Zipnosis test
MattP
4 reasons why email tracking is backfiring
Over the past few years email tracking has become huge in sales & marketing.
While marketers have used it via their Marketing Automation systems for almost a decade, millions of sales reps have been using it directly in Gmail/Outlook. Inside sales/SDR tools also include this feature.
After all, everyone wants to know if their email was read, how many times it was read, etc. so that you can actively serve those prospects/clients.
Life was good till the hackers showed up and the email providers (Microsoft, Google, Anti-spam services) decided to do more to protect clients. Here are 4 reasons why should stop tracking emails.
1 – It’s sending your emails to the spam folder.
Every trackable email includes invisible pixels or trackable URLs which directly increase the spam score of an email. I’ll explain the technical details in another post but if your email contains these long, funny URLs from a domain (the tracking service) different from your company domain, your spam score just went.
2 – The big one – it’s screwing up your metrics
Here’s the big one – an increasing number of false positives. More and more email protection services (software that scans an email before it reaches your Inbox) load these tracking pixels before the message is delivered to the recipient. So the sender might think the message was opened but it wasn’t opened by a human – it was the email service that “opened” it.
3 – It’s going to get worse
A new capability in Microsoft Office 365 (which has >70% enterprise market share) “clicks” on the links in an email message to test if it is an unsafe URL before the message is delivered. This artificially inflates click metrics. Marketing campaigns look like they are performing very well and SDRs might think prospects are very engaged but the reality might be very different.
4 – Just in case you do care about GDPR
Now there’s one more thing (email interaction data) to worry about and make sure your email tracking provider has a way for you to be compliant.
A quick test that you can run on your own if you use an email automation (marketing automation or inside sales automation tool) to see if your metrics are getting impacted is to test the timestamps on emails sent and clicks coming from the same target company. If you see several people from the same domain “click” on your emails at exactly the same time, most likely it was their email protection service and not real humans. And if
So what to do if you want to measure engagement without link tracking?
Use Google Analytics. That’s what we do as we’ve found that to be the most reliable way. I’ll explain in another post how we do it.
Email tracking is not free, it comes at a steep cost – either by sending your messages to spam or mis-reporting and giving you a false sense of email engagement.
A Brief Visual Guide to GDPR
GDPR is another of those boring regulations but it is super important for Marketers to pay attention to and comply with.
Here’s a brief, visual guide that’s easy on the eyes.
Act like your CEO – with speed & skinny data
The one person that every Sales & Marketing leader cares about is the CEO.
Every project and initiative is started with the goal of getting concrete results that are worth sharing with the CEO to show how it impacted business.
A recent Harvard study identified 4 things that set successful CEOs apart.
If you want to please your CEO or want him/her to recognize your work, you should think and act like your CEO. Here are two things worth learning:
Super CEOs act with speed.
They make decisions because they know that the cost of doing nothing might exceed the cost of failure. Sales & Marketing leaders should act swiftly because the pace of business and market change is astounding. Every quarter lost in internal meetings and pondering has a cost. If your new projects could have grown business even by 0.5%, that’s a significant number.
Super CEOs act with skinny data.
They don’t act simply on intuitions but they don’t wait for 7 quarters either.
The cost of getting the most-perfect dataset about sales, marketing and customers is not worth it. In many cases, it might even be unattainable before retirement. The technical term I use for this data is Minimum Viable Dataset. It was an inspiration from something we use heavily in the world of Startups & Product Development called Minimum Viable Product.
Growth-minded leaders exhibit hunger for what they can change this fiscal year and are willing to act differently based on data even if it’s a mid-flight correction. The changing landscape in every industry will render fixed, 12-month plans ineffective (and it’s happening all around us).
Why the road to AI might be bumpier than the road to Cloud
When my dad stops reading the newspaper to pause and ask a question, I know it’s a serious matter. Recently, his question was – “what’s this AI thing that I keep seeing in the news?”.
AI is beginning to reach hype of epic levels. But the road to AI is turning out to be bumpy. Below are some observations.
[Here’s a simple definition of AI so you read this in the right context. Software has been linear and dumb for a long time. We need smarter algorithms to make it intelligent. Some companies have been doing this for a long time; now the entire industry is trying to do it. The mission is called AI. It has given us all common vocabulary, some great tools and a branding opportunity.]
Cloud is boring but a LOT of B2B apps are still not even in the Cloud. They are getting there. Most AI platforms that power apps need all the data to be in the Cloud. So there’s this headwind that has to be dealt with.
Access to data – for all non-trivial applications of AI-powered software, the fuel is data. Even at small/mid-size companies, this remains the biggest challenge because of legal and political issues. Add to that the fact that very few companies have their entire stacks with one vendor. This “disconnectedness” between tools causes major slowdowns.
Cloud had relatively simple use cases. The major use cases have been around data replication and scalability. When I sold Cloud-based email back in 2009, the main point of the pitch really was – “hey, you won’t loose your email data if there’s a storm.”
AI is at a higher level of evolution – think Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. With that comes the burden of delivering higher value. The use cases are more complex and closely tied to business results. It’s no longer about getting rid of hardware.
The biggest headwind that AI is facing in B2B is understanding data. It’s turning out to be a difficult problem to solve. It will be solved but it’s going to take time. Most AI platforms by big vendors can’t understand subtleties of an individual client’s data. AI models work IF they understand what the data is about. One-size-fits-all algorithms are very difficult. Ask a computer scientist.
AI is helping all of us in the tech world (and beyond) by reminding us to build more intelligent software. That’s the good news.
The not-so-good news is that in the case of many vendors (especially in sales & marketing software), the pre-AI avatar of their product is the same as the post-AI avatar. The result – confused buyers who are struggling with how AI will make their life any better.
A friend’s recent story captured it best. Her company was evaluating Salesforce Einstein and for every question her team asked in the meeting, the answer they got was “it’s AI-powered”.
Macho vs Mindful Managers & AI
One of the interesting observations we’ve had on our journey to quantify sales has been the recognition of two types of sales managers – the Macho types and the Mindful types.
(I use the word “manager” loosely; it might refer to anyone who has management responsibilities).
Macho Managers operate primarily on the basis of their intuitions and ego. They overrate their abilities and influence, and will often attribute their team’s success to their strong personality.
Mindful Managers, on the other hand, are the ones who deliberate and are constantly looking to fill the gaps in their understanding of the business.
Machos often have a distorted view of reality and believe that everyone around them is happily following their marching orders. The most interesting characteristic of Mindful Managers is their never-ending quest to grow. They are constantly searching for ways to gain an edge based on external factors, not internal (ego).
One of the experiments we sometimes run is we’ll ask a Manager to pick a few deals that his/her team has won and share what he/she believes were the main reasons behind the win/loss. Then we run the SalesTing tool which analyzes all the customer interactions that happened during the buyer’s journey. Algorithms (with some limitations) reveal the true and often surprising facts.
As AI pervades Sales in more and more ways, Machos might be on borrowed time.
While AI won’t replace managers, it will ally only with those who are willing to benefit from it.
The best managers will be ones who can use a mix of external factors (AI) and internal factors like inspiration. They will use quantification to grasp what’s truly happening. They will change behaviors not based on their cognitive illusions but based on what the data reveals.
The Machos will simply jump ship more often as is already happening.
Interestingly (and thankfully) we’ve seen no correlation between gender or age and the likelihood of being a Macho Manager or Mindful Manager.
Minimum Viable Dataset – a new approach to using the smallest dataset for the biggest impact
The Invisible Pipeline GIF
A gif is worth a thousand words.
CRM and Marketing tools only have visibility into < third of the real pipeline.
Here’s a rendering of the Invisible Pipeline problem that we’ve been working on solving.
Torturing CRM data to extract confessions can’t solve this problem. There’s a more humane way — using a tool like SalesTing that automatically shines a light into the IP.
Yes, it’s AI (Alignment Intelligence) 🙂