Book Short:  Bringing it on Home

Drawing the LineWe are having a bit of a debate at the moment internally around our Sender Score deliverability business about how to handle clients who are in businesses that are, shall we say, not exactly as pure as the driven snow.  As a company that provides software and services to businesses without a vertical focus, we are often approached by all sorts of companies wanting our services where we don’t love what they do.  Examples include:

Gambling
Tobacco
Neutriceuticals
Guns
Adult content or products

Our challenges are along three dimensions, each of which is a little different.  But common threads run through all three dimensions. 

Dimension 1:  Our deliverability technology platform.   Our basic technology is used by mailers of all shapes and sizes to preview their campaigns, monitor their deliverability, and analyze their reputation metrics.  It doesn’t deploy campaigns.  Do we care who the users are?

Dimension 2:  Our full service deliverability practice that comes with consulting and high-touch account management.  This service offering has an additional layer of complexity in that our employees work closely with accounts and their web sites.  We already allow employees to opt-out of accounts where they find the work objectionable.  But is that enough?

Dimension 3:  Our whitelist, Sender Score Certified. This one is even trickier.  On the one hand, our program has fairly clear, published standards.  We do a thorough qualitative check of the client’s web site and email program to make sure, among other things, that the program is opt-in.  We monitor the client’s quantitative reputation metrics in real-time to make sure its complaint rate is low, signifying that its customers like (or at least don’t mind) receiving its email.  On the other hand, this program is supposed to signify the best of the best for email marketing and newsletters, which is why it’s used by so many ISPs and filters as their standard for defining “good mail.”  And yet on a third hand (perhaps there’s some sort of herbal remedy that can help me with that problem), for many ISPs, our program is their only whitelist, so clients who are above board, even if in a grey industry, may have no other option.

So is it our place to legislate morality, or should we just focus on what’s legal and what’s not legal?  How much accountability do clients bear for content that shows up in their emails from advertisers?  For example, and I’m making this up, what do we do if a men’s health magazine that’s a client has links in its email newsletters that are placed by an affiliate network that click through to a pornography site?  What if the pornography in question is legal in one country but not another?  How much time and energy should we spend vetting clients before we take them on?  Or monitoring them around these issues once they’re a client?  Does it matter which product they’re using?

I’d love feedback from the outside world (or the inside world) on how we should think about and handle these issues.

Parenting and Corporate Leadership

Let me be clear up front:  I do not think of my colleagues at Return Path as children, and I do not think of Casey, Wilson, and Elyse as employees.  That said, after a couple weeks of good quality family time in January, I was struck by the realization that being a CEO for a long time before having kids has made me a better parent…and I think being a new parent the last three years has made me a better CEO. 

Here's why.  The two roles have a heavy overlap in required core interpersonal competencies.  And doing both of them well means you're practicing those competencies twice as many hours in a week than just doing one – and in different settings.  It's like cross training.  In no order, the cross-over competencies I can think of are…

Decisiveness.  Be wishy washy at work, and the team can get stuck in a holding pattern.  Be wishy washy with kids, they run their agenda, not yours.

Listening.  As my friend Anita says, you have two ears and one mouth for a reason.  Listening to your team at work, and also listening for what's not being said, is the best way to understand what's going on in your organization.  Kids need to be heard as well.  The best way to teach good verbal communication skills is to ask questions and then listen actively and attentively to the responses.

Focus.  Basically, no one benefits from multitasking, even if it feels like a more efficient way of working.  Anyone you're spending time with, whether professionally or at home, deserves your full attention. The reality is that the human brain is full of entropy anyway, so even a focused conversation, meeting, or play time, is somehow compromised.  Actually doing other activities at the same time destroys the human connection.

Patience.  For the most part, steering people to draw their own conclusions about things at work is key.  Even if it takes longer than just telling them what to do, it produces better results.  With kids, patience takes on a whole new meaning, but giving them space to work through issues and scenarios on their own, while hard, clearly fosters independence.

Alignment.  If you and your senior staff disagree about something, cross-communication confuses the team.  If you and your spouse aren't on the same page about something, watch those kids play the two of you off each other.  A united front at the top is key!

I'm sure there are others…but these are the main things that jump to mind.  And of course one can be great in one area without being in the other area at all, or without being great in it.  Are you a parent and a business leader?  What do you think?

How to Impress Your Boss

No matter what area of the company, non-profit, or public sector you work in, ask yourself these three questions every time you are about to review something you did with your boss:

1. What am I trying to accomplish with this piece of work?
2. Is this the best/only way to accomplish that mission?
3. Is this my best work?

I guarantee you two things if you get into this habit.  First, you will frequently stop and do more work on something before handing it into your manager.  Second, you will get a raise and a promotion sooner than your friends.  And yes, it really is that simple.

Book Shorts:  One Up, One Down

I read new books by two of my favorite authors today:  Geoffrey Moore and Seth Godin.  Moore’s was his best book in years; Godin’s was his worst.

Geoffrey Moore’s latest book, Dealing with Darwin:  How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of their Evolution, is Moore’s best book in a while. While I loved Crossing the Chasm and thought Inside the Tornado was a close second, both The Gorilla Game and Living on the Fault Line didn’t do it for me — they both felt like a pile of Silicon Valley buzzwords as opposed to the insightful and groundbreaking market definition in his first two books.

But Darwin is a gem. It goes back to Moore’s strengths in analyzing leading companies and creating a powerful framework for innovation that transcends industry and stage of company. And even better, the book has a few very useful “how to” lists to help readers interpret the content and adapt it to their own environments.

So whether you’re a Geoffrey Moore fan or not — assuming you are a fan of innovation and kicking your competitors’ collective butts — this book’s for you.

By contrast, Seth Godin’s Small Is the New Big is old news if you are a Seth Godin fan. It is literally a repackaging of essays, articles, and blog postings he’s written over the years. He’s trended down lately in his writing, like Moore (and most authors who have a single theme or two, it should be said), but unlike Moore, this book isn’t his recovery. The book is a must-have if you (a) love Seth’s writing and want a hard copy archive of his soft-copy stuff, (b) you don’t read Seth’s blog and want to see what you’ve been missing, or (c) you have his other books and are compulsive enough that you can’t stand incomplete collections.

Otherwise, wait for his next book, which hopefully will have some more of the original thinking and writing and ideas that made books like Permission Marketing, Unleashing the Ideavirus, and Purple Cow such new business classics.  I have to say, the thing that disappointed me most here is that I felt like Seth totally sold out with this book — as a regular reader of his, I just felt duped by the Godin Marketing Machine, which is precisely the kind of thing he rants against.  There was definitely NO Free Prize Inside this one.

You Heard It Here First, Part II

Tomorrow, Return Path is going to announce that we have acquired the Bonded Sender Program from IronPort Systems (the release is here).  As usual, I’m happy to pre-announce M&A activity on my blog in exchange for a moment of self-promotion.

Bonded Sender is the industry’s oldest, best known, and most effective whitelist/accreditation program.  In a nutshell, it’s a bitch for mailers to qualify for it — they have to demonstrate that they’re a super high quality mailer and get certified by our partner TrustE — but once they do, they have relatively guaranteed safe passage and default images into the inbox at Microsoft (Hotmail and MSN), Roadrunner, and a number of smaller ISPs plus over 35,000 corporate domains who use SpamAssassin or who have Ironport’s email appliances installed at their gateway.  BUT — and this is a big but — they have to keep clean in order to stay on the list, and if they receive more than a tiny number of spam complaints against them, they get fined (hence, the Bond) and ultimately kicked out of the program.

Why is this big news for us and for our customers?  We pioneered the delivery assurance business starting back in 2003.  That business is really hitting its stride now.  The things we already do for clients — monitor their deliverability, analyze and resolve their most pressing problems, and manage their reputations — are critical and raise companies’ deliverability rates from 78% to 95% on average, after six months.  Bonded Sender will automate much of this process for the best clients at the biggest ISPs, and raise that number to 100% in the process.  Look for other announcements in the coming weeks about the expansion of the program in terms of major ISPs who use it.

Why is the Bonded Sender program so great?  Well, ultimately, I think it’s a big part of the solution to spam.  Legislation will do its piece, as will authentication technologies.  But reputation/accreditation systems are a critical component to solving spam as well, and what we love about Bonded Sender is that it attacks one of spam’s biggest root causes, which is that sending an email is free.  The world can’t continue to operate on the principle of exclusion (e.g., I’ll filter out everyone I don’t like), because exclusion leads to too many errors when carried out at an extreme level.  Whitelists like Bonded Sender operate on an inclusion basis, meaning that mailers who are squeaky clean and who are willing to put their money where their mouth is are allowed in.  Those mailers SHOULD BE allowed in and don’t mind paying a modest fee to guarantee or virtually guarantee inclusion.  So the program does exactly what it’s supposed to do.

I blogged about Bonded Sender last May when they came out with their initial announcement that Microsoft had decided to use the Bonded Sender whitelist (well before our deal was in the works with IronPort).  That posting still holds today, although there’s a fourth misconception as well, which is that it’s too expensive for smaller or non-profit or educational institutions (not true – it’s actually free for non-profits and extremely affordable for small companies, relative to what they pay to send their email in the first place).

Anyway, we’re excited to partner with IronPort and to add Bonded Sender to our Delivery Assurance product portfolio…and a big welcome to Scott Weiss and his team from IronPort (especially Peter Macdonald and Josh Barrack, who will be joining us full-time) to the Return Path family.

In the Land of Too Many Conferences, This is a Good One

It’s rare that I’m sad to leave a conference — usually I can’t leave fast enough.  But such is my mood today leaving Mediapost’s third Email Insider Summit.

Our industry is way over-conferenced in general.  I’m guessing that our company’s full conference calendar has 40+ events on it over the course of a year.  It’s more than we can afford to exhibit at, participate in, speak at, attend.  We do our best, and what money we spend is much more carefully monitored and measured than it used to be, but usually it’s with that sick feeling in the pit of our collective marketing stomach that we’re throwing money away just because our competitors are there.

But the Email Insider Summit is different.  While there are some aspects of the show that I don’t love — four days is a long time, and three half days of golf and snorkeling is a little too heavy on the boondoggle side for my personal taste — the content and attendees are fantastic.  Mediapost’s formula of comping marketers and charging vendors very high prices to attend ensures an intimate, high level, and vendor-light crowd.  That’s a recipe for success in my book!

The two most interesting nuggets from today:

1. John Stichweh from Coca-Cola’s observation that brand marketing and direct marketing continue to rapidly converge, and that measurement of outcome (e.g., ROI) as opposed to measurement of process (e.g., GRPs or impressions) are gaining steam, never to look back.  I couldn’t agree more.  What can be counted will be counted.  And it can all be counted in the world of advertising, somehow.

2. Lisa Galli from CNET’s discussion of mobile marketing and what they’re doing to take advantage of the channel.  The best example I’ve heard in years of a marketer leveraging a medium is their new SMS Reviews product — just text message CNET1 the words Review xxx (insert name of product here), and you’ll get a text message back with a product review.  Now THAT ought to make shopping for electronics much more interesting.

I’m ready for more conferences like these, and fewer mammoth trade shows.

Counter Cliche:  Who’s The Dog in this Scenario?

Fred’s VC cliche of the week is a good one — “If you lie down with dogs, you’ll come up with fleas.” His point is a good and simple one, that VCs shouldn’t take people risks in deals and shouldn’t try to back management teams they have serious concerns about (ethical or otherwise) in the hopes of trying to change the team or change management.

The obvious counter cliche is that entrepreneurs run that same risk in accepting capital from less-than-savory venture investors.  An ethically-challenged investor can wreak havoc on a young company, potentially tying the company up with peripheral legal problems or even damaging the company’s attempts at raising future rounds of capital.  So, VCs can be the dog in the scenario as well.

But I think there’s a broader counter cliche here, which is that one’s reputation in business is always tied, to some extent, to the company one keeps.  This applies to investors, and also to clients, vendors, and partners.  The appearance of a connection to an unsavory character, even if it’s just an appearance, and even if “unsavory” is in the grey area instead of black-and-white, is almost as problematic as a real connection.

Our business at Return Path is a good illustration of this principle, as is the case with many companies in email marketing, since email marketing has some very visible bad guys (spammers), good guys (think eBay and Expedia), and lots of companies that operate in shades of grey in between.  One of our lines of business, Delivery Assurance Solutions (email deliverability), is particularly critical in terms of us having a great reputation in the industry, since we work on behalf of email marketers to get their mail accepted (not blocked/filtered) at major ISPs.  No matter how you cut it, this business invariably involves making some judgment calls from time to time on who’s a “good guy” vs. a “bad guy” in the email marketing world.

We try to be as clear as possible with our prospects and clients about what kinds of behavior we wil or will not accept from clients, since our reputation in this business is everything to us.  We won’t, for example, help a client with ISP relations or monitoring tools if they don’t sign reps and warrantees in our contract about their email practices that go well beyond CAN-SPAM in terms of compliance with industry best practices.  We can’t accept clients into the Bonded Sender whitelist program unless they jump through all kinds of hoops with our third-party watchdog partner, TRUSTe.  And as painful as it is from a revenue perspective, we do fire clients periodically who we discover to be either not in compliance with their reps and warrantees to us, or who we discover to have a particularly poor reputation in the industry.  All of these things are designed to make sure we stay flea-free.

One area that’s particularly tricky for us is what to do with a “bad guy” who comes to us asking for help to become a “good guy.”  While it’s hard to be completely objective about this type of situation, we have an emerging policy around it.  We WILL work with clients who the world perceives as a “bad guy,” but only on a consulting basis to teach them email best practices and how to become a “good guy” (one of my Board members, Scott Weiss from IronPort Systems, calls this Return Path’s 12-step program).  If those clients take our advice and make meaningful and measurable changes to their email programs, we will continue to work with them and will slowly allow them to use our other services over time.  If those clients resist our advice or are too slow to change their ways, we will stop working with them immediately.

I guess the point of the counter cliche is that sometimes it’s hard to tell, as Sally told Harry in the movie, who is supposed to be the dog in a particular scenario.

Counter Cliche:  Win The Peace

Fred’s VC cliche of the week this week is a good one, Hope for the Best and Prepare for the Worst.  It’s certainly true, as he says, for startups going through a financing, and in many other instances.  I may regret mixing business and politics here, but since Fred has done that before (with the same caveat), I’ll give it a shot as well.

As important as it is to prepare for the worst, entrepreneurs and politicians alike need to make sure they’re also planning to win the peace — in other words, planning for a successful outcome. 

How much happier would we be as a country at war right now if our administration had had a full plan in place for what to do after they toppled Saddam?  Similarly, CEOs need put some cycles against scenario planning for successful outcomes so they’re not caught flat footed when things go well.  How can lack of planning to win the peace come back to bite you?  Here are a few ways:

– You’re not staffed properly to support a big contract that comes in — and you have no pipeline of candidates or contractors to backfill

– You don’t have media buys lined up for an marketing campaign you want to run as soon as the financing closes

– You haven’t started an integration plan before a tenuous acquisition closes, so integration doesn’t happen quickly enough

There are certainly other examples as well, in war as in comapny-building, but what it all comes down to is the need to scenario plan for best cases as well as worst cases.  It’s all about avoiding costly lead times.

Counter Cliche:  I Know When I See One, Too

I haven’t written a counter to one of Fred’s VC Cliche’s of the Week for a while now, but today’s was too good to resist.  While I haven’t (and most entrepreneurs haven’t) worked with 200 VCs, I have seen, heard about, been one (sort of), and worked with enough of them to know enough to comment as follows:  as is the case with Fred and entrepreneurs, I’m not sure I can define what makes a great VC in one phrase, but I know one when I see one, and here are some of the characteristics they exhibit:

– Major pattern recognition — "I’ve seen this movie before, and I know how it ends…";
– Deep understanding of the market and/or customer set to add strategic value;
– Fundamental desire to be a product manager or marketing manager of your product, but also —
– Ability to stay out of the weeds with day-to-day details when the Board meeting ends;
– Always ready with a story or bon mot about other crazy investors or even crazier entrepreneurs to make you feel better about your own life;
– Complete transparency about the motives of his/her fellow GPs and LPs and ability/appetite for follow-on financings (and needless to say, no/limited blocking of transactions that are clearly in the company’s best interests but might run counter to his/her firm’s own short-term interests);
– Willingness to jump into a debate with the strongest of convictions, yet without 100% of the facts, since 100% of the facts are never available;
– Equal willingness to admit being wrong if a clear and compelling argument comes forth; and of course the most critical —
– No fear of yielding to Management when Management knows best!
– Note — note included — major rolodex (a nice to have, but not required)

The other part of the counter cliche is that I’m sure there are some great entrepreneurs who only exhibit a few of Fred’s list of traits…much as I’m sure there are some great VCs who only exhibit a few of my list above.

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.