I work from home. If you do too, you know what that means. For those of you that don’t, I don’t recommend it. As a 44 year old male that’s been in the software business for over 20 years, I thought this would be straight-forward and relatively easy – basically, common sense. Well, not exactly.

For those of you that must work from home, here are my new rules based on a few glitches that I’ve been trying to work out…

1. Start by brushing your teeth before you head down to your home office. This may sound easy, but it’s not. It’s easy to defer and then you’ll find yourself with ‘cigar breath’ around 2pm. Not good, even my headset complains. Shower? I’m not going to touch that yet…that’s way too advanced.

2. Eat Breakfast – hands down, this is the hardest thing to do before starting work. I do this 2 out of 5 days and this is after the 10 minute debate inside my head, “why eat now, I can work for ‘a while’ and then eat in ‘a bit’”. Yeah, right. I’m now 150 lbs and dropping every day. I may be Johnny Winter by next winter.

3. Block out your lunches – many reasonably smart people can’t deal with the 4 US time zones very well. Therefore, on 4 out of 5 days, some jack%#@ has booked a meeting over my lunch hour. Oh, you’re too important to eat lunch or take a break? Even if you’re the CEO you should block off some time whether it’s for a work-out, reading time, eating, meeting with a friend/mentor or just thinking. Block out at least 3 of your lunch hours a week – do it.

4. Don’t Fold Clothes or Do Dishes – many of us are over-achievers and as such, we can’t stand to have idle seconds or minutes. During long conference calls, 60-120 minutes, I’ve folded clothes, done dishes, and even picked up dog crap in the backyard. I don’t recommend this although I will say that if you’re picking up dog crap it can have a positive mental effect that may help you. For example, if you’re picking up dog crap, nearly everything you hear on the phone will sound reasonably good and you may even find yourself volunteering for a ‘new project’.

5. Put up a cool picture in your office – you will need something to stare at because you will be bored out of your mind on some calls. Boring college classes won’t even come close to comparing – in fact, those classes way be viewed retrospectively as some of the “best times”. Hang some cool pictures in your office that help you escape the dementia.

6. Occasionally, just bow out – in sports, it’s common to find yourself in a situation where you just need a break, rest, or water. It’s like getting “dizzy”. Don’t be too proud. Occasionally, ok daily, on 1 of my calls, I’ll just declare myself “too fatigued” to continue. This typically catches most people off guard because who and the hell is too tired to finish a conf call? Well, it depends on the company. I get fatigued daily and I just admit it and then bail out – some people wear me out…like the DMV may wear you out. It works surprisingly well and everyone seems fine with it, almost relieved. Although, I do think there are some unanswered questions floating around.

7. Remember that you’re not alone – this is mostly to just placate my audience. You are alone, that’s what it means to “work from home”. Maybe it’s your “dream-job” or maybe you are just a great “individual contributor” (wink-wink)? Either way, you are going to be alone for more hours than you’ve ever imagined. Prepare for the pain of spending so much time with yourself and look for ways to improve on your bad habits (especially – #1, #2, and #3 above).

Good luck, god speed and buy a nice chair.

About the Author
My name is Greg Davoll and I’m a fan of Imulus. I work for a cool software company called Quest Software and I run marketing for our Data Protection business (fancy term for backup and recovery). If you like this, please follow me at twitter.com/duvylove or check out my profile on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/gregdavoll

As we at AppVenture start to grow and refine our marketing strategy, I wanted to share the three evaluation criteria that I find most telling when sizing up Interactive Agencies and Web Design companies (let’s lump these two into “design firms” for the sake of simplicity). As a technologist, I’ve worked in and around design firms for over a decade now and have been reflecting on what made for the most successful projects. Here’s my take:

Chemistry
Every great relationship starts with a flash of chemistry. Business relationships are no exception. And like any fiery relationship, there will be good times and there will be great times (and probably some rough patches, but let’s try to stay positive)! At the end of the first meeting, you should feel excited about the possibilities of your redesign effort and be looking forward to getting the ball rolling. Beware of relationships that don’t feel right, but you can’t quite figure out why.

Business Focus
Now that sparks are flying, it’s time to regain your composure =] As you narrow down the design firm to redesign you website, make sure to remember why you are spending your hard-earned cash: you hope to generate more cash! Good firms will always be excited about great design, but great firms will be excited about how you will further your business objectives through great design. By focusing on what you do, how you do it, your target customers, and your differentiators, a design firm can make you stand out from the competition doing the voodoo that they do so well. If the design firm fails to ask you some good questions about your business, you might want to reassess if this relationship will translate into more commas in your bank account.

Communicative
So you are convinced that this design firm is right for you given your first impressions and their focus on your business. Great! So how can you find out if the design firm can deliver what they promise? The best place to start is their proposal for the redesign. As you look over their proposal, you should find that it parrots back what you told the design firm that you wanted to accomplish in a clear and concise way. There should be no surprises and no mention of anything that wasn’t previously discussed. If the design firm can’t listen to your needs, translate those need into a proposal, and clearly communicate what you discussed and understood, you may want to reconsider hiring that firm. If they can’t communicate before you start, there is little hope of communicating once project deadlines begin creeping up on you.

Summary
As a buyer of services, you should always be looking for both the strengths and weaknesses of each design firm with which you are speaking. If a firm shows any weaknesses in the above mentioned criteria, you should take a moment and consider the implications of that particular weakness on your redesign project. Can you afford to have a weakness in that area? What does a weakness in that area mean for your business?

Do you have other criteria that you find important? Please share your thoughts below.

I hope you get some utility from these criteria, and here’s to your next successful redesign project!

AUTHOR: Fernando Cardenas is Founder and CEO of AppVenture in Boulder, Colorado

Now more than ever, businesses are looking for creative and cost-effective ways to increase sales. Although many businesses have an eNewsletter, it is often approached as an afterthought when it comes to their overall marketing efforts. This is a critical mistake as recent data indicates that eNewsletters are a vital and cost-efficient form of marketing. In fact, according to statistics compiled by the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing returned about $48 for every dollar invested, the highest of all marketing channels in existence.

After sending out nearly 1,000 eNewsletters for clients, I’ve discovered many businesses that could have easily utilized an existing eNewsletter to increase their sales, have instead left it on their “to-do” list for months or even years – without one single send. This is often because the person who set up the eNewsletter has left the company or is just too busy to get to it. Sound familiar?

In addition to the obvious fact that without sending an eNewsletter you won’t reap the benefits, the longer a business waits to send, the more their hard-earned list becomes ineffective. Even though it’s not viewed the same way (and it should be!) gathering an email from a contact who is interested in receiving communications from your company via eNewsletter, and then never sending an eNewletter to that contact , is the same as getting a phone number from an interested prospect and never calling.
Thus, if you find yourself in the category of “I’ve got an eNewsletter that I never send” either get to it or hire someone to help you send it out. It will be one of the best marketing decisions you make to help grow your company and increase your profits.

Author: Chelsea Vurciaga of C Results Communications

Well, 2008 is nearly gone at this point, so we should all be refining our marketing plans and budgets for 2009. Hopefully, it’s not too late to provide you all with some recommendations for next year’s plan. 2009 will be a year of reduced marketing budgets and IT budgets. For whatever it’s worth, here is Davoll’s Marketing Survival Guide for 2009:

1. Refine your messaging (product and corporate): Get “Back to Basics” – focus on your core audience and make sure you understand them well (e.g. personas). Re-examine your product-level messages to make sure they are tuned to your target buyers – be specific, not generic. Ensure your corporate messaging is taking into consideration the economic situation and the fact that most companies will be spending less or considerably less on IT in 2009 – if you can, focus on reducing IT costs.
2. Check your closets: Make sure that you’re maximizing the resources that you already have in-house. Find under-leveraged resources and put them to work on deliverables that matter most to your Sales team. From time-to-time, I like to run an internal campaign called “Tool of the Week”. This requires marketing to develop a list of prioritized sales tools – with your Sales team. Over the next 90 days, publish a new or refurbished sales tool to the sales team every week. Sales will love you.
3. Marketing metrics: There has never been a better time to get close to your numbers. Make sure you understand where your leads are coming from. Which programs are converting to opportunities and at what cost? If you don’t have a marketing operations function or discipline, then creatively find a way do to this. Weave your key marketing metrics into your Marketing Plan and make sure they are aligned with the business objectives. Define a process in 2009 to track to these metrics on a bi-weekly or monthly basis. The CEO and CFO will love you.
4. Paid search matters: Review all your SEM campaigns. Look closely at your 2008 SEM metrics. If you haven’t already, factor out the highest-level search terms that your prospective buyers use to begin their initial product search. For example, if you have a specialized search engine product, a campaign dedicated to high-level “enterprise search” keywords would be appropriate. Categorize these into a separate, “net-new” campaign and track the metrics independently. Cast your net wide.
5. Cut out the fat: Cut programs that aren’t working. Fire vendors that aren’t delivering. You have the perfect excuse, “the marketing budget has been decreased”! Seriously, this is the time to cut back to the core essentials – you can add back later on.
6. Examine your price list: Re-evaluate your pricing for software and maintenance. It may be fine as-is, but look for ways to lower the cost of entry or carve out an entry-point offering with some usage restrictions. If your maintenance renewal rates are below the industry average, then look for ways to increase while not alienating your customer base.
7. Leverage your virtual team: The beauty of marketing is that there are so many great agencies, boutiques, and freelancers to help you get things done. Put your program budget to work and outsource as much as possible. Reduce your team’s headcount to the minimum while putting your program budget to work for you. Your boss will love you and your team will look “bigger than it is”.

That’s all for now…thanks for listening and happy marketing in 2009. J

About the author: Greg Davoll is an independent consultant specializing in software marketing and product strategy. Greg has over nineteen years of enterprise software experience across an array of branded technology companies including IBM, NetIQ, Sybase, BMC Software and Embarcadero Technologies. Learn more at http://www.linkedin.com/in/gregdavoll or contact Greg at greg.davoll@gmail.com.