Storytelling is central to the human experience. Our earliest written narratives tell the stories of great heroes and their brave deeds: Gilgamesh, Achilles, Hector, Akhenaten, Darius, Pericles. Thousands of years later, their stories live on. Great stories inspire us and teach us in ways simple exposition cannot.

So what do ancient texts have to do with modern marketing? Why is storytelling so powerful? A well-crafted customer story can elicit a shared experience between your customers and your prospects. Persuasion, empathy, social proof, vicarious adventure.

Shared experiences, seriously? In an experiment studying the power of stories, neuroscientist Uri Hasson from Princeton measured the brain activity of a woman telling a story in both English and Russian and a group of listeners. His team found that when listeners heard the story in English and understood the narrative, their brain activity actually mirrored the storyteller’s brain activity at specific points the narrative. “By simply telling a story, the woman could plant ideas, thoughts and emotions into the listeners’ brains,” explained Dr. Joshua Gowan of Psychology Today. 

Humans are hard-wired to share information via stories.  Here’s how you can leverage the power of stories to show prospects the true value of your products in ways that simply yammering on about features and benefits can never accomplish.

Every Epic Customer Case Study Starts with a Hero

Selecting the right case study subject isn’t hard. Look for a customer who really identifies with your brand, knows your products and services pretty well, and is having success with them. You can ask your sales and customer service teams for recommendations or send out an email to your customer list asking for volunteers.

Why would your customer want to participate? When you make your customers the heroes in your case studies, being featured in a case study becomes a great way for them to increase their personal and corporate visibility. Every time one of your prospects reads the case study, they will learn about the company and the featured executive. Participating in a great case study can lead to other professional opportunities: presenting at a conference, being a guest on a podcast or webinar, being interviewed in a trade publication, etc.

Strategic Interviewing: How to Ask the Right Questions Every Time

Thorough planning and preparation before you interview your customer for the case study are essential. Start by researching the company – review their website, read their latest news, etc. Search for the person you’ll be interviewing in Google and on LinkedIn to get a better idea of his or her background and job objectives. Talk to your colleagues in sales and customer service for an internal perspective on the customer’s sales and delivery perspective. Don’t forget to plan the logistics of the interview. Will you speak in person, via phone or an online meeting service like Go to Meeting or Skype? Make sure you have the right phone numbers and know how to use the meeting apps.

If at all possible, try to record the interview. Being able to review the conversation will help you more accurately capture quotes and details about the customer’s experience. The recording lets you focus more on what the customer is saying and less on frenetic note-taking.

When you prepare your questions, make sure you ask about all aspects of the customer journey so you have adequate content available for each of the five content areas outlined below. Don’t forget to verify the correct names and spellings for each person, company or location mentioned.

How to Structure your Case Study

Effective customer stories have a simple narrative structure: situation -> action -> results. Here are the five basic sections you need to take readers along that path:

1. Introduction
   Introduce your customer, explain his/her role and describes the organization.
2. The Problem
   Explain the problem the individual, department, or company faced. Whenever possible this should include a description of the situation’s negative impact on revenue, costs, or efficiency.
3. Search for a Solution
   What prompted your customer to take action? How did he or she initially try to solve the problem? What other solutions did the team consider? How and why did they select your solution?
4. The Action
   What actions did your company and the customer take to solve the problem together? How did these actions solve the problem?
5. The Results and Success
   How is the customer’s life and business better because he or she chose your company to help solve their business problems? What recommendations does he or she have for professionals facing similar problems?

Finishing Touches

Once the body of your case study is complete, you can add finishing touches to increase the readability and search engine optimization.

1. Review your headlines and subheadings
   How can you add strategic keywords and benefit oriented language to make your copy more enticing online and to readers?
2. Add images and captions
   Kissmetrics reports that captions are read 300% more than the actual copy itself. You can use a nice long caption to convey a key piece of information to your readers.
3. Add pull-quotes
   Highlighting part of a customer quote as a graphic element not only enhances the social proof of your story but also adds visual interest to break up the text and enhance readability.
4. Add a sidebar
   Bullet points in the sidebar help readers who are scanning the document grasp key messages quickly. Quick descriptions of the customer and its challenge help orient readers to the situation. Achievement highlights illustrate the value your company can deliver

Promoting your case study

Epic case studies are versatile marketing tools. Once you have the basic case study complete you can use it in many ways in your marketing programs. Promote it on the blog and resource sections of your website. Add it as a sidebar offer on your site. Use it as content bait in your website popups and online advertisements. Feature it in a press release. Create a PowerPoint slide with bullet point highlights for your sales reps’ sales decks. Tweet it. Post it on LinkedIn. Add a link to it in the email signature of your email blasts or sales team’s prospecting emails.

If your customer agrees, you can rewrite the story as a feature article for an industry publication to create a video version. Simply use excerpts of the interview audio or write a simple voiceover script and animate some PowerPoint slides to support the story. You can also highlight specific portions of the case study by adding quotes and stats as graphics on your website or in your PowerPoint presentations. Open your mind to creative possibilities and you’ll find lots of ways to share each epic case study.

The post How to Write a Customer Case Study appeared first on Great Enthusiasms.

The Recurring Website Nightmare

When I taught weekend marketing classes for Fairfax County Public Schools’ Adult and Community Education Program, I was surprised how many business owners and marketers were completely overwhelmed with website issues and unprofessional web developers.

Business owners and marketing managers in my classes told me about a hundred versions of the same frustrating story of a website held hostage. 

 It usually goes like this:

How to Take Control

The Recurring Website Nightmare

Are You Sure You Own Your Domain?

How to Reclaim Your Domain

Do you have full admin access to your hosting account?

What to do if you can’t get server access?

I hired a web developer who was:
a) some guy I found online
b) a friend’s kid home from college for the summer
c) a part-time programmer who I heard from someone might be cheap and pretty good

For just a basic website, he charged me
a) $50
b) $250
c) $1,000
d) $10,000
e) $25,000

Now there are problems with the site:
a) I can’t update anything
b) Something on the page is broken
c) It doesn’t work right on mobile browsers
d) It doesn’t appear in search engines
e) It’s hideously ugly and looks outdated
f) I got a cease and desist notice that all the photos were stolen

The developer can’t/won’t help me because:
a) He wants a lot more money to make changes
b) He won’t take my calls
c) He’s flaked/disappeared and no one knows where to find him
d) He says he’ll fix it but never gets around to it
e) He’s a jerk and I don’t like him

Putting up with this level of foolishness from a developer might be fine for your personal cat photo blog, but it’s utterly untenable for a professional trying to run a business. As a marketing professional it makes me angry to see so many people taken advantage of by incompetent and unscrupulous web developers.

It really doesn’t have to be this way!
You can easily manage your site in-house

When I suggest that marketing teams and small business owners dive in and manage (or even build) their own website, sometimes they freak out. “This website stuff is really complicated! I don’t have time to spend weeks or months figuring all this out!”

When I started programming websites in 1995, it was pretty complicated. Figuring out servers and HTML code was confusing. There were no what you see is what you get editors or content management systems – every page had to be coded individually.

But today setting up a great basic website is a breeze! New services and new software make it easier than ever to build and deploy a professional website. With a few hundred dollars and a couple of weekends, any business owner can build out a pretty good basic website using tools like WordPress and SquareSpace and easy-to-use commercial themes. Integrating websites with leading marketing tools is easier than ever too.

If you prefer to have a professional design and set up your site, there are plenty of agencies and responsible freelancers who will create your site with easy-to-use content management tools so you can quickly add new pages or posts in-house. Plus if you hit a snag, there are thousands of videos on YouTube to help walk you through whatever you need to do.

At the very least, make sure that you have full control of your domains and hosting. 

Do you own your domain? Are you sure?

Make sure you have access to your domain registration account and that the domain is properly registered to your company.  For convenience, many web developers simply add new domains for their clients in their own domain registration account. They may have access to discounted registrations with a bulk domain account or they simply prefer having easy access to the DNS records whenever a change is needed for their clients.

Web Developer Registrations

For convenience, many web developers simply add new domains for their clients in their own domain registration account. They may have access to discounted registrations with a bulk domain account or they simply prefer having easy access to the DNS records whenever a change is needed for their clients. When they do this, they own your company’s domain!

Slammers and Stolen Registrations

Unfortunately, many con artists and disreputable companies prey upon companies that do not maintain well-defined domain management processes. One very well-known slammer is Domain Registry of America. Make sure you alert your accounts payable department to throw away any invoices from this company immediately. If you send them money they will transfer your domain to their company. Three of the companies I’ve worked for have nearly been taken in by this scam. Fortunately, they all had well-organized marketing expense approval processes so I was able to alert the accounting teams to the danger before they paid the “invoice.”

How to Reclaim Your Domain

Check the ownership and hosting details for your website

Look up your domain’s ownership information using the ICANN Domain Name Registration Lookup tool. There you should find the name of the registered owner and the technical, billing, and administrative contacts for the site. If a contact privacy option has been added to the domain registration, the contacts will not be listed but you will find contact informations via the privacy provider.

Also take a look at your domain’s DNS record to verify your site’s web host. The free DNS lookup tool at MX Toolbox works great for this. (You can use their MX record lookup tool to see where your email server is hosted too.)

Set up a domain registrar account. 

You definitely want to control your company’s domain registration in an account that the designated marketing and IT employees in your company can access. Don’t worry – you can point your domain’s DNS to any web host. (I strongly recommend that you do not have your web hosting and domain registration at the same company.)

NameCheap* is a great low-cost option for domain registration. I used to use Network Solutions for all of my domains but moved most of them to a less expensive provider some years ago. Network Solutions is three times the cost of most other providers and their increasingly aggressive upsell interstitials and messaging interfered with my basic domain management tasks so much that I moved all but one of my domain registrations to UltraCheapDomains.com. This is a reseller account run through Wild West Domains by Fred Gleeck (one of my favorite direct marketing writers). Unfortunately, Wild West has been acquired by GoDaddy so I will be moving my registrations to NameCheap as they come up for renewal.

Do not give web developers or any external vendor password access to your domain registration account.  If you need to make a change to the record, have the developer walk through it with you via Zoom screen share after you have logged into the account or  have them explain what is needed so you can make the update with the help of the technical support team at your registrar.

Send a friendly note or make a friendly call asking for a transfer

If a former web developer or employee registered the domain and is listed as the owner, start by contacting them and asking nicely if they will transfer the domain to you.  Here are the ICANN guidelines for domain transfers. Hopefully either you or they will have the login information for managing the domain and you can easily make the switch.

Below is a handy video from WP Crafter about how to manage a domain transfer to NameCheap. Be sure to read the NameCheap domain transfer guidelines. 

 

What to do if your transfer request is refused or you are ghosted by the developer

Gather and review all of your service agreements, invoices and payments for the developer. Make sure that you did not overlook any clause in the contract that gives the developer the right to hold your website hostage. You may also need a photocopy of your CEO’s photo ID.

Contact the registrar and explain the situation (they’ve heard it before!). They will probably have a process for resolving the situation. You may have to provide the documents above to prove your company is the rightful owner of the domain.

If this process does not work, talk to your company’s attorney about filing a Domain Name Dispute with ICANN. Be sure to have all of your documentation regarding payment to the web developer or employee (especially reimbursements for domain registration).

The post Take Control of Your Website appeared first on Great Enthusiasms.

In college, I stuffed my resume with leadership roles in several campus organizations and studied like crazy.   I tagged along with friends to their “War and Peace in the Nuclear Age” class for fun. Professor Loch Johnson was kind enough to let a wonderstruck freshman sit in. When former Secretary of State Dean Rusk told a group of UGA students that History/Poly Sci was the best preparation for getting selected, I immediately changed majors from International Business to the liberal arts double major. (So stupid!)

Then two things happened that changed everything.

First, one of my best friends, a summa cum laude Russian Studies major, took the only foreign service job she could get – driving a truck at the Moscow embassy. She was a hell of a lot smarter than I and that’s the best she could do? Her excited descriptions of life working in the embassy didn’t sound like a good fit for my creative and entrepreneurial spirit.  [Edit 2024: Her entry job turned out to be a great start to begin showing her brilliance – President Biden made her the US Ambassador to Russia. We’re in good hands.]

Second, I went to study European Economic Development at Science Po in France for a year to build my language fluency and international relations knowledge. There, I got to see in person the mind-numbingly boring work that clerks at the consulate had to do all day in the dingy, institutional office. I learned that choice locations like Paris usually went to people with well-connected families or after many years of service. 

The prospect of spending my life stamping visas for cranky tourists in a dingy office in some backwater Francophone dictatorship was too depressing to contemplate. It just wasn’t for me. All those years of work were for nothing! Instead of being a well-prepared candidate entering a challenging global career, I was just another unwanted liberal arts major. My parents insisted that I go to law school. (Thank God I I refused after seeing the boring-ass stuff my boyfriend was learning!)

Fortunately, those copies of Wishcraft and What Color is Your Parachute were still on my shelf.
I analyzed all my high school and college projects to figure out what I truly enjoyed and used the exercises in the books to figure out what plan B should look like. Communications, marketing, budgeting, analysis, and creating new things popped up over and over on the list. I got a summer job translating equipment manuals at Michelin and learned desktop publishing and how to use a Mac.  That experience opened the door to an internship doing marketing for some apartments.  

Then, I graduated right into the teeth of the crash of 90-91- the worst economic recession since the Depression until 2008 – and couldn’t get a single job interview. (I feel your pain, Millenials!) “Wishcraft” came to the rescue again. I used its techniques to figure out how to put together a business plan, pitch for a loan, and seize an opportunity to purchase, renovate, and re-sell houses with my brother. I loved managing the project and decided to get an MBA.

As finished my MBA, I realized that mobile technology was going to change the world – I just knew it! I dove into learning everything about cell phones, the underlying technology and the carrier market by reading industry publications and doing info interviews. Used the Wishcraft process again to figure out how to get a job in mobile tech without an electrical engineering degree, finally landing a marketing analyst gig with a carrier.

At BellSouth Mobile, I learned to crunch data, analyze market info, write copy, and work with sales reps. In 1995, I got interested in this new thing called the world wide web and taught myself HTML to create my first personal homepage. Cellular experience + the ability to build a website got me a job in Silicon Valley just in time for the Dot Com boom. When my husband took a job in DC after the crash, I transitioned to marketing mobile alerting enterprise software.

Since then, I’ve had a blast marketing enterprise software for dozens of companies as an employee and a consultant. I started a marketing agency and my own software startup (when it ran out of funding, I even learned to program). Now I work for a bigger tech company and have started learning a whole new set of technologies.

Marketing and technology change all the time. Every week of every month of every year for the past 20 years, I’ve learned something new in my field. From copywriting to direct mail to web to digital to social media to 27 different marketing software applications – it changes all the time and I still love learning the latest innovations. 

None of this would have been possible without Barbara’s wonderful Wishcraft book and the wonderful success team her community of readers has created. I was even fortunate enough to participate in a live success team group led by the amazing Beth Lyons. Every major accomplishment that I’ve enjoyed has been due to her amazing process – and for several years due to the amazing reader community on her website’s bulletin boards. I’m so grateful for that careless high school girl’s purchase! It led me to a career path I love and could never have predicted.

Update May 2020: Barbara Sher passed away on May 10, 2020, at the age of 85. Undoubtedly she has already begun exhorting the angels in heaven to try new things, dream crazy dreams, and have more fun than they could ever imagine before meeting her.

The post 25 Years of Doing Work I Love appeared first on Great Enthusiasms.

Are you dealing with any of the following challenges:

• Does your site design look dated or unattractive?
• Has your branding or business model changed after a pivot?
• Does your site load slowly even though you have plenty of server resources?
• Is your site responsive or does it look weird on tablets and cell phones?
• Is it a pain to add new pages or make changes to existing ones?
• Do strange layout errors appear when you make minor changes to a page? Is the code brittle?
• Is updating graphics on the site impossible because you don’t have the source files?
• Does your marketing team have to wait for a developer to find time to make updates between his/her other projects?
• Are your bounces high? Do your conversion rates suck?
• Is your site ranking significantly worse than your competitors’ in Google?
• Do your competitors’ sites have a significantly different structure or more user friendly design and content than yours?
• Does your site use Flash? (Please say no.)

If you said yes to one or more of these questions, there is a good chance you should consider at least a minor renovation of your site. Fortunately, building new websites and redesigning existing sites is easier than ever!

The post Do You Need a Website Redesign? appeared first on Great Enthusiasms.

If your company is pre-launch, having your development team whip together a basic site is probably fine. But modern marketing programs are very web intensive and have specific functionality requirements.  Diverting your development team for building web pages for the marketing team not only slows your product development, but also cripples your marketing team’s agility.

Supporting multiple inbound marketing campaigns requires the ability to quickly create and easily test new pages. That’s not going to happen if your marketing team has to wait for a busy developer to free up time for every update. (Especially if the developers insist on coding each page individually or using a CMS platform that is a complete pain in the ass for non-technical users and has a less robust community than WordPress. (Drupal or Zope, anyone?)

Plus, developing for product functionality is not at all the same as developing to maximize marketing conversions. Your marketing teams will need to be able to quickly update pages to test messaging, offers and more.

If you want to maximize your website and campaign conversions after launch, getting help from an experienced marketing pro who can structure your site properly is a wise idea. Remember, crippling your marketing team’s ability to rapidly implement and quickly optimize marketing programs will cost you a LOT more in the long run than hiring a good web marketing design firm.

The post Why Your DevOps Team Should NOT Build Your Website appeared first on Great Enthusiasms.

Why you’re not too busy to organize your marketing files

How much time do you waste every week fetching and fixing marketing assets for other people? How many projects take you half a day instead of half an hour because you have to search through your hard drive, dig out your old computer, and email four other people to track down the photos, illustrations, and fonts you need (in the right formats) to produce a new piece of marketing collateral? Here are three reasons why it’s worth investing the time to tackle this chore:

Make your sales team self-sufficient (and less dangerous). You’ll want an easy way an easy way for sales people to get assets in a way that helps keep them happy and in reasonable control.  If they cannot find high quality materials easily, they will start making their own god-awful crap that does NOT conform to your messaging or branding standards. Stop this problem before it starts my making it stupid simple for them to find what you want them to use.

Work more effectively with your vendors. Giving vendors the right building blocks and instructions increases the probability that their work will be right the first time, saving you time and money.  Why pay to reproduce a collateral piece if you can easily find

Save money. If you can easily access existing marketing assets and source files, you don’t have to have things reproduced or relicense photos and images again. You’ll pay less and get more value from nearly every marketing vendor.  Your graphic designers can work directly from source InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop files instead of creating new ones based on your PDFs.  Your public relations firm can re-use the press release and backgrounder templates you already created.  You can quickly update your infographic with this year’s data without having to send it back to the original designer.

Getting Started: Who needs what?

Deciding what kinds of files to make available is easy when you approach the question in the same way you target each of your customer segments.  Each group you work with will have slightly different needs and preferences.

Employees One of the best ways to keep your company’s communications looking great and consistent with the branding effort you work so hard to promote is to make sure everyone has well-designed, easy to use templates and tools available.  From basic letterhead in Microsoft Word format and presentation templates in PowerPoint.  Including standard non-disclosure agreements and common documents pre-approved by your legal and human resource teams prevents a lot of problems before they occur.

Sales Team In addition to the files all employees need, your sales team needs quick, easy and intuitive access to your most popular marketing collateral and sales tools.  When you make it easy for them to access high quality, well-targeted materials, they can spend more time contacting prospects instead of hacking together botched flier layouts in Paint.

Partners Making the right materials available and reliably up to date for your technology and channel partners is crucial for supporting your partner marketing programs.  This is especially important for small companies who have to compete with monolithic brands for attention with partners’ sales teams.

Vendors If you’re not working collaboratively with your most trusted marketing vendors, you’re missing significant opportunities to enhance the quality of the work they deliver while cutting costs for both of your firms.  Make sure they have access to your branding guide and relevant vector graphics, high resolution artwork, and collateral source files. Why pay to have every piece of artwork or collateral recreated when you could easily adapt existing materials? Neither you nor the vendor has time to waste on twelve back and forth emails trying to get the right version of the logo into a new flier.  When you both have easy access too the files, you can simply swap out the logo file when you review the document.

The post How to Organize Your Marketing Files appeared first on Great Enthusiasms.

There are lots of options for approaching the pricing problem. You can quietly test pricing options on your sign up page like 37 Signals (and hundreds of other companies).  You can create a major customer relations fiasco by introducing both a large price increase and an onerous change to your service structure like the infamous Netflix debacle.  Or, like Amazon, you can delay increasing your price for nine years and add significant value to your service.  As a customer, I’m all for this approach and am certainly willing to pay a little more for better service.

MarketingLand.com reports that 39% of Amazon’s customers are prime members and these customers spend more than twice as much with the online retailer – $1,340 vs. $650 on average. (These figures are based on survey data from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners.)

Like thousands of other customers, my husband and I signed up for Amazon Prime when it was introduced in 2005.  Honestly I don’t know if our annual shipping costs would have exceeded the cost of the program in every one of the nine years, but the dead simple convenience of being able to order a couple of books or a DVD or some household item whenever we need it without any shipping friction to impact the purchase decision has been well worth the $79.  Sure, I still prefer to group my purchases into more efficient groupings and store things on my wish list or in the shopping cart until I’m ready to put in an order.  But if one of my children gets invited to a birthday party and I’m too busy to schlep to Toys R Us, it’s great to be able to order just one toy.

Having one Amazon prime membership for the household (on my husband’s Amazon account) for free shipping was fine all these years.  But since we signed up, Amazon Prime has gotten better and better.  They added free Kindle book lending.  They added 40,000 streaming movies and videos.  The free shipping has gone from super saver 3-7 day delivery to blisteringly fast 2-day delivery (and sometimes only one day).  Freaking awesome.

In December, Santa brought two Kindles for the kids.  I decided to purchase my own Amazon Prime membership so the kids and I could stream videos conveniently on their Kindles and on my iPad.  (We already enjoyed the streaming feature from my husband’s membership with our Roku, but switching accounts on the devices is a hassle.)  The option to borrow books on my Kindle was an added bonus.

So now, our family’s annual Amazon Prime has gone from $79 to $198 ($99×2).  You know what?  It’s STILL a good bargain.  Sure, many Amazon customers who don’t really use and enjoy the perks of the Amazon Prime service may decide to drop it at the higher price point, but I bet their big data geniuses have figured out that their best customers won’t mind all that much.  CIRP’s research bears this out.  MarketingLand.com reports that even if the price increase had been $20 higher, 94% of the Amazon Prime customers they surveyed would “definitely” or “probably” still choose to renew.

Actually, wouldn’t it be great if more of the companies we rely on would increase their prices by 25% and improve their service 200% just like Amazon?

The post Why Amazon’s best customers won’t mind a price hike for Prime appeared first on Great Enthusiasms.

Graham explains, “This spillover of the consumer buying and using experience into what people will expect in business experiences is a looming phenomenon that will affect product marketers—as well as sales, marketing and product management.”  Just as consumer marketers have learned to listen and adapt to social media empowered customers, so too will B2B marketers face losing some control of their messaging and positioning as market tide move them forward.

Since product marketers are already engaged cross-functionally within their companies and actively meeting with and listening to customers in the market, Graham explains that they are in a unique position to help their companies manage this transition.  Read his suggestions for ways product marketers can help their sales, marketing, and product development teams succeed in this changing environment.

The post The Consumerization of B2B IT appeared first on Great Enthusiasms.

The posting seemed pretty straightforward and admittedly not all that interesting for a lot of folks, but you would not believe the response we received – over 120 responses! Our little freelance gig attracted respondents ranging from eager college students to extremely experienced professionals with advanced degrees. For a crummy little data entry project! I am overwhelmed and grateful that so many people would consider helping us with our projects. Can you imagine what kind of response a really great opportunity must attract?

So how can a job applicant stand out amid so much competition?

In our case, I grew increasingly frustrated as I reviewed the submissions and sorted them into four groups: 1) consider for interview, 2) maybe interview, 3) no/not a good fit and 4) “oh, hell no.” I’m no human resources expert (just a very busy entrepreneur), but here are some tips for job seekers based on my experience as the schmoe on the other side of the job query emails. Hope some of you will find this helpful.

Your objective is to get to the next step in the selection process

As with any complex business to business sales process, your objective in the job search should be to get to the next step in the selection process. When you respond to a job listing, you want to make sure you jump two hurdles: a) avoid an immediate rejection and b) entice the hiring manager to review your resume and move you to the next level of consideration. You can’t necessarily predict what the next level will be. Perhaps it is having your resume reviewed by other people in the company, perhaps it is going directly to a phone interview.

The company will expect to have its own hurdles to jump in the selection process. Will you like the company and its culture better than competing companies? Will the pay range meet your requirements? Will the job description be challenging enough to keep you interested, but not so challenging that you’ll want to leave too soon? Will the scope of the job need to be changed based on the unique skills of the individual applicants? Don’t expect an immediate offer or issue a list of demands in the first email.

No blind resumes – include a query note

If you don’t care enough about a position to spend five minutes composing 4-7 sentences explaining how your skills match the work to be done, don’t waste either of our time by just emailing a resume file. With over 100 resumes to review I’m not going to download and open the file without any reason to believe it will be worth my while.

Oh yeah, and that lovely resume you simply pasted from Word into the body of the email instead of writing a query is an unintelligible piece of crap by the time it gets rendered in my email client.

Put your name on your resume file

Include your first and last name in your resume file name. Have you ever considered what a complete pain in the ass it is to sort through 25 saved attachments that are all named “my resume”?

What does your job query note say about you?

I am naturally going to immediately draw inferences about you from your query note. What do the following types of query notes say about you?

No query – lazy, doesn’t care, probably wouldn’t take the job if it were offered (see section above).

Long, boring traditional non-customized query letter about how you seek challenge and can add value for our organization – too lazy to target the message and just pasted in a pre-written cover letter, probably didn’t read the job listing thoroughly since this has little or no relevance to our company or our position. (Maybe HR weenies like these, but the person who can actually make the decision to hire you hates them.)

Spelling, punctuation, errors and or IM abbreviations – either has exceedingly poor communication skills, poor judgment, or is simply a slacker who takes no pride of workmanship in his/her professional life. You would not BELIEVE the HORRIBLE writing we received in many of the responses we got despite having mentioned in the posting that good grammar and some writing would be required. At least 5 of the responses had no capital letters and my preschooler can punctuate better than some of the college graduates!

I am completely baffled that so many people are comfortable presenting themselves professionally in such a slovenly manner. Do they show up at interviews and networking events in torn, dirty shorts and stinky tank tops too? As a hiring manager, I don’t want to hire these people because I don’t want to spend MY work time cleaning up their grammar. Plus, I don’t want to work with the kind of person who just doesn’t care about his/her work. Geez!

“How do I apply” query – Oh for crying out loud! If you have to ask, you’re clearly clueless and will require far, far too much micromanagement.

And you would know IF YOU HAD ACTUALLY READ THE FREAKING JOB POSTING. (Obviously this idiotic query mighty yield better results at a large, soul-sucking bureaucracy than a fast-moving startup.)

“What is the annual salary?” and “My salary requirements are…” queries – cares more about the pay than the work, cannot perform basic mathematics, and is completely clueless. This is not a good query focus because:

• In our case, we posted an hourly rate of $8/hour and put 5-10 hours per week in the TITLE OF THE JOB. My first thought when reading these queries was, “Are you stupid or something?” Figuring the annual salary is basic fourth grade math: hours x rate. Duh!
• If you have experience in the field you’re applying for and/or you’re not too lazy to look up the usual range on Salary.com, you should have a basic idea what that market rate is before you apply. Remember, you want to avoid immediate rejection. If you don’t have a basic idea of the normal compensation structure, you probably don’t know what the job entails either.

“I want/need a job” queries – The economy is very, very tough right now. Despite my tendency toward overworked bitchiness while reviewing the responses to our project posting, my heart breaks with the knowledge that so many good people are in need of work.

Unfortunately, indiscriminately applying for any job isn’t going to do either of us any good. If it isn’t a good fit, you won’t be happy and the work will suffer. And if the only content in the query is “I am interested in the position,” or “I need a job,” then the hiring manager really doesn’t have much reason to justify moving you to the next phase of the selection process.<

Concise, targeted queries focused on getting the work done – I LOVE these! How are you are most likely to move into my “to be interviewed” bucket? In 4-7 grammatically correct and appropriately punctuated sentences show me that a) you actually read the job posting – yes, all of it! b) understand the work needed, c) have some experience that would help you accomplish it, d) show some initiative and/or a temperament that makes me want to work with you.

What our successful applicants had in common

The people we decided to consider for interviews all sent in concise, professional queries that clearly indicated that they had a reasonable grasp of the work needed. They showed us that they can think independently and can apply their previous experiences to successfully accomplish the tasks we need to get done.

A few acknowledged that they did not have experience with some of the software we use, but took the time to Google it and get a feel for what it does. That initiative means as much – maybe even more – than actual experience with the tool.

I can teach someone to use a computer program in an hour or two – I can never teach someone to be the kind of person who is intellectually curious and/or enough of a self-starter to seek information and figure something out on his/her own.

What about the resumes?

We generally didn’t even use resumes to make the first cut in our search. Not very many people make a career of data entry, so a traditional resume would not likely tell us whether the person could do a good job or not. We’re basically just using them to finalize the list of people we want to interview and to prepare for the interviews. Honestly, I’d rather see a link to your LinkedIn profile, but a resume is convenient for printing to review before the interview.

So there you have it – job searching from the perspective of one overworked hiring manager at a small startup. I’m sure other managers and recruiters will have different perspectives and opinions. But perhaps some of you will find these tips helpful.

Good luck! I hope some of these suggestions will help you find interesting work and outstanding professional opportunities.

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• What kinds of leads should you target?
• What do you need to know about those leads?
• What will you do with leads after you generate them? email newsletters? direct mail campaigns? telemarketing?
• What systems and software will you be using to manage the data?

Each marketing decision significantly impacts the data fields you  will need to successfully implement your marketing plan.  If you take a  little time to understand what information your sales and marketing team  will need throughout the prospecting and selling cycles, the marketing  data management system you develop will be much more effective.

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