The Grange Tower Bridge Hotel is the latest addition to the London hotel chain’s portfolio and it opened its doors for the soft opening in the first week of June.  Situated five minutes’ walk from Tower Hill tube station it has some impressive views (from upper floors) across the river and of the nearby Tower of London and Tower Bridge.

Why did we go?

To experience the hotel and see how it feels compared to other hotels in the chain.

What did we do?

We stayed for one night in June about four days after it opened its doors.

Look and feel of hotel:

The ‘soft’ opening means that the accommodation and restaurant are open, with other facilities such as conference space and spa still being completed.  There was also quite a bit of landscaping to be completed outside so the initial impressions are of a building site!

The lobby has a very sparse, almost industrial look, which wouldn’t be to everyone’s taste and is quite different to a lot of hotels we have experienced.  It feels very spacious with lots of open space and high ceilings, but with stones floors and pillars, ‘cosy’ isn’t an adjective that would fit here.

Once up on the 7^th floor, the feeling changes completely and this is the first time it really felt like a 5-star hotel, with deep carpets and immaculate decor.  Our room also felt very plush with floor-to-ceiling  windows, extremely thick curtains and excellent quality furnishings.  The bathroom was also great quality with separate shower and different light settings.

Amenities:

The bedroom had everything you would expect from this level of hotel, including robes and slippers, although we did only have one set.  The media connections are very good with a panel across the top of the desk containing different mains sockets for different countries and connections to all the media in the room (iPod etc) so very good for business travellers.  Interestingly the mini-bar was empty and it wasn’t clear if this was the usual situation or if it had never been filled.

It is worth mentioning that although the hotel pool and spa are not due to open until September, guests are able to use the facilities at the nearby Grange City Hotel for a charge of £10 per person.

Service:

This was the area where it was most obvious that this is a new hotel and they were certainly having their share of teething problems.  Upon arrival there were about six staff behind the check in desk and all seemed busy trying to sort out problems with new arrivals.  We had a bit of a wait but the actual check-in was very quick and efficient.

Breakfast the following morning was a bit of a shambles.  They have a huge restaurant but clearly not enough staff to service it properly, as there was not a single table that had been cleaned when we arrived, despite many tables being clear of guests.  We, along with a few other people, were therefore not able to be seated until the head waiter was able to track down a colleague to clear some tables.

Eventually we were offered a seat at a dirty table while we waited, which was not a good suggestion.  It would have been better to stand rather than stare at the previous diners’ debris.  However, once we did have a table, the food itself was very good with plenty of choice, although we did have to ask more than once for some tea.

Overall:

This has all the makings of a really good hotel for leisure or business, with a great location, especially for those who want to be close to central London as well as the City.  A lot of the staff appeared to be trainees and they will naturally have a learning curve, however if a hotel markets itself as 5-star it should be able to operate at this level from the outset.  Judging by some of the comments on TripAdvisor, we got off quite lightly!

It will be very interesting to return to the hotel once the conference space is open to see how things have changed and to experience the service levels once the staff and the systems have bedded in.

accommodation · B2B · Event · Grange Tower Bridge Hotel · London · Marketing · review · Venue

Most B2B businesses would say they don’t have an e-Commerce website … they don’t have a shopping cart and for good reason; B2B purchases are often high value items or service contracts.

I propose that most B2B sites ARE eCommerce sites, it’s just that the final transaction takes place off-line. The site plays an important role in a longer sales process. For this reason research and complex decision-making dominate the B2B user experience rather than a shopping basket and checkout. B2B sites have to offer in-depth information that you’d never normally find on a B2C site.

So B2B sites are just another form of eCommerce, but, there’s one big contrast between B2C and B2B – pricing. You rarely find it on B2B sites. In recent B2B research by the Neilsen Norman Group, wanting to get pricing (or an indication of cost) was rated as the most important information needed by B2B site visitors (29% higher than product/service availability which ranked 2nd).

The research shows that in order to make a decision to further the buying process, B2B visitors want a basic knowledge of products and services from their initial research that includes an idea of the cost.

So what’s your excuse for hiding your price?

No tags

We’ve all seen them, the square box, with some random black squares arranged within – gradually beginning to appear on consumer products and advertising.

We’ve been thinking about how to use them in a B2B environment.

The most obvious one (to us anyway) seemed to be to pop it onto our business cards:

Business Card with QR Code

All you have to do is download a Barcode Reader app to your smartphone of choice, then use that to take a picture of the QR Code, and your phone will automatically register the contact details and should prompt to save as a V Card.

From a B2B perspective, we think it would work well in the following scenarios:

1. Email marketing & Events – include a QR code image in HTML emails that people can scan to download event venue details, someone’s contact details, special offer information etc ( as they can be scanned from on screen as well as in print)

2. Include a QR code in print ads – really handy for tracking responses as you could share a “secret” URL only accessible by scanning the code

3. Include a QR code in printed direct mail – especially great if marketing products – if you go one step further and develop your own app (if relevant) you can integrate the two to enable product reminders and ordering.

4. Web – using QR codes on the website can be a great addition to a contact us page, or to share URLs

5. Well, that was the business card idea

Want to know more about they work? The below link takes you to a great blog that has the top 14 things you should know about QR Codes:

http://searchenginewatch.com/3642255

If you’ve any other ideas for use in a B2B environment, please comment below!

B2B · business cards · direct mail · email · Marketing · QR codes · web

The one group  of businesses I expect to have their unsubscribe process spot on are retailers – especially online retailers.

I don’t think I’m being unreasonable, they are completely customer focused, familiar with technology and have been using the internet for some time now!

I think someone needs to let play.com in on the secret – sorry guys!

In a New Year clearout I decided to purge my personal email of subscription emails….it’s a dumping ground email address for me when I buy things online, but I finally tired of all the scintillating offers and decided to decamp. This soon became an odyssey of critiquing Unsubscribe processes – teensy bit relevant to me as we run many email campaigns for our customers, and frankly, I’m a bit nosy.

Firstly, the myth of bigger companies and retailers being more on the ball – how wrong could I be!

Art.com impressed me the most, not only was the process painless and quick, they’ d taken the time to create an appealing page that said how sorry they were to see me go. Very sweet (didn’t stop me, but I would still buy from them, which is the point).

A few sites from very small retailers impressed me with their painless unsubscribes..and then I clicked on the Play.com one.

Step 1: I was presented with a login screen – well if I’m unsubscribing, I probably haven’t bought anything for ages, and I’m damned if I can remember that password!

Step 2: Yup, you guessed it, so then I had to go through a multi-step forgotten password process (I won’t bore you with that one)

Step 3: (Correct, I am persistent) finally get logged in and am presented with an Account Settings page.  The Unsubscribe feature is in a box called Change Newsletter Settings, placed at the bottom of the page, below the fold.

Step 4: Radio button located, I selected it. Sentence appears confirming update (but no acknowledgement that I had unsubscribed, or would be missed – sniff)

Then to top it all off, the next day, guess who I received a newsletter from? Yup, you guessed it, my good friends at Play.com!

This isn’t a diatribe against Play.com – they do the selling bit very well!

But, it is just lack of attention to detail- Unsubscribe is not something that’s hard to get right – just place what the customer wants at the heart of the process, make it easy, make it fast and tell ‘em you’ll miss em!!!

B2B Marketing · customer service · play.com · unsubscribes

I took part in a recent survey for the Soil Association – despite the fact that it was clearly the most biased, marketing driven survey I’ve ever come across.

The questions were so leading as to make objectivity impossible, such as:

“Annual reports from the Pesticides Residues Committee regularly show pesticides showing up in non-organic food. 150 of the 311 pesticides commonly used in non-organic farming have been identified as potentially causing cancer. Do you think this is cause for concern?”

Well, how would you respond? Oh no, I’m fine about eating potentially cancer causing pesticides…(and don’t even get me started on the word “potentially”), so, it fails on one of the most primary quality control checks for surveys: maximise objective assessments, and reduce subjective ones.

Surveys are also supposed to be balanced – otherwise what is the point? With surveys that contain leading questions such as the above, you’ll only learn what you already think you know – which may well have been their objective, who knows? And if the Soil Association (who I don’t have issue with as a whole) wants to back up their marketing messages with data from this survey (I can see it now: 97% of people think non-organic food causes cancer), then that’s up to them and their conscience.

Which is my point here….surveys are most valuable in situations where you don’t know what you don’t know. Validating a marketing message, or an assumption about a marketplace for example, and the quality of surveys should be tightly controlled to ensure objectivity and balance. Why? Well, if you’re planning on using the results for marketing/messaging purposes, you don’t want to be caught out with inaccuracies that have come about through leading questions. At best, your messaging could be based on non-existent industry needs, at worst, your reputation could be impacted negatively.

I am guessing that actually what the Soil Association were trying to achieve was to get my contact details, and given that it was presented to me after completing my shop on Ocado, they probably figured I fit a certain profile, and these statements would be what I wanted to hear. Which is all fine, but don’t dress it up as “one of the most important debates of our time” (their words, not mine), a more credible approach would have been “if you agree with these statements then support the soil association”

So what would a non-leading version of that question above have looked like? How about:

Are you concerned about pesticides in food? If so, please state your reasons:

- because the media tells me I ought to be

- because I have heard that they may be harmful to people’s health

- I don’t know

- I just don’t like the idea of eating chemicals, but don’t know what effect that has on my health

That way, if you wanted value from the survey, you would understand if people are actually concerned in the first place, then you would see what’s driving that concern.

Putting time into planning the questions properly, and avoiding the temptation to slant them to your solution, will ensure that not only do you get the most value from the results, your subsequent actions are based on real fact, and you will have established credibility with your audience.

Another good article, from the US, on this subject, is available here. This article also has some good specifics around how to measure the quality of your surveys.

B2B Marketing · soil association · surveys

Who cares about B2B marketing more specifically?

It is great to see an increase in content focused on B2B Marketing Best Practice – hooray!

And in my role as chair of the Marketing Society’s B2B Forum, I attended a small dinner recently, hosted by Sir Paul Judge, and attended by senior executives from the B2B arena, companies such as Accenture, Ernst & Young, IBM, Fujitsu and BT (and more) put forward their ideas for increasing the focus and resources to enable successful B2B marketers.

A huge amount of marketing expertise was present in that room – including Laurie Young, author of several valuable books on the topic of effective b2b marketing, and it was interesting to see what they wanted to see covered in the b2b media and by organisations such as the Marketing Society and the Chartered Institute of Marketing (who also attended):

1. Highlight more innovation in the sector

2. Encourage marketers to be represented in the B2B boardroom

3. Highlight best practice in developing the value proposition

4. Demonstrate how better to articulate marketing’s contribution to the bottom line (our friend, marketing ROI)

5. Improve industry knowledge (in terms of the industries you are working in and targeting) throughout the sector

There’s a lot of expertise out there, it’s just about creating a framework and resources to enable everyone involved. I’ll keep you posted on progress!

B2B Marketing · BT · Ernst and Young · Fujitsu · IBM · laurie young · marketing best practice · sir paul judge

Once we’d all finished popping the champagne (ok, actually tea as it was only 9.30am) after reaching this fulfilling benchmark, I thought, well, what next?

Specifically what next for email? My inbox is full of emails from publications, potential suppliers etc, ranging from “email doesn’t work anymore” to “email is the way forward” and everything in between.

My personal, very humble opinion, is that email still works, just as it always has done, in the sense that GOOD email marketing works, POOR email marketing DOESN’T.

Ok, rant over…almost.

We’ve probably all seen the email, blogs and websites that have all hints and tips about what works, and we discuss them earnestly over networking drinks and in planning sessions. So we all know it, but do we all do it?

No, is the simple answer. Which got me wondering, well why don’t we then? Nobody sets out to do a bad email.

I have a theory (based on the aforementioned 200 email campaigns) that it boils down to 3 reasons:

1. Decision by committee - too many cooks spoil an email and dilute the message and original intent with multiple minor modifications that are unnecessary at best, and downright damaging at worst. We need to be stronger, as marketers, to stand up for our beliefs as to what’s right and what’s effective!

2. Succumbing to the number tempation – well yes, we’ve verticalised our message and approach, and we know who will respond, but how will it hurt if we just add another 5,000 contacts to the list of recipients? It will make the sales guys happy….enough said here I think

3. Thinking email is cheap – yes, the actual physical cost of an email campaign is cost effective, but why waste that money by using poorly qualified data for example? Why is it ok not to test email campaigns as you would other marketing channels? Always integrate with other channels! Be clever about the ROI, don’t just blindly follow the opens and clicks list.

I’m sure you all know the above (from painful experience I’m sure), perhaps what we need are lessons in assertiveness rather than email marketing. Yes, I’m being facetious – actually it brings me round to my favourite subject – getting best practice B2B Marketing on the executive agenda.

Until marketers are targeted and SUPPORTED on criteria that results in good quality b2b marketing, then it’s not really going to change. What do I mean? Well for starters:

1. Accept that good marketing takes time to prepare, so approve budget EARLY, accept that time to leads reflects the prep and relationship build time appropriate for your market

2. Create linked objectives between sales and marketing – make it clear where the line is, and what the expectations are – if you have a 12 month sales cycle and don’t approve budgets until March – guess what, no leads until Q3!

3. Create objectives NOT JUST BASED ON LEAD NUMBERS. Yes, leads and sales pipeline is important. But in B2B where relationships have to be nurtured, relationships, reputation and influence are equally as important. Would Proctor and Gamble stop doing television advertising because people don’t rush out to buy the minute the advert is on?

My mission is continuing – I am attending a small dinner on the 27th September with senior marketers from some of the largest global companies, where I am going to throw down the gauntlet – watch this space

If you want to support my B2B Mission, please join our B2B marketing symposium LinkedIn group!

thanks all!

B2B Marketing · campaigns · email · email marketing · marketing ROI

Now, a question. What’s the purpose of email?

Answer – communication.

What’s the least effective kind of communication for relationship building? One way communication.

Ok, so that was two questions, my main question is why oh why oh why oh why do companies STILL insist on sending automated emails that you can’t reply to??? (I don’t advocate gratuitous punctuation normally but this needed it)

I downloaded a paper today from a website, and asked for it to be emailed to me. And it duly was delivered – great.

BUT the email it was sent from was a “noreply@” email address. What makes this offence doubly frustrating is that, while I downloaded the content from a popular marketing publication site, the email (and therefore the content) was from a marketing agency.

So, really, marketing ought to know better – as it’s customer service and engagement rule 1: give the customer as many opportunities to engage with you as possible – and make it easy.

With today’s technology it is very easy to include a proper email address in automated communication, which someone could reply to – say if they had a problem downloading the content, or if there’d been no attachment as promised. Or they may have been so riveted by the content that they wanted to get in touch. You can route it to a mailbox, restrict out of office bouncebacks and apply rules so that it’s dealt with appropriately.

It really is the simple things that make the most difference – for example the automated email wasn’t personalised – but they know who I am as I had to log in to make the download.

None of it’s difficult – it’s just about attention to detail.

PS – if you’re reading this, and you have a jolly good reason for using a noreply email, I am genuinely interested in a lively debate.

B2B Marketing · communication · Digital Marketing · email · noreply · technology marketing

I guess a more accurate (but less optimistic title) could have been “Integrating Sales and Marketing – is there any point and does anybody want it to happen?” – however that would have been a little defeatist (and much less catchy).

I attended a B2B Marketing Event recently, where they had a speaker presenting on that very subject (Rod Sloane) and, today received an email from B2B Marketing on using technology to bridge the gap.

All very useful, as Rod addresses the culture issue, and the latter using technology – and it’s obvious that both are needed.

However, it got me thinking – are we over intellectualising the issue? Can we not just apply some plain old psychology to the problem, and look at the motivations of both sides:

Marketing:

1. Wanting to demonstrate their value to the business
2. Needs sales to follow up on leads to gain validation
3. Needs sales to help them get closer to the customer (to validate messaging, help with case studies etc)

Sales:

1. Needs marketing to generate productive and relevant meetings for them
2. Wants marketing to take ownership of the pipeline
3. Wants their market and customer knowledge to be leveraged

I know I’m simplifying, and that there are wider, more complex motivations (and issues) but you get the drift.

Next, why is everyone talking about the need to inetegrate the two? Why do people feel it’s not happening? I would like to suggest 2 factors here:

1. Fear of failure (if we don’t work together and it fails, we can blame each other)
2. Lack of communication (what exactly is it that you do?)

IDC Advisory Group (according to Rod Sloane) said earlier this year “in 2009, half of all sales people did not meet quota, two thirds of the time, it was due to lack of sales and marketing alignment”

So, what are the clues to help you work out if sales and marketing aren’t aligned in your organisation (as if you didn’t know), Rod points out that generally large amounts of finger pointing occurs, as opposed to focusing on moving forward and addressing change.

What I ultimately really liked about Rod’s presentation is his assertion that ultimately what marketing is about is generating revenue – amen.

If you’re a regular reader (thank you by the way) you’ll know that improving the quality of B2B Marketing is a personal mission of mine, and Rod highlighted two core tenets of that process:

1. Marketers are responsible for revenue generation – and that includes embracing (maybe not literally) the sales team
2. Marketers should be compensated on their contribution to a sales deal

So, actually, (to bring me back to my point – and I do have one) the process of integrating sales and marketing has to begin with your sales and marketing strategy: combined targets, communication improvements and combined compensation – and a provision of the right tools to make it happen.

B2B Marketing · integration · Rod Sloane · sales · sales and marketing integration

Just a quick update to my post of a few weeks ago…”B2B Marketing – the forgotten discipline”…

I am really pleased to let you know that the first B2B Steering Committee meeting was held on Thursday May 6th in London for the Marketing Society (http://www.marketing-society.org.uk/)!

I have been appointed the chair for this forum, which is very exciting.

It seems that what is missing for most B2B Marketers is understanding what case studies and best practice exists to help increase knowledge and expertise. There seems to be a lot of vendor led information available, but a lack of independent, clear and concise information on how to be a brilliant B2B Marketer.

Many industry qualifications seem to focus on B2C Marketing theory and disciplines, with maybe a “chapter based” nod to B2B – completely ignoring the many complexities and difficulties in B2B.

What’s very exciting is that we have some very “big brains” involved in the Marketing Society’s forum, which means we can quickly start generating some great content – watch this space!

So, the mission continues! Now, if only I can get the CIM’s attention….

B2B Marketing · CIM · the marketing society