Ever wondered where spammers get your email address so they can send in those wonderful emails about enlarging parts of you body that you dont have or trying to flog pills or watches, well chances are they took it off your own website.  Using a programme, spammers can scrape email addresses off websites, hence you get lots of spam.  A few years ago I landed into work with 1279 emails awaiting me, tankfully not all work but I did have to delete all the spam, 1272 of them, which took some time. 

Do you want to ensure your email address cannot be scraped?  Use this Email Address Encoder tool http://www.wbwip.com/wbw/emailencoder.html. Its easy and best of all its free.

Does anyone else resent the dumping of large unsolicited office supplies brochures on their desk this week – we received two from AJ products who we have never heard of. Our office supplies people never send unsolicited brochures – we call or email them with our needs and they make recommendations, usually with a web link.  Quite apart from the sheer waste of money have these guys missed the eco plot altogether?

Doing business in the current environment is about building strong relationships not mammoth brochure drops! Get real guys and excuse me putting them right in the recycling bin (having taken off the nasty polythene).  While I prepare to play with our wonderful new CRM system from Adecsys – we referred these guys to clients like Professional Tradesmen and Irish Grasslands Association and finally commissioned our own system.  Beats ACT hands down….and most info exported trouble free. A much better investment that filling my recycle bin.

I spoke on Saturday last at the BNI annual members day in Cork and I promised anyone who sent me an email or text a list of 10 things to do for free on the web right now. my one condition was that the email or text must be sent within 48 hours. Why? Well the stats say that 85% of all responses to an email campaign will happen in the first 48 hours. A few cunning members probably figured that knowledge was already up on our web knowledge area as traffic took a spike today…

This conference was pretty good. Well in parts stunningly good. This afternoon (after I have followed up all these referrals)I am instigating a review of our own marketing having realised from Frank De Raffele  the blinding truth.  Last time I was a Marketing Director and did intensive training in the area of marketing strategy development – the Internet was not even invented. Oops – how mortifying! Listen to Frank live Mondays 5-6 pm EST time (5 hours behind Dublin). No nonsense blinding truths a speciality….

The Monread website launched this week got me thinking about CRM. Customer Relationship Management has become a fundamental of our own marketing strategy and we like to think we do it quite well but there’s always that busy time when you don’t follow up a meeting or make that pre-renewal call to make sure all is well.

Its more than five years since we first invested in ACT and for the first year or so we thought it was an excellent way of managing contacts. Then we found that we had been sold an out of date version and Sage were a bit embarrassed so offered to upgrade us for free. I spent a whole Christmas setting up the new version only to lose the whole lot as it crashed and burned. And somehow the Sage support team (at this stage in the UK) got less enthusiastic, then I looked at the forums and saw that the new version had problems. Big ones. We have struggled for two years with this monster of a piece of software that interferes with Outlook, makes computers run slowly and frequently loses data.

Then we were offered another free upgrade which we turned down – seems this would solve all our problems but by now we really did not believe and checked the forums again. More trouble.

Monread do Goldmine and tailor it for your own needs. They have offers on until the end of October too. Any views on Goldmine vs ACT??

Blown away at my morning BNI Cilldara meeting by simple marketing concepts presented by Finbarr Malone and made four resolutions for sharpening up our marketing:

1. Blow away our prospects and clients at every stage of the process by providing more than they expect
2. Add more perceived value at every stage of the process
3. Work up our clients’ enthusiastic testimonials and case studies – during the fat time we tended to ignore these as a resource
4. Try try and try again – most sales apparently close after 7 contacts – most sales people give up after 4

 Mention this blog and Finbarr will give you 4 more profit making suggestions too. Want to visit a BNI Chapter? Check out www.bni.eu and go to the Ireland section

Banks are clearly waking up to the CRM thing, not only do Bank of Ireland carry around 30,000 plus account names in laptops but clearly intend selling them insurance.  At the other end of the scale a rather intriguing letter crossed my desk this week entitled ‘Whatever your plans we are hear to help’ from AIB Direct Banking, assuring me that I am only a phone call away from the advice I need. 

Funny that. My dedicated account handler in AIB has had for many weeks now a copy of the latest accounts and a email request that they now reconsider our banking terms and facilities on the back of 56% growth year on year in turnover. I made a call (becasue actually there is only one email address per branch in the jolly old AIB) and asked him to come back to me. Fortunately I did not hold my breath. Weeks later I am still waiting for enlightenment but now I have this fine letter which is about as impersonal as it comes and cost part of a tree to produce.

Still let not the pot call the kettle black, we all sometimes fail to realise the essential truth of good CRM – its about the individual not the masses. With more than 600 websites its sometimes hard to remember this too.  So I took myself off this fine Saturday morning to Riverside Furniture Design aka RFD to see their fantastic new showrooms in Portarlington – just a day after their new SitesToGo website went live.  This could cost me! Watch this space for the drawings…..