MarketingSherpa's new subscription scheme off to a rocky start

MarketingSherpa, the venerable marketing research firm, blew it this time. 

First, the good news.  For years, the Sherpas have published valuable case studies, good ideas and research findings, all at no cost.  In order to make a little money from this activity, they've made new reports free, then charged an ala carte price of nine bucks to access an archived report.  This amount was just little enough to not be worth expensing for work, and too much to suck it up and pay for it out of your own pocket.  Many marketers were hoping they'd go to a subscription model, an all-you-can-eat price that you can expense and then have access to the vast archives.

So I was excited when Sherpa announced last month that this subscription service was now a reality.  For a few hundred bucks, you can access the archives (not the for-pay reports) as often as you like.  For a researcher, or someone looking for great ideas, this was a Good Thing.  I signed up right away.

Some problems quickly arose:

- Technical difficulties.  Sure, all new efforts we put out there suffer hiccups.  Still, it doesn't inspire confidence when the first link I click on after coughing up my credit card number gives me this message:

Warning: mysql_num_rows(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in /home/httpd/vhosts/msherpasites.com/httpdocs/styles/version7/maincontent/related_articles.php on line 38
You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ' ORDER BY dPublishOn DESC LIMIT 0, 10' at line 1

A lesson marketers should learn from this is that on every error page, you should have a link to email a live person to report the problem, not leave the user in database limbo.

- The search engine, provincial and quirky in the past, doesn't cut it for a subscription service.  For example, if I'm looking for good designs for email newsletters, typing 'newsletter' into the search box pulls up every page with the word 'newsletter' in it, not just those reports concerning newsletters.  The search engine isn't intuitive.  Sherpa has done some interesting work around creating "heat maps" of how visitors use web sites, but when you type the term "heat map" into the search engine, you get no answers.  There's no way to sort the results, so you have to ping-pong back and forth between the results and a new browser window, but you can't because...

- MarketingSherpa breaks how the browser functions. You can't right-click on a search result to open a new browser window from your search results. I thought companies were done with this bad design practice years ago, but apparently Sherpa thinks their content is more valuable than Forrester or Gartner, both of whom don't destroy this web convention.  According to "Ron P" at Sherpa, Anne Holland, Sherpa's founder and president, made the decision herself, out of fear that users would cut-and-paste the copyrighted Sherpa material into their own material.

I'm sure that's a valid concern.  But on the Internet, as we've found time and time again, the small percentage of people who want to thwart your copyright protection will find away around your scheme, while the vast majority of honest, fee-paying folks will suffer for your decision (see this note from Steve Jobs re: digital rights management for more on this).

Holy cow! This fatal flaw alone is enough to make me cancel my subscription.

- I replied to the "Welcome" email with my concerns, but nobody answered, and no auto-responder let me know that my email even was recorded.  This is such a common practice with organizations, that I'm almost surprised that I'm surprised when someone doesn't do it.   I emailed twice and received no response. 

If you have a customer support organization in place at your company, it's important to keep in communication every step of the way to let customer's know they are on their way to resolution. And remember that every From: address in your email has to eventually get routed to a real person for response -- otherwise you'll hear from your customers in a very public way -- like on a blog.

I wonder whether Sherpa, a storehouse of best practices, followed the lessons of so many of their case studies in construction this site. Did they test it with potential customers?  Are there heat map studies done on their own site?  Did their new owners (MarketingExperiments) do any research on the initiative?  If so, why not be transparent about it?

I'm sure these issues will be resolved in time, the way all web faux paus do.  It's a shame the Sherpans didn't spend more time reading their own research.  I think the answers are out there.

** Update:  One week later, the search engine is much improved.  And, the customer service team got back to me within 24 hours when I forgot my password (but the "email me my password" feature doesn't seem to be working).   It's clear they are making strides, but it seems a shame that they decided to charge for access to the beta version of the new archive, rather than make it free in exhange for feedback on the bugs.

Thanks for all your email about this issue.  I want to make it clear that I think the Sherpa research is valuable, and my comments were directed on the new subscription service they rolled out, not on the organization as a whole.

Comments

[Susan Loral]

My company has bought their reports and attended the Sherpa shows in the past. I don't like the new program and we won't be subscribing to it.

I'm disappointed at Ann Holland's response to your issue

[Don Rodriguez]

I for one was disappointed to see Sherpa's business model had changed. I liked the idea of being able to purchase just what I wanted to read, the ability to cherry pick the content and the fact that here was a service any business, no matter how small, could afford. As an independent consultant, I don't have the luxury of shelling out a thousand bucks for a report or 5 digits for a subscription service. I thought here is a co. that is actually customer-centric and realizes they can probably make $ by being affordable to all. I guess the majority of Sherpa's target market work for a corporation as opposed to themselves and would like the company to foot the bill.

[Tony Barnes]

I saw the offer on the sherpa site right away - no digging required. The search engine (websidestory?) on the site has never been great. The content is, though. I like Sherpa's content. Never bought anything from them, though.

Sounds like your customer service needs to send an email at least acknowledging that you got the message right away !

[Jessica Holland]

Sounds like Sherpa is charging for a beta program that should be free :)

I'm tired of companies like Microsoft that charge customers to participate in troubleshooting their buggy products.

[Anne Holland]

Steve, Thanks for your feedback about our new Membership Service. It's always good to hear how we can improve things - and that's actually why we launched it last week "under the radar", without any overt promotion whatsoever. If you dug into the corners of our site, you'd find an offer, but if you stuck to our home page, bookstore, and the free articles that 99% of our traffic goes to, then you would not.

You were one of the few who dug, discovered the offer, and signed up on the VERY FIRST DAY of the beta test. I thank you for that. We gave a free 7 day trial and cut $100.00 off the price to acknowledge the fact that being the first tryer of a new service isn't always a perfect experience. Our goal - to find out what we needed to improve from honest customers.

Some of your problems -- such as the error you got early on -- were corrected within minutes on that first beta launch day. Others -- such as folks' aversion to right-click-DRM -- were changed within 7 days of launch.

We also were able to update our customer service procedures so when a Member emails us (as you did) past 5pm on a Friday night, our late-night service staff are ready to step in more quickly to handle the account. (Originally, we were having our head of service handle members personally -- that's a problem when she leaves for the weekend and then comes in on Monday to a deluge of email. Note: I heard someone got back to you by Tuesday at the latest, is that correct?)

When will our Membership service roll out at full price with public promotions? Not until we're satisfied that our user experience is a bit more improved. For example, our programmers are upgrading site search functionality thoroughly over the next week.

Like almost any software-based launch, this has been buggy. But I'm convinced we'll get there fairly soon. In the meantime (and naturally afterwards) I look forward to learning from everyone's comments.