Skip to main content

You've Been Marketed!

My office "won" a free lunch yesterday at a local eatery. Unsuspecting, naive professionals that we are, we all figured, how fortuitous of us--we won! Wrong. We were about to be 'marketed'.

Gathering at the front door of the restaurant, one of our crowd didn't belong. Who's this guy, I thought. Oops, I'm out of the loop again...new employee. Nope, that's not it. Why is he wearing a suit?

"Hi, I'm Ron. I'm hosting your lunch today. I have a table ready over here for us." Ok, so this guy is with the restaurant. He's milking the opportunity to show off the restaurant. Fine. Although, what's up with the suit?

After we sit down, Ron goes on to explain he's a financial advisor with Ameriprise. Huh? Where'd you come from pal? Then it hits me: he's "purchased" our time. Brilliant! Now I'm really into this. I start reviewing the marketing:
  • captive audience
  • getting something in exchange for listening to a pitch
  • targeted marketing (I doubt it was a coincidence our firm was picked...and Ron could have performed reconnaissance ahead of time)
  • folks who actually might need financial services
  • all in a comfortable, neutral setting
Ron let everyone order (requesting to keep it around $10/person) and then while we were waiting for our food, Ron gave his 5 minute pitch. Afterward, he had us complete a survey with contact information and financial needs (he said it was a NASD requirement...I need to look that one up). And then he left--left us to contemplate what just happened! I think most of us already had financial plans in place but I saw a few folks putting thought into Ron's survey.

Overall, I was impressed. Impressed that someone had punched through my marketing firewall without leaving me feeling like I'd just encountered Slimer. I received something in exchange for my time. It was a bit misleading but I'm willing to let that go. I also admired the initiative. It had to take guts to pull off the presentation. I really hope this pays off for Ron--I'd love to know conversion rates on this approach.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Switching the Parents to Ubuntu...?

I spent a half hour or so recently on the phone walking my Mom through a technical issue. Tentatively, I diagnosed her issue as a hard drive failure. She brought it over on her last visit and sure enough, the Dell XPS 450 from circa 1999 sounds like a bad coin-operated laundry at full capacity. I was aghast to discover she's running Windows 98. Ugh. Also, her recovery disk is just that--for recovery. I don't believe I'll be able to re-install Win98 on a new hard drive. That, coupled with the end of Microsoft (and Dell) support for Win98, got me thinking about Linux. (and she's not intense about her computing needs...and she doesn't want to spend much money...) I've been reading good things about switching one's parents to Ubuntu. Any thoughts out there?
4 comments
Read more

Rollback a Ooops in TFS with TFPT Rollback

Rhut roe, Raggie. You just checked in a merge operation affecting 100's of files in TFS against the wrong branch. Ooops. Well, you can simply roll it back, right? Select the folder in Source Control Explorer and...hey, where's the Rollback? Rollback isn't supported in TFS natively. However, it is supported within the Power Tools leveraging the command-line TFPT.exe utility. It's fairly straightforward to revert back to a previous version--with one caveot. First, download and install the Team Foundation Power Tools 2008 on your workstation. Before proceeding, let's create a workspace dedicated to the rollback. To "true up" the workspace, the rollback operation will peform a Get Latest for every file in your current workspace. This can consume hours (and many GB) with a broad workspace mapping. To work around this, I create a temporary workspace targeted at just the area of source I need to roll back. So let's drill down on our scenario... I'm worki...
10 comments
Read more

Installing the .Net Framework 3.0 SP1 on Windows 2003 Server

I'm building an [automated] build server requiring the .Net 2.0 and 3.0 runtime. Unfortunately, at my client, they leverage a proxy server. The standard .Net 3.0 SP1 framework redist is really just a bootstrapper. Logged in as a local admin on the box, I didn't have the opportunity to authenticate the installation EXE with my domain credentials. So, the install kept timing out. Finally, I found this helpful post from Aaron Ruckman on how to download the very elusive, full framework package. It's here , BTW (x86). I finally get the full installation EXE downloaded to a fileshare, re-run the install and wham--" XPSEPSC: XPS must be installed..." Excuse you? This isn't an XPS ...it's a VM. I found a few MSDN posts here and here outlining the problem. I'm still not clear on what XPSEPSC does (Google yielded little) but you can download it here (x86) . After installing XPSEPSC, the framework installed without issue. Update : Somewhat related, there is no...
6 comments
Read more