The problem many B2B (Business To Business) firms have is finding an answer the question, “How in the world can I gain the attention of that fickle buyer of exactly what I sell?”

If you’re like most entrepreneurs, you have tried direct mail, trade magazine advertising, email, snail mail, phone banks, mixers, trade shows, door-to-door sales forces, and just about everything else. You have a dynamic web site, excellent products, good delivery, and a customer-relations department that sets you back a month’s profit annually. All this and you still cannot get the attention of the people you want and need to grow your business! What to do? How can we use these new technologies to make our business flourish? What will work?

PERILS OF E-MAIL
E-mail was supposed to be the be-all of advertising. The statisticians promised that by next week just about every person, dog and cat in the world would have access to e-mail, so all you had to do was discover their e-mail address and send your message to everyone at one fell swoop. Entrepreneurs jumped on this bandwagon with e-mail lists you could buy or rent, and off we went.

Oops! We learned the art of ‘Spamming’ was not appreciated! So we purchased targeted lists, told our potential customers to open the wonderful attachments to our e-mail message, and off we were to the ad race once again. The new technology was wonderful! After all, you could attach audio clips, video clips, slide shows, and pictures of Aunt Tillie using your potential customer’s products to an e-mail message, and wasn’t that wonderful?

Then along came viruses, and now no one wants to open attachments, not even from friends they trust. Now what? The next step was to include these former attachments into the body of our e-mail message. By the time we put in the greeting from the Chairman of The Board, pictures of our new office site, a complete description of every product, and a ‘thank-you-for-reading-this’ message, we had the world’s longest download that tied up the receiving computer for minutes and caused fiery phone calls telling us just what the recipient thought of our ad. So what’s next? How about a combination of two or more of the traditional methods of advertising that seem to work? Let’s take a page from AOL’s (America On Line) book to see if we can attract buyers to our site using a combination of traditional advertising with modern technology.

THE CD-R
The CD-Recordable CD and a good designer can add that touch which could put your B2B on the computer of every potential buyer, and do it (in larger quantities) for about the same cost as a major ad and pr campaign. Here are a few suggestions.

1. Send the CD in your next direct mail, give it out at the trade show, include it with all orders for products, and in general, get your message out to every potential buyer of your goods and services.
2. The CD should be ‘auto start’, with a menu. One item on the menu should be your entire WebSite, another maybe a video of the way a typical order is filled (with pictures of staff), another a product comparison with your biggest competitor (Hey! Are you any good or not?), statistical information, detailed product information, and most anything else you would want a prospect or customer to know.
3. Have many-many places in the video where the customer can click to enter the Web and place an actual order or send an email direct to you for more information, etc.
4. Make the whole thing user-friendly.

One question is: “Can I, a small business person, do this?” Of course you can! CD designers are in the trees just waiting to be shaken out, blank disks add but a fraction to the cost of any campaign, and AOL has shown the way! If you’re the slightest bit ‘techie’, you can do it yourself, even to designing and printing the CD label!
Go for it!

GETTING STARTED
Begin by visiting your local computer store and asking questions. Put an ad in the paper asking for help. Ask your ISP (Internet Service Provider). You will discover a wealth of help is out there just waiting to be tapped. If you are presently using an ad agency or a marketing group, ask if they are up-to-speed on this technology. Some (and I emphasize some) are on the ball, but it’s my experience that you will need to assemble your own team. The technology is old, but the application is new. Use a focus group to decide what your presentation should look like when the CD is booted. When you do you mailing, send one to me. I love innovative entrepreneurs!