I am giving a short pitch on You Design It tomorrow at Rice University to a room full of Venture Capitalists. Since I am in the unique situation of not needing funding, I am having some shirts printed for the occasion that may be less than trendy considering the average age of the VC’s. At least it will look like I am wearing a tie

I recently received a sales call from a vendor that we have an account with for the products we purchase. They are a 4th or 5th tier vendor that we use when our 1-3rd are out of product (which isn’t that often). Needless to say, we don’t put as much volume into purchasing with them and they are well aware of how much we spend a year with a our 1-3rd options. They want a piece of that pie because there is a major difference in the dollar amount.

This sales call was from a girl we’ll call Summer, and she started the call by telling me we would no longer receive free shipping for orders over $200 because our amount of spend annually didn’t warrant it. She then followed that information by asking me what she could do to get more of my business. I graciously accepted the information and nicely got off the phone by sidestepping the question of how she could get more business. Summer called me back a few weeks later to check in and I took the opportunity to help her by telling her how I perceived the last phone call. I described it as she slapping me in the face and then wanting me to apologize for it. I did this jokingly, so the mood was light and I never try the tough guy role (don’t believe in it).

She then wanted to argue with me that we agreed to buy more with the free shipping on orders of more than $200 and she didn’t see enough of an increase to continue offering that incentive. I had to stop her mid sentence to remind her why she was calling me. You see…she was calling to get more business and she apparently forgot about the big picture. She had now called me twice and bombed by doing two things:

1. Calling me with bad news in a sales call
2. Following that call and trying to argue with me about how I felt when she is the one who asked how I felt.

I do believe Summer is probably good at her job and I know that she works for a good company. I have been very polite with her throughout this whole dialogue and still plan to do so. I wanted to give her a chance because we do need them as an alternative and they are very good at filling that role for us. I asked her if she had a money back rebate or a product sample rebate based on the amount of annual spend that we do (these are things their competitors do).

She said no to both. I know that her hands on tied on a program like that because I am sure that decision is made by the top brass. We basically had to end the conversation with the conclusion that - “it is what it is”. No hard feelings on my side and hopefully none on theirs. All I can figure is, if you don’t do the things necessary to grow……..don’t expect growth.

This past week You Design It had the honor of printing a variety of t shirts for Amy Hughes. She is from the Houston, Texas area and sings “Texas Country”. She asked us to go contemporary with a country flavor for one of her shirt designs and this is what we came up with. She is selling these at a concert where she is opening up for Roger Creager, a very popular country music artist in Texas.

Check out her website and buy her CD on iTunes.

Yesterday on You Design It, I received a call-in order from an actor/director that I have seen in a few movies. He bought some hats with embroidery for one of his movies. The funny thing about seeing who he was is that Lauren and I had seen him in one of his movies two weeks ago and had another one of his movies on our Blockbuster queue.

In unrelated news….watch this movie “Reign Over Me“, rent this movie “Man About Town“, and buy this movie “The Search for John Gissing“.

“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” right? I got a good helping of that this weekend when Verisign turned off our payment gateway from transactions without notice. Luckily the phone started ringing off the wall with customers determined to purchase or we might not have caught it. Turns out….my credit card that is billed for the gateway had expired and I failed to give them the new expiration date. The weekend is the worst time for this to happen because support is non-existent if you haven’t already paid a monthly contract of $100+/month. For the two years before this we haven’t experienced a single problem so we couldn’t justify the high priced service contract.

I lost a few thousand dollars and I am sure the nominal amount that Paypal lost isn’t enough to even get them out of bed. Sure, we aren’t Amazon but we don’t ask for much and always pay on time. We have given them well into the five-figure range of transactions over a two year period.

I just hope we never get so big that we can’t make a 5 minute courtesy call to help out solid everyday customers.

Our new PPC campaign is going really strong, in fact a little too strong. We have had to scale it back until we can get some more people in here to help out. As I have mentioned before, our PPC efforts have been solely focused on Google because we feel that if we can fine-tune our campaigns on the toughest/most expensive playing field, then the others should fall into place. Until we can get some help around, it looks like we are going to have to limit our growth. Good idea or bad idea?

Our monthly ad spend on the search engines is increasingly ramping up at a very quick pace. So far our strategy for success has been to just purchase more clicks and increase the amount we spend per click. This has effectively grown our revenue and given us the opportunity to focus on other things by keeping the campaign management simple. We are now getting big enough and spending enough that we have to outsource our PPC campaigns to increase ROI, lower spend, and ultimately increase conversions.
You Design It initially had a company in charge of its SEO/PPC and they proved their inadequacy real quick by ignoring our core competencies and optimizing/paying for keyphrases that didn’t benefit us at all. This time around we are going to have months of data and pages of metrics to support a foundation. We have relied too heavily on Google’s PPC and we are going to branch further out into Yahoo, Ask, and MSN.

We are searching for a provider that wants the business. A company that is going to make promises and back them up. Does that even exist?