How We Work : Blog

It's a unique celebration this year with Deepavali and Hari Raya so close together. Find out more about the festivals through the card we sent out to all our customers and partners.

Interestingly enough, I found out from our Kuala Lumpur colleagues, this festive season is termed "Deepa Raya" there! In the midst of some of the serious conflicts arising worldwide due to race and religion, I'm thankful in this part of the world - cultures can comfortably come together in a nice mish-mash.

Whether you are celebrating or just enjoying the holidays - have a great time! 

The Direct Marketing Association (DMA)'s 2005 report on lead generation is out. Based on 573 campaigns from 21 industries and 19 different media, the telephone was tops in lead generation and direct order response rates.  Industries covered include:  financial products and services, health services, manufacturing, packaged goods, catalog/retail, and travel.

This validates other research we've seen where telemarketing campaigns lead with a response rate of around 5.28% in B2B. The benefits of using telemarketing include immediate feedback, allows tactic modification if response rate is low. The downsides are a limited audience and difficulty in getting decision makers on the phone.

From our own experience, telemarketing has definitely proven effective. In the course of running our own campaigns, we did learn some common sense things to do in using this channel:
1. Get the best you can pay for
Many of us have interacted with the human drones who call on the pretext of selling something to you. They either talk too fast, read the script verbatim and / or talk in a monotone like someone died. Hire the best! They might be the first voice your potential client hears, you don't want them to be the last.
2. Keep it short, sweet and have something to sell
Write up the script and run it by as many different people as possible. By the time your telemarketer uses it, they should be able to run through the base message with the customer in 2 min or less easily. It's the same thing as a slow loading web page - you have to catch your customer quickly.
3. Round it up
Sometimes you get to the sale, sometimes you don't. But there is always something you can take away from the call. Prepare a short survey (1-3 questions) that you can ask quickly and use the questions to better understand your target segments.

You can view the DMA release here.

Jo (Marketing)

One of the best business books I read in 2003 was Starbucks founder, Howard Schultz's "Pour Your Heart Into It" - It was an inspirational, authentic read about building the business - one cup at a time. I'm mentioning it here because I've been following John Moore's Brand Autopsy blog, he is writing a book, about lessons learnt working inside Starbucks. He has drawn out a list of Starbucks Tribal Knowledge Nuggests which have been interesting, the link to nugget 1 is here. 

Jo (Marketing)

I came across the concept of adaptive conversations (coincidentally after our initial blog post).

Some snipplets:
Adaptive Conversations work like this: A general question is posed to participating customers. Customers may respond to the question with a comment in their own words. Unlike blogs, they do not see all of the comments left by other participants. Rather, they see a statistically selected sample of comments by other participants. In addition to creating their own comment, customers can select and rank other comments that they agree with. Even customers who do not author comments can select and rank other participants' comments. It is this selection and ranking process that enables the accurate ranking of comments and the analysis of comments....

One can use Adaptive Conversations in conjunction with a blog to create a deeper, analytic picture of issues raised in a blog conversation, providing an understanding of how the issue plays against a broad cross-section of customers....

What's interesting is using adaptive conversations together with a blog to converse with clients. Adaptive conversations use the familiar blog workflow but in a more structured manner so that customer feedback and interaction can be quantified. One of our focus areas is in building applications to drive channel partner loyalty. What I've been thinking about lately is whether the brand advocacy that is the end goal for consumer loyalty can directly be applied to channel partners. 

It makes sense to a certain extent because for many B2B companies: channel partners are also their customers (e.g. High-tech). By definition, advocates act as a source of referrals - that's where I was struggling. In a sense, the dual roles of B2B customers/partners are complimentary - it makes business sense for a channel partner to be an advocate of the products they sell.  

Adaptive conversations, got me thinking as it's a perfect avenue to to get feedback from partners on anything from new ideas for sales pitches to the best marketing collaterals. A lot of companies underestimate how much partners want to be engaged, heard, (they also underestimate how much customers satisfaction depends on the service provided by the partners) (I'll put up stats to back this up soon). Getting partner feedback is important. Acting on that feedback, builds trust.  Adaptive conversations + a general partner-only blog that would provide updates on confirmed product directions, sales information etc. would make sense for really communicating with a group of 50 or more partners. 

You can read more about adaptive conversations here.

Have a great weekend ahead!

Jo (Marketing) 

This post is supposed to be one of those "Why-a-corporate-blog?" introductory posts. There is a huge list of the usual reasons: to build relaionships, to disseminate news, to build product awareness.

What I realized though, in the hectic rush that has been the last weeks to get this new site up, the central theme here for this blog and site is really Conversation. We've used internal, informal conversations to get feedback on the old site and we are continually tracking the conversations to make the new site better. The blog was launched for the same purpose - so that we can continue and extend the conversations. earth9, as a place is casual but professional, dynamic and quirky, this medium is a great way to show the different faces and people behind the company, share some out-of-this-world ideas and get feedback on the things close to our hearts: from the kinks of project implementation to what really constitutes marketing ROI..

So let the conversations begin! A starting point is the new look for the web site. Tell us what you think. In doing up a new site design, we got a variety of feedback on what people thought of the old site design. Some of the feedback included:
1.People did not find a path to "walk" through the site.
2. People were not clear about what our services and solutions were.

That explains some of our design decisions e.g. making the top navigation a flat panel that at one glance gives the user an idea of the services and solutions we provide. More changes will be rolled out in the coming weeks. Keep the feedback coming!

Thanks, Web Team @e9