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.

First day at Techstars:  Where do you start?

I’m a new mentor this year at Techstars, a program in its third or fourth year in Boulder (and this year also in Boston for the first time) that provides a couple dozen companies with seed capital, advice and mentorship, and summer “incubation” services in a really well conceived for-profit venture started by David Cohen in Colorado.

Yesterday was my first day up there with my colleague George Bilbrey, and we met with three different companies, two of which we will tag team mentor through the summer.  I won’t get into who they are at the moment, mostly because I’m not sure what the confidentiality issues are offhand, but I’ll make the first of a series of posts here about observations I make from doing this work.

Yesterday’s thought was:  Where do you start?

It was so interesting to meet with in some cases pretty raw companies.  They weren’t exactly “a guy with an idea,” but for the most part they were <5 person teams with a working code base and some theories about who would buy the product. 

So where do you start on the question of business planning.  Do you dive into the deep end of details?  (What should we charge?  How do I get my first 5 beta customers?  What about this new feature?)  Or do you wade into the shallow end of methodical planning?  (Who is our target market?  What problem are we solving?  How much is it worth to the prospect?  What will it cost us to produce, sell, and support the product?)  We heard both of those approaches yesterday across the three companies. 

My conclusion isn’t that there’s a single correct answer.  For most mortals, it’s probably the case that while it’s good to have a product and an inspiration behind it, there’s a long road between that and a successful company that requires careful articulation of the basics and a good grip on potential economics before incremental investments of time or money. 

But there are the occasional companies whose ideas are so perfectly timed for such a large market or user base that some of the method can be ditched up front in the name of getting to market (think Twitter or eBay) — provided that the company circles back to those basics down the road in order to grow smartly over time.

Anyway, it was a thought-provoking day and great to see new entrepreneurs and ideas take root.  George and I have a series of six sessions set up with these companies as well as the full Techstars Demo Day in early August.  I’ll try to blog some thoughts after each session.

Wanted:  VP Marketing – A-Players Only!

I’m going to try an experiment and post a job description on my blog.  We’ll see how this works!

Return Path is looking for its next head of marketing.  Jennifer Wilson, our current and long-standing VP Marketing, is going out on maternity leave in the fall and is going to return afterwards in a part-time capacity, so we’re looking for someone new to join the team and help take the company to the next level.

Most of the details are in the job description, but the vitals are:
– Based in NYC or Denver, CO
– Must have previous experience running a marketing effort
– Mix of B2C and B2B, but B2B is probably more critical
– Mix of branding/positioning/messaging and sales lead generation
– Don’t have to be an expert in the email marketing industry (though that’s a plus)
– Someone will succeed here if he/she is super smart, is open to new ideas, is an excellent communicator and writer, and has a great sense of humor

If you’re interested, you can download the job description (pdf format) here.

Managing in a Downturn

I spoke at a NextNY event last night along with several others, including fellow entrepreneur David Kidder from Clickable and angel investor Roger Enhrenberg about this fine topic (Roger wrote a great post on it here) and thought I’d share a few of the key points made by all of us for anyone trying to figure out what to do tactically now that Sequoia has told us to be afraid, very afraid.

Hope is Not a Strategy:  Your business is not immune. It will do what everyone else’s will. Struggle to hit its numbers. Struggle to collect bills. Lose customers. There is no reason to hope you’ll be different.

Get Into the Jet Stream:  Develop your core revenue streams — and make sure they’re really your revenue, not just skimming tertiary revenue out of the ecosystem.  Investors will look to see how sustainable your model is with more scrutiny than ever.

It’s a Long Road to Recovery:  I don’t care what people say. There is no true “v-shaped” bounceback from a true downturn. Plan for a long (4-8 quarter) time to return to normalcy.

Budget Early and Often:  Things change rapidly in this kind of environment. Make sure you reforecast, especially cash flows and cash, monthly when you close the books.

Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow:  If you have a real business, you need to be it for the long haul. Keep pursuing opportunities. Keep investing in the future. Don’t pare back your vision and ambitions. Just make more conservative investments, insist on shorter payback windows, and adjust expectations about timeframes.

Leadership Counts:  Your people are nervous. They’re concerned about their own bank accounts. Their jobs. Be even more present, more transparent, and more communicative. And set the right tone on expenses with your own decisions. The troops need to know that you care about them — and that the big boss has a steady hand on the wheel.

The Acquisition (a parody of a parody)

I just spent a great 4th of July with my brother Michael, one of the finer and funnier people I know.  Among other things, we treated ourselves to about the 18th viewing of Mel Brooks’ History of the World, Part I on DVD.

One of our favorite moments in the movie is the Broadway musical version of “The Inquisition” (lyrics, download MP3).  Since both of us work in the online marketing industry (Michael is a marketing manager at search agency Did-It), Michael came up with the brilliant idea of a parody of a parody…so here goes, all in good fun.

The acquisition, what a show
The acquisition, here we go
We’re on a mission, have you heard the news?

The acquisition, serve those ads
The acquisition, we’re so glad
We’ll make an offer, that they can’t refuse

Google, don’t be boring
WPP, don’t feel set
Yahoo seems to be ignoring:
It’s better to lose your market cap than your market!

Hey, Steven Ballmer, what do you say?
“I just got back from Avenue A”
“Avenue A?  What’s Avenue A?”
“It’s what I ought not have bought, but I bought anyway!”

The acquisition, what a show
The acquisition, here we go
We know you’re wishin’ that we’d go away.
But the acquisition’s here and it’s here to stay!

Happy 4th, everyone!

People are People, Part II

In Part I, I talked about the diminishing distinction between B2B marketing and B2C marketing, and how getting the right message to the right person at the right time blurs those traditional boundaries.  I have a different thought on the same theme today, spurred on by Elly Trickett, who is DMNews‘ fantastic new Editor-in-Chief.  Elly wrote a great editorial in the October 1 print edition of the publication that I just caught today entitled “Don’t Forget Your Consumer Side,” in which she recounted a speech she made to an audience of marketers where she asked them to come up with examples of trigger-based digital marketing they had received, and one member of the audience replied with the statement, “We’re not consumers.”

Hogwash!

That’s just the kind of comment that gives the marketing and advertising industry a bad name, not to mention leading directly to bad practices. 

When we as a profession treat the recipients of our messaging like numbers, we do bad things.  We get excited about moving a 1% response rate to a 1.5% response rate (a 50% improvement!) without remembering that 98.5% of our messages fell on deaf ears from being the wrong message, to the wrong person, at the wrong time, sent in the wrong way.

When we as a profession figure out how to treat the recipients of our messaging in more of a Cluetrain Manifesto kind of way (that is to say, as humans, not as “targets,” “prospects,” “consumers,” or “users”), we do our best work.  We engage our prospects and customers.  We think of them as our audience, not as dollar signs walking around with bulls-eye targets on their backs.  We push back when our boss asks us to crank out a rushed email message to make this quarter’s numbers look better when it goes against our better judgment.

So people are people.  If you wouldn’t want to receive an advertising message that you are sending out…maybe it’s worth thinking twice about whether or not to actually send it out in the first place.

The Highest Form of Flattery

Competitors copy us all the time.  Sometimes it’s big things like product features or strategy.  Sometimes it’s little things like marketing collateral or a logo or product name.  Those are always a little annoying, but really, there’s nothing one can do about it.  As we say at Return Path, it’s the price we pay for being a market leader.  And to be honest, I’m sure we do the same on occasion, whether inadvertently or on purpose.

But we spotted one today that’s so incredibly egregious and just plain silly, I don’t even know where to start.  A competitor — name will be hidden to protect the guilty — just ripped off our boiler plate language at the top of all of our job descriptions.  I know this because I personally wrote the copy for ours, and I did it before this competitor even existed.  At least I think they did…let’s compare:

Here is ours:

If you’re obsessed with creating a world class organization and looking for a great company to call home, we want you! Return Path is a growing, thriving company full of smart, motivated people. Our 140+ employees are a tightly-knit, super-focused and incredibly dedicated team. We work hard, and we’re passionate about making email work better for both our clients and their customers.

And theirs:

If you are a smart, dedicated top performer, we want you! Company X is a growing, thriving company full of smart, motivated people. Our employees are a tightly-knit, super-focused and incredibly dedicated team. We work hard, and we’re passionate about safeguarding the credibility, rendering, and effectiveness of our clients’ digital communications.

You be the judge!

New Media’s Influence on the Traditional

Last week, DMNews unveiled its new look and feel and format (of the print publication) at the DMA’s annual convention in Chicago.  Hats off to Publisher Julia Hood and Editor-in-Chief Elly Trickett for diving in and coming up with some great improvements to the publication so quickly after taking the reigns.

What I find particularly interesting about the new format is that its design and even content structure seem to borrow heavily from the world of online media,  such as:

• A top-of-page “navigation bar” that tells you at a glance what articles are on the page (email, circulation, multichannel, legislation, lists, etc.) so you can flip pages and figure out quickly where to stop based on your interests
• MUCH shorter news briefs
• More “fixed” topic sections that are (I think) meant to be recurring in every issue…”Gloves off,” “Duly noted,” “Nailed it”
• “Key points” call-outs of an article etc. instead of all the long form of the prior generation of the publication
• A section called “data bank” that is almost like an analytics widget

I had been ignoring the print edition for several months, assuming I’d catch any critical articles to me via the web site, keyword feeds, and the email newsletter.  But this new format will definitely have me back to at least flipping through the print edition looking for relevant articles.

Eight is NOT Enough!

Today is the eighth anniversary of the founding of Return Path. No offense to Dick Van Patten or Grant Goodeve, but Eight is NOT Enough.  We are just hitting our stride here! 

Congratulations to our incredibly hard working and dedicated employees, and thanks to our clients, partners, and investors for all their support these past 8 years.  Eight may have been Great…but Nine will be Fine!

Bad Side Effect of Tropical Heat Waves?

I love David Kirkpatrick’s weekly column called Fast Forward.  In his most recent edition, he talks about the connection between technology and world peace, which is insightful.  But it also led me to click on a link in the first paragraph to Wikipedia and its great map and listing of ongoing global conflicts here. 

I’m not sure if anyone has ever done any research on this — I’m guessing the answer is yes — but what jumps off the page for me is that all of the ongoing global conflicts today are clustered around the equator.  I do know that crime in urban areas swells in the summer when it’s hot out and tempers flare. 

Not to be too glib, but is it possible that we just need a giant air conditioner around the middle of the planet (an environmentally kind one, of course)?

The Gift of Feedback

My colleague Anita Absey always says that “feedback is a gift.”  I’ve written in the past about our extensive 360 review process at Return Path, and also about how I handle my review and bring the Board in on it.  But this past week, I finished delivering all of our senior staff 360 reviews, and I received the write-up and analysis of my own review.  And once again, I have to say, the process is incredibly valuable. 

For the first time in a long time this year, I got a resounding “much improved” on all of my prior year’s development items from my team and from the Board.  This was great to hear.  As usual, this year’s development items are similarly thoughtful and build on the prior ones, in the context of where the business is going.  Since one of my prior year’s items was “be as transparent as possible,” I thought I’d share my development plan for the coming 12-18 months here on my blog.  If you’re reading this and you report to me, you’ll get a longer form debrief at our next offsite.

1. Continue making the organization more of a Hedgehog, lending more focus to our mission and removing distractions wherever possible.

2. Move the organization’s leadership team from “pacesetting” to “authoritative” management styles by focusing more on :

    a. standards of excellence around employee behavior and performance: develop a more clear performance management system, raise the bar on accountability around leadership and management issues, shift management training from tools to values-based coaching

    b. clear communication loops: balance open door policy with manager empowerment by getting the executive in charge to fix issues (instead of fixing them myself) and/or facilitating stronger manager-employee communication

    c. constant translation of vision into execution: foster clearer context and deeper employee engagement by not just communicating vision, but communicating HOW the vision becomes reality at every opportunity

3. Sharpen elbows further around leadership team: identify key attributes of success, weed out underperformers, re-scope other roles, and clarify “partner for success” opportunities as part of core responsibilities. Make each individual’s development needs public in the senior team (I guess this is the first step towards that!)

4. Make the organization more nimble, inspiring a bias for action through shifts in priorities and cross-functional swat teams where required

So there you go.  If you work at Return Path, please feel free to hold my feet to the fire in the coming months on these points!