Tralfaz

Day: August 22, 2011

  • Opt out marketing mail messages

    We all get a lot of spam.  I have int he past, used one of my mail accounts to register for something or other.  Don’t know what it was, but it seemed to bring a few offers of “XYZ market report” or “Reach KLM decision makers in solar technology”.  Or some such similar twaddle.  Always addressed to me.  Always crafted to avoid the spam filters.

    It was a minor annoyance.  Really, just a couple seconds, and I deleted them unread.  Then one day I opened one of them up, and saw a link to unsubscribe.  Well, these seemed like legitimate offers, I was just not interested.  So I clicked the link and unregistered my email.

    Big mistake.

    That appears to have validated that I exist.  Now I get 3 – 5 of these offers a day.  A range of market data and reports on: 

    • Heavy Industry
    • Mining Technology
    • Minerals Extraction
    • Petroleum engineering
    • Photovoltaic production
    • LED for Lighting applications
    • Photovoltaic installers
    • SAP
    • Sharepoint
    • …

     

    I think you can see the trend.  Alas, I am afraid to try to opt out again.  The signal to noise ratio in my inbox is trashed.

    Sigh.  Scummy, semi-legitimate spammers.

  • Why is it that sales’s first reaction to something new is to give it away?

    I know that I can’t be unique here.  We develop a really cool new feature/module/functionality.  Early validation and customer feedback is hugely positive.  Phrases like “game changing”  “revolutionary” “must have at any cost” are bantered about.

    Then comes time for mainstream release, and without question, the sales organization demurs that it should be “bundled” in.  Or offered “gratis”.  Or become part of the main product.  This happens time and time again, and really frustrates the marketing side of my persona.  We just developed something that is a huge value add differentiator, and we have an opportunity to increase our market visiblity and share by a period of exclusivity.  And the stakeholders who can take this and run with it uniformly believe that we should give it away.

    They want to turn it into a checkbox in the presales evaluation process.  Huh?  Really?

    Sigh.  If the work I do to find differentiation generating features nets to no increased value, and the work of our development team truly does nothing more than fill out a checklist for a presales evaluation, then why bother.

    The lowpoint of product management.