BlogSmall business, Marketing, Promotion and Web Design

Today in college (I do this two nights every week, remember?) we had a guest speaker. She was telling us about a failed 20-year old family business that served big-name clients. There was a CEO, his niece – a brilliant sales person who worked there for 10 years and CEO’s 20-something son with MBA and lots of ambitions. The niece was asked for Excel spreadsheets with her sales numbers, but she wasn’t too bright about that. Her specialty was selling – not spreasheeting. Eventually, the pressure from stiff CFO, the MBA-flaunting kid and her CEO uncle for those damn spreadsheets and numbers got so heavy that she left the company and took half of their clients with her. Rule number one – don’t mess with your sales people.

I call this a Five Dollar Problem, and here’s why. I happen to know just this type of sales person – bright, ambitious and persuasive. As I say – she can sell you snow in a winter and you gonna come back with your whole family asking for more. But she’s not good with anything that has to do with numbers, including computers. In fact – she doesn’t know how to use one. Trust me on this one for I tried so many times – and as many times I’ve failed. Her usual response is: “I don’t need to know computers, I have my husband for that” (yes, I’m talking about my wife). So when she was working in one elaborate place she (along with other workers) had to punch in her time sheets, how much time did she spent with each clients and what procedure she performed, what product she sold and so on. The regular spreadsheeting, you know. While being the most computer illiterate lady in New York save Statue of Liberty, she immediately figured out the solution to her problem. She was paying 5 dollars every week to their receptionist – a really nice college girl, who did my wife’s time sheet in less than 5 minutes.

Business owner was happy – she got the numbers she needed. My wife was happy – she didn’t have to struggle with those “complicated computers” every weekend and could get home earlier. And the receptionist girl was happy – she got every Saturday lunch for free. All it took to solve this problem is 5 dollars. Thus a name – a Five Dollar Problem. Meaning – the cost of solving this problem is exactly five dollars.

It is exactly the same problem as our guest speaker had presented. The problem that delivered one of the major cracks in the foundation of a 20-year old business. But rather than being demotivated, as we all get when we ask to submit to spreadsheeting, she solved the problem in a classic win-win scenario. It definitely didn’t break a business, it didn’t cost the business half of the clients, it was just that – a Five Dollar Problem.

Just three hours after I posted my rant on Citysearch spam I got a new message from the Angie Eckford. You might think there was an apology or at least a word “sorry”…

So did I. Boy, were we both wrong!

Through 157 words of the reply (not counting signature and subject) there was not a single use of words “sorry”, “apology” or “regret”. What was there, though, are explanation on what went wrong (okay, I don’t know how to use Mail Merge too, but I don’t use it as an excuse), what that person was trying to do (send out a promotion to as many people as possible) and accusations that my previous post made “the entire company tuned into your message you placed online and negative comment about me“.

At least someone listened this time.

Since the first post went public I feel the need to reply here, on this blog as well. I do hope this won’t happen again – neither to me, nor to other people who might have been interested in Citysearch services. After all, CItysearch service seem to be popular and someone somewhere is probably very happy using it.

We have learned our lessons here – mine are “think twice before doing business with Citysearch” and “don’t use your main e-mail even with companies that look big”.

It’s quite interesting how some people take their jobs as a carte blanche to do pretty much anything they want. Some time ago while doing a marketing research for our clients for web development, I got in touch with Citysearch. Client and I were thinking of trying some of their services but it turned out my other client was already using them and was less then happy. I, for one, thought that it’s the case of “marketing – you’re doing it wrong”, but that’s not the point of this post.

While on the phone with CitySearch sales agent, I was really pushed hard to purchase their services. I actually ran out of polite words to decline – even though I stated the honest reason that we couldn’t take any more clients at that moment. Sales rep kept pushing me almost to the point when I was ready to hang up on her. But – we worked it out, so I hoped it’s over.

I was wrong.

Recently, starting about a month ago, I started getting correspondence from Angie Eckford, the city search rep of some sort. Of course all the e-mails looked personalized, but how personalized can a message be given the subject is something along with “Business Owners Receive 50% off Direct Connections to Qualified Customers” – you can guess all by yourself. To me there’s nothing personal, SpamAssassin on my servers kills plenty of those in a day. Plus the regular Viagra stuff – you know.

Given that there’s a direct phone, personal e-mail and a thin memory that I talked to some human being from that company I replied with the question of “When did I double opted-in into this spam list?”. The reponse was just what I thought it would be: it’s not a spam list, it’s a personal message.

Yeah, right. Viagra guys also sending me personal messages. You know, those that start with “%FIRST_NAME% %LAST_NAME%, you will be suprised!“.

Politely, I replied with “Please, don’t do that again.” – only to get one more piece of citysearch junk in my inbox.

Sure, Citysearch works for some people, most likely – restaurants, local places to go and so on. But I’d rather spend some extra hours working out Google AdWords campaigns to target my clients’ markets, than be a subject of such a dishonest treatment by CitySearch representatives.

Oh, and did you know that cost per click is about ten times cheaper in Google AdWords than in Citysearch campaings?