weird, and that it’s more accessible to men. Hopefully everyone can get my point, even if men get it a bit more. I’m channeling Brad as I write this. So bear with me.

Here is a picture of a men’s room with floor mats under the urinals.

The difference between using a men’s room that has floor mats and using a men’s room that does not have floor mats is profound in multiple ways. I’ll leave out the specifics, but you can imagine the comparative experiences if you haven’t had one or both.

A really good floor mat, from a quick scan of Amazon and Uline just now, costs $11 if you buy in bulk and is built to last 4-6 weeks. That gives us an annual per urinal expense of about $100 – trivial in the scheme of maintaining an office, restaurant, or place of business.

But here’s the thing. These floor mats are few and far between. I don’t have scientific research on the matter, but I’d guess that between 1 in 5 and 1 in 10 places of business have them. Maybe even fewer.

So, urinal floor mats are (a) cheap, (b) easy to acquire, and (c) make a profound difference in the environment. And yet, they are only have 10-20% market penetration at most.

That market penetration is not far off from the prevalence of very good leadership and management in business. I hear stories all the time from executives about absolutely terrible leadership practices. I also hear plenty of stories that aren’t awful, but are evidence of non-leadership or non-management. The experience of working for a good manager, or in an organization with strong leadership, is profoundly different than working with the absence of those things.

To complete the analogy, good management and leadership are also (a) cheap, (b) easy to acquire, and (c) make a profound difference in the work environment. Sure, you can’t buy good leadership online, but it’s not all that difficult to be a caring, supportive, transparent manager. Heck, there’s even a book called The One Minute Manager.

So why the low market penetration of both? It makes no logical sense. It’s not as if most people haven’t had the experience of using a urinal with a floor mat…or of having a really good leader or manager. It’s not as if leaders and decision makers don’t appreciate those things themselves.

The answer boils down to three simple points that anyone who is a manager or leader can do, any day:

• You have to pay attention
• You have to care
• You have to act

Great leaders and managers exhibit all three of these traits. They pay attention to things around them, noting that Everything is Data. They care about people, about experiences, about impressions, about reputations. And when they notice that something is off – however small it is – they care enough to remember and then take the time to act. To make a small change. Send an email. Have a quick conversation. Make a suggestion. Give someone quick praise or constructive feedback.

And to come back to where this post started – it’s also not that hard to have a nice men’s room at your office or business or restaurant. You just have to pay attention to the fact that it’s a much better experience to buy floor mats. You have to care about the experience in the men’s room (for yourself, for employees, for customers, for vendors, for visitors). And then you have to act and either buy the stupid mats or ask an office manager to do the same!

Great Exchange on Newspapers’ Future

Dave Morgan and Jeff Jarvis trade excellent thoughts here on the future of newspapers.  Read the posts in this order:

Jarvis:  Why newspapers aren’t making it in the new world (and what they can do about it)

Morgan:  What they can do about it (disaggregate their vertically integrated business models)

Jarvis:  Disaggregate even further!

The exchange is really thought-provoking about other forms of traditional media whose businesses are being turned upside down by the Internet.  Yellow Pages.  Music.  Movies.  The current Hollywood writers’ strike may actually be unsolvable with the Movie and TV industry’s current structure.

The Art of the Post-Mortem

It has a bunch of names — the After-Action Review, the Critical Incident Review, the plain old Post-Mortem — but whatever you call it, it’s an absolute management best practice to follow when something has gone wrong. We just came out of one relating to last fall’s well document phishing attack, and boy was it productive and cathartic.

In this case, our general takeaway was that our response went reasonably well, but we could have been more prepared or done more up front to prevent it from happening in the first place.  We derived some fantastic learnings from the Post-Mortem, and true to our culture, it was full of finger-pointing at oneself, not at others, so it was not a contentious meeting.  Here are my best practices for Post-Mortems, for what it’s worth:

• Timing:  the Post-Mortem should be held after the fire has stopped burning, by several weeks, so that members of the group have time to gather perspective on what happened…but not so far out that they forget what happened and why.  Set the stage for a Post-Mortem while in crisis (note publicly that you’ll do one) and encourage team members to record thoughts along the way for maximum impact
• Length:  the Post-Mortem session has to be at least 90 minutes, maybe as much as 3 hours, to get everything out on the table
• Agenda format:  ours includes the following sections…Common understanding of what happened and why…My role…What worked well…What could have been done better…What are my most important learnings
• Participants:  err on the wide of including too many people.  Invite people who would learn from observing, even if they weren’t on the crisis response team
• Use an outside facilitator:  a MUST.  Thanks to Marc Maltz from Triad Consulting, as always, for helping us facilitate this one and drive the agenda
• Your role as leader:  set the tone by opening and closing the meeting and thanking the leaders of the response team.  Ask questions as needed, but be careful not to dominate the conversation
• Publish notes:  we will publish our notes from this Post-Mortem not just to the team, but to the entire organization, with some kind of digestible executive summary and next actions

When done well, these kinds of meetings not only surface good learnings, they also help an organization maintain momentum on a project that is no longer in crisis mode, and therefore at risk of fading into the twilight before all its work is done.  Hopefully that happened for us today.

The origins of the Post-Mortem are with the military, who routinely use this kind of process to debrief people on the front lines.  But its management application is essential to any high performing, learning organization.

Yiddish for Business

Contrary to popular belief, Yiddish isn’t “Jewish slang” (I hear that a lot).  According to Wikipedia, Yiddish is a basically a High Germanic language with Hebrew influence of Ashkenazi Jewish origin, spoken throughout the world. It developed as a fusion of German dialects with Hebrew, Aramaic, Slavic languages and traces of Romance languages.  It is written in the Hebrew alphabet.

I don’t speak Yiddish.  Like many American Jews whose families came to America in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, my grandparents spoke it somewhat, or at least had a ton of phrases they wove into everyday speech.  Presumably their parents spoke it fluently before coming here and Americanizing their families.  My own parents have a handful of stock phrases down.  My brother and I have even less.

What I like best about Yiddish is that I find it to be a very descriptive and also onomatopoetic language.  I can never verbally describe a Yiddish word without a lengthy description and some examples, and usually some level of gesticulation.  I’ll try to be more succinct below.  But in the end, words mean a lot like what they sound like they should mean.  A lot of New Yorkers who aren’t Jewish end up knowing a handful of Yiddish words because they’re pretty prevalent in the City, but many people outside New York don’t.  So I thought I’d have a little fun here and do something different on the 6^th anniversary of launching this blog (today) and list out some of my favorite Yiddish words and describe them with a business context.  In no particular order…

–          Schmooze – to chat someone up, work them, frequently with some kind of hidden agenda in mind.  Business application:  “She showed up at the charity event just to schmooze Alice, who was a potential client.”

–          Chutzpah – nerve, as in “wow, he has some nerve.”  My dad always said the classic description of chutzpah was the kid who murdered both of his parents, then pleaded with the judge for leniency because he’s an orphan.  Business application:  “He missed all his goals this quarter and asked for his full bonus and a raise?  Now that takes real chutzpah!”

–          Spiel (pronounced schpeel) – a monologue or lengthy pitch.  Business application:  “I’m raising money, so I have to really organize my spiel before I go talk to the VCs.”

–          Schtick – someone’s standard song-and-dance.  Business application:  “I stood up in front of the room and gave my usual schtick about our values and mission.”  Kind of like Spiel.

–          Schlep – to make a long, pain-in-the-ass kind of trip.  Business application:  “I had to schlep all the way to Toledo for a meeting with that guy, and he didn’t even end up signing the deal.”

–          Mazel tov – literally means “good luck” but usually used in regular conversation to mean “congratulations.”  Business application:  “You got a promotion?  Mazel tov!”

–          Noodge – someone who inserts himself into a conversation in a somewhat unwelcome manner.  Related to Kibbitz – to give unsolicited advice from the sidelines. Business application:  “Sally is such a noodge.  She kibbitzes about my unit’s strategy all the time and just stirs up trouble.”

–          Maven – an expert, even a self-styled one, in a very niche area.  Business application:  “You want to figure out what smartphone to  buy?  Ask Fred – he’s the maven.”

–          Kosher (a Hebrew word as well) – completely by the books, originally referring to dietary laws that religious Jews follow.  Business application:  “Ask Marketing if it’s kosher to use our partner’s logo like that.”

–          Verklempt – choked up, overcome.  Business application:  “When I got my review and promotion and raise, I was so verklempt that I couldn’t speak for a minute or two.”

–          Schlock, Dreck, Chazerai, Bupkis – all have slightly different literal meanings (apparently Bupkis means “goat droppings”), but I use all of them somewhat interchangeably to mean junk or something of limited or no value.  Business application:  “That presentation was nothing but chazerai.  What did I get out of it?  Bupkis.”

–          Kvell – to beam or burst with pride, related to Nachus – warm “gooey” feeling of pride.  Business application:  “I had so much nachus when my company won that award for being the best place to work, I was just kvelling.”

–          Mishegas or Bubbamyseh – craziness or self-imposed silliness.  You might have heard the word Meshugenah before, which means crazy.  Business application:  “I can’t get all caught up in his mishegas.  I’m going to make my own decision here.”

–          Kvetch – either a noun or verb meaning complain, in a harpy kind of way.  Business application:  “Frank is such a kvetch.  He is just never happy.”

–          Mensch – a good guy.  Business application:  “Michael is such a mensch.  He always helps his colleagues out even when he doesn’t have to or doesn’t get credit for it.”

–          Fercockt (pronounced Fuh-cocktah) – crazy, messy.  Business application:  “John’s project plan is totally fercockt.  No one can follow it even when he tries to explain it.”

–          Mishpochah – family.  Business application:  “Welcome to the company – we’re happy to have you in the mishpochah.”

–          Tsuris – heartache or sadness.  Business application:  “Boy that’s one client that gives me nothing but tsuris.”

–          Tchotchke (pronounced chach-kee) – a trinket or little toy.  Business application:  “What kinds of tchotchkes are we giving away at our booth at the upcoming trade show?”

Pull one of these out in your next meeting – see what it gets you!

How to Ask For a Raise

I’m guessing this topic will get some good play, both internally at Return Path and externally.  It’s an important topic for many reasons, although one of the best ones I can think of is that most people aren’t comfortable asking for raises (especially women and more introverted people, according to lots of research as well as Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In).

My whole point in writing this is to make compensation part of normal conversations between a manager and a team member.  This requires the manager making it comfortable (without negative stigma), and the employee approaching it maturely.

My guess is that the two most common ways most people ask for raises when they bother to do so are (1) they get another job offer and try to get their current employer to match, or (2) they come to their boss with a very emotional appeal about how hard they are working, or that they heard Sally down the hall makes more money than they do, and that’s not fair.  Although either one may work (particularly the first one), there’s a better way to think about the whole process that removes the emotion and produces a better outcome for both employer and company.

Compensation is fundamentally a data-driven process for companies.  The high-level data inputs are the size of payroll, the amount of aggregate increase the company can afford, and the framework for distributing that aggregate increase by department or by level of performance.  A second set of position- or person-specific data looks at performance within a level, promotions, and internal leveling, and external comparables.  Fundamentally, smart companies will approach compensation by paying people fairly (both internally and externally) to do their jobs so they keep their best people from looking for new jobs because of compensation.

If compensation is a data-driven process for companies, employees should treat asking for raises as a data-driven process, too.  How can you go about that?  What data can you bring to a compensation conversation with your manager to make it go as smoothly as possible?

1. Let your manager know ahead of time that you’d like to discuss your compensation at your next 1:1, so he or she is prepared for that topic to come up.Blindsiding will never result in a calm and collected conversation.
2. Be mindful of the company’s compensation cycle timing.  If the company has an annual process and you are just about to hit it (within 2-3 months), then consider carefully whether you want to ask for a raise off-cycle, or whether you just want to give your manager data to consider for the company’s normal cycle.  If you’re really off-cycle (e.g., 4-8 months away), then you should note to your manager that you’re specifically asking for off-cycle consideration
3. Bring internal data:  your most recent performance review or ratings as well as any other specific feedback or praise you’ve received from your manager, colleagues, or senior people.  See below for one additional thought on internal data
4. Bring external data:  bring in compensation and job requirement and scope data from multiple online sources, or even from recruiters if you’ve been called recently and asked about comp and scope of roles.  The most important parts here are the two I bolded – you can’t just bring in a single data point, and you also have to include detailed job scope and requirements to make your point.  If you only find one data point that supports a raise, expect your manager or HR team to counter with five that don’t.  If you bring in examples that aren’t truly comparable (the title is right, but the scope is way off, or the job requirements call for 10 years of experience when you have 5), then expect your manager to call you out on that
5. Recognize that cash compensation is only one part of the mix.  Obviously an important part, but not the only part.  Incentive compensation, equity, perks (gym membership, healthcare, etc. – they all add up!), and even company environment and lifestyle are all important considerations and important levers to pull in terms of your total compensation
6. Have the conversation in a non-emotional manner.  State your position clearly and unambiguously – you feel you deserve a raise of Q because of X, Y, and Z.  Tell your manager that you enjoy your job and the company and want to continue working there, fairly paid and amply motivated.  Don’t threaten to quit if you don’t get your way, leave the acrimony at the door, set a follow-up date for the next conversation to give your manager time to think about it and discuss it with HR, and be careful about citing your colleagues’ compensation (see next point)

The one piece of data that’s tricky to surface is internal comparables.  Even the most transparent organizations usually treat compensation data as confidential.  Now, most companies are also not idiots, and they realize that people probably talk about compensation at the water cooler.  But bringing up a specific point like “I know what Sally makes, and I make less, and that’s not fair” is likely to agitate a manager or executive because of the confidentiality of compensation.  However, as one point among many, simply asking your manager, “do you feel like my compensation is fair relative to internal comparables for both my position and performance?” and even asking questions like “which positions internally do you think are good comparables for my compensation?” are both fair game and will make your point in a less confrontational or compromising manner.

Managers, how can you best handle situations where employees come in to discuss their compensation with you?

1. Most important are two things you can do proactively here.  First, be sure to set a tone with your team that they should always be comfortable talking to you about compensation openly and directly.  That you might or might not agree with them, but the conversation is safe – remove the stigma.  Second, be proactive yourself.  Make sure you’re in touch with market rates for the roles on your team.  Make sure you’re rewarding high performers with more responsibility and more money.  And make sure you don’t let “job scope creep” happen where you just load up your good people quietly with more responsibility and don’t officially change their scope/title/comp
2. If the employee does not more or less follow the steps above and approach this in a planful, non-emotional way, I’d suggest stopping him before the conversation gets more than one or two sentences in.  Empathize with his concern, hand him a copy of this blog post, and tell him to come back in a week ready to talk.  That saves both of you from an unnecessarily uncomfortable conversation, and it gives you time to prepare as well (see next item)
3. If the employee does more or less follow the steps above and approaches this rationally, then listen, empathize, take good notes, and agree to the follow-up meeting.  Then sit with your manager or department head or HR to review the data surfaced by the employee, develop your own data-driven perspective, and respond in the meeting with the employee with data, regardless of your response.  If you do give a raise, the data makes it less about “I like you.”  If you don’t, you can emphasize the employee’s importance to you and steer the discussion towards “how to make more money in the future” by expanding role scope or improving performance

I hope this advice is helpful for both managers and employees.  Compensation is a weird topic – one of the weirdest at companies, but it need not be so awkward for people to bring up.

Well, not everything yet, but that day is getting closer.

Jack, my VP Finance and an avid blog reader (but not yet publisher) pointed me to Beyond Bullets, a relatively new blog about Powerpoint written by Cliff Atkinson, described in his bio as “a leading authority on Powerpoint and organizational communications.” Who knew such an expert existed?

The blog is pretty good and worth reading for people who regularly design and give stand-up presentations and are tired of the same old, same old Powerpoint templates. I read through most of the postings so far, and while some are a little esoteric, many of the tips are great. Most are either about the actual software and things you can do with it or presentation design and organization. I’ve always thought I was good at Powerpoint, but I don’t hold a candle to Cliff.

After reading Brad’s post this morning on The Torturous World of Powerpoint, I can’t help but wonder if he’d be less tortured if more people knew how to design and give good presentations.

Senders No More

February marked the official end of Return Path being in the email sending business, even a little bit. Of course we still have corporate email servers, and we still have basic retention email marketing programs for our customers and prospects (with explicit permission of course!), but after a 9 1/2 year run, we no longer have direct consumer email-based relationships.

As we announced last fall, we recently divested all of our businesses other than our deliverability and whitelisting business — Postmaster Direct (list rental), Authentic Response/MyView.com (surveys), and ECOA (change of address). Those were great businesses, but they increasingly diverged over the years from each other and from our core deliverability business, so it made sense for them to belong to different companies in the end.

Besides diverging from each other, being a bulk sender of email had both advantages and disadvantages for us as a company. On the one hand, it was good for us to see firsthand what some of the issues are that impact our clients. We were, in fact, our own clients, one business unit to another. But on the other hand, being a bulk sender carried a real business risk of compromising our position as a trusted intermediary between senders and receivers. It was always a fine line to walk, and while we never got in trouble for it, we were always concerned — to the point where for a long time we didn’t allow our other business units to apply for our whitelist, Sender Score Certified, even at “arm’s length.” At least we weren’t an ESP!

But now that risk is gone. We are senders no more. Be sure to read our CTO’s description of what it was like to send a transactional privacy policy notification to 20mm addresses, most of which hadn’t been mailed in months or years.