The Funnelholic

Unless you’re in a cave, thanks the credit markets the global economy is on the rocks. I have always marveled at the carefully chosen words of our politicians or economists. BTW, not just in trying times but all the time. Right now, my most uncomfortable laughs are coming from the pundits regarding the current financial mess. I especially enjoyed this, so this pundit Martin Feldman from Harvard is the first one to declare a recession. Here is my favorite though:
Martin Feldman on Bloomberg.com (read article here):

Harvard University economist Martin Feldstein, a member of the group that dates business cycles in the U.S., said the nation has entered a recession that could be the worst since World War II.

I didn’t have perfect grades, but wasn’t the recession during World War II known as the “Great Depression”? Way to go out on a limb there Marty! Of course he prefaces it with “could”.

Even more hilarious is our boy Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulsen.

From Bloomberg.com also:

“We have slowed down very significantly. I’m not getting into’ whether it is a recession.

That’s a good one. Our guy whose job it is to keep our economy safe is going with a “no comment”.

Bottom line, you gotta be an idiot to not see that the sh__ is hitting the fan. Pundits and politicians know full well what is going down, but their job is to couch hysteria so they have to choose their words careful.

Here are the translations:

What Feldman really said was: We are headed into a financial cycle close to or worse than the Great Depression

What Paulsen really said was: We are clearly in recession, I am too dumb to consider the Great Depression, all my buddies work on Wall Street so I gotta keep the markets pumped up, and I am not going to be the one to call this what it is.

Ahh, the beauty of words. So why does the Funnelholic weigh in? Well, I for one while “growing up” professionally in the valley used to laugh at marketing folks worrying about every word, but when I was finally an adult I realized the importance. Now, I notice it all the time. you might say, well, I am not that dumb I am not falling for this, but the truth of the matter is there has not been a massive sell-off yet and people aren’t fully freaking out so their words are likely working against the mass public. (BTW, words can only hold reality for “that long” (imagine me barely holding my two fingers apart). Funnelholic learning: Words do matter.

I thought this was a good article on InsideCRM.com where the editors looked up as many valuable SFA links on the internet and tossed them into one article…Great for research, the editors did all the work for you.

Insidecrm.com: The Ultimate Guide to Sales Force Automation

Warning: Yes, I work with InsideCRM.com.

On the other hand, I think this series of webinars has been great both topic-wise and production-wise. The next webinar is a great idea with real customers discussing real CRM implementations and the learnings. The moderator Chris Bucholtz, who is the editor of InsideCRM, is really good combining his career as a tech editor with a background in radio. Click here or on the picture below to sign up.

The last webinar went great. That was the one on my favorite topic, I blogged on it before. That was before the webinar. First of all, attendance was incredible and secondly, the webinar went great. Bottom line, no matter what you do, CRM adoption is still a massive problem and solving that issue is critical for your CRM or metrics success…i recommend watching it. Its archived, so you can sign up and watch this.
If you are considering CRM, watch this one which is more of a CRM primer. Sign up here.

I thought there were some good topics on this. The actual video itself was grainy for me.

Anyway, the topic is rich media and its role in B2B lead generation. Example: moving away from straight whitepaper PDFs.