The other day, I wanted to grab a screenshot of a B2B product I license so I googled the demo.  I was brought to a landing page where I had to fill out a web form to see a short video (Mistake 1 – Creating barriers to early information seekers).  Once I registered, I was taken to a page where the video was displayed in a small, non-expandable window (Mistake2).

A half hour later, I received an email which said my company was too small to speak with a rep, but that I could purchase it online (Mistake 3 – suggesting that I wasn’t worth the time of a sales rep implies that I also wasn’t going to be worth the time of trainers or support teams; Mistake 4 – they treated me as a prospect when I was a customer, a fact they easily could have checked based upon my email; Mistake 5 assuming that I would be ready to purchase based upon a three-minute demo).  When I replied to the email to let them know about these marketing mistakes, it bounced (Mistake 6 —  I missed that it was a no reply email, but since the note was addressed and signed by somebody, I didn’t look at the actual email address).

It was an incredible display of big company arrogance and incompetent marketing.  I’m not going to shame the company by naming it.  Instead I turned them into an object lesson.  There were so many errors in this process that it was clear that their own marketing teams don’t test out their automated processes.  The real shame is that this is a company that offers marketing services, but seemed not to care about checking its own marketing processes.