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New Services May Bring The End of Cold Calling | |
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SoHo NEWS & TIPS
Helping You Make the Most of Your Small Office/Home Office
SoHoTIPS.com
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Greetings,
Finding new clients in the competitive business world can
be very difficult. Not only do you have to deal with
competition, but you also have to find the time in your
busy workday to commit to the hunt. It can get very
frustrating! But today's article may shed some light on
new services that will help you find clients in less time
and with less stress.
Best,
Mandi
Be sure to visit the SoHo News and Tips blog!
SoHo News & Tips Blog
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NEWS & TIDBITS
- The New York Stock Exchange makes a $10.2B bid
for European exchange operator Euronext NV...
- Rumor has it THQ Wireless is shutting down all
Los Angeles-based operations, and moving to
Minnesota.
- IDT, the Newark telecommunications and entertain-
ment company, will close its call center...
- Deutsche Boerse vowed to push ahead with its
merger offer for Euronext in the face the New
York Stock Exchange's rival bid...
- Rumor has it all tommy.com employees lost their
jobs in a round of massive company-wide layoffs
instigated by new owners Apax Capital Partners...
- Fannie Mae agreed to pay a $400 million fine for
alleged problems with governance and accounting...
- Dell plans to open up two brick-and-mortar
locations in a pilot program to test the retail
waters later this year...
- General Motors Corp. said it asked a US bankrupt-
cy court to adjourn hearings on bankrupt parts
maker Delphi Corp. to give the companies more
time to reach a deal with their unions...
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New Services May Bring The End of Cold Calling
By JEANETTE BORZO
Ever since Anu Shukla launched RubiconSoft Inc.
three years ago, she and her team have been so
busy building the business that there's been
precious little time to hunt for new clients. The
online marketing service didn't even have a full-
time sales executive until early this year.
Yet the company has managed to land a dozen or so
big-name clients, including Tower Records and Ritz
Interactive Inc., which manages a host of retail
Web sites.
Ms. Shukla's secret? Software tools and online
services that help her generate sales leads with-
out the usual legwork and the often-inefficient
cold calling. For instance, she used an online
social-networking service to get a foot in the
door at Tower and Ritz. The service, from LinkedIn
Corp. of Palo Alto, Calif., allowed her to search
through lists of her contacts' contacts for
potential leads. When she found names at Tower and
Ritz, mutual acquaintances gave her an introduct-
ion.
For Ms. Shukla, services like LinkedIn, as well as
Jigsaw, Spoke and iProfile, are much more effective
than simply cold calling. "You know who you're
calling and who they report to, to make the call
more fruitful," she says.
These days, entrepreneurs can choose from a host
of tools that help them address an old problem:
how to sign up new customers when you have small
or nonexistent sales resources -- and must compete
with corporations with deep pockets and big
reputations.
Some tools, like LinkedIn, let you find sales
leads through mutual acquaintances. Others are
more like beefed-up phone directories, offering
exhaustive lists of corporate personnel and their
contact information. Still others offer comprehen-
sive background information on prospective clients,
culled from press releases, news reports and other
sources. Some offer a combination of these features.
"Sales is a challenge for any company, but
especially for small businesses -- small firms
don't have the resources or the channels that big-
ger companies have," says Sanjeev Aggarwal, a
senior analyst at Yankee Group, a consulting firm
based in Boston. "These new tools have made it
more manageable."
Most of these services charge a fee for full
access to their information -- in some cases,
hundreds or thousands of dollars. But many offer
stripped-down free versions as well. For instance,
a directory site might let you see the names of a
company's personnel, but you wouldn't get their
contact information.
Even these limited resources can be valuable, Ms.
Shukla notes. "We didn't pay a penny" for any of
the tools that landed clients, she says.
Finding Contacts
One of the most popular categories of tools allows
users to browse through extensive lists of potent-
ial sales leads.
Jigsaw.com, created by Jigsaw Data Corp. of San
Mateo, Calif., offers a database of contacts
submitted by members. To get access to those names,
you must either pay a fee or contribute new
contacts of your own. Twenty-five dollars a month,
or 25 contributed contacts, gets you access to 25
new names. You can also earn points toward buying
more contacts by correcting mistakes in the data-
base. Users can search the list by a number of
criteria, including company size and industry.
At Great Outdoor Network Inc., a West Palm, Fla.,
company that offers online services for media
planners and buyers, Chief Executive Robert Shockey
uses Jigsaw to track down leads. His target:
advertising executives in the "out-of-home" market,
such as billboards and bus stops. "It's imperative
for us to reach vice presidents of marketing,"
says Mr. Shockey, whose company has 15 employees.
"We use Jigsaw to locate the right people."
The fact that users police the information appeals
to many small businesses. "They really monitor the
accuracy," says Mimi Evans, co-founder of Seligence
LLC, a 23-person firm in Lawrence, Mass., that
provides companies with information they can use
to boost sales.
Spoke.com, from Spoke Software Inc. in San Mateo,
Calif., also offers a searchable database of
contacts, but combines it with a social network.
The company -- using online sources, users and
data providers -- has created a list of more than
30 million people across more than 600,000
companies, which users can search by name, title,
geography and other criteria. Once users have
zeroed in on a potential contact, they can use
Spoke's social network to see if they have a
common acquaintance who could provide an intro-
duction.
Talk to Chuck
Ms. Shukla is a fan of Spoke's Group Connector
feature. The 25 employees at her Redwood City,
Calif., company plug their contact information
into Spoke, which lets them quickly check if any-
one in-house has a contact at a targeted company.
Through Spoke, RubiconSoft discovered that one of
its employees knew someone at Charles Schwab Corp.
-- which led to a product demo at the brokerage
firm. Without a friend on the inside, "can you
imagine a small company trying to get into
Schwab?" Ms. Shukla says.
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Other tools don't bring you new contacts but help
you manage the ones you have more effectively.
Plaxo Inc., of Mountain View, Calif., lets its
members store their contacts in an online database.
Then, whenever members update a contact's inform-
ation, the update is sent to all the other Plaxo
members who share that contact. So, for instance,
if one member notes that a contact has changed
jobs, the other members who have that contact on
their list receive word of the change.
Ms. Shukla recently found out from Plaxo that an
executive she knows at a book and record retailer
had moved to a much larger company. This meant
that she not only gained a sales lead at the
larger company, but also could cultivate a new
sales lead at the smaller company, once a new
executive replaced her departing acquaintance.
"When a person has just changed jobs, they don't
have a lot of baggage," she says. "Catching people
at the right time is as important as knowing where
they are."
Some sales tools provide entrepreneurs with detail-
ed briefings on the companies they want to target.
Some small technology firms trying to sell to
Fortune 500 companies, for example, turn to
iProfile LLC in Henderson, Nev. IProfile creates
profiles of the big companies, laying out such
information as who reports to whom and who makes
buying decisions.
The service "gives us context about who is who and
how they interrelate," says Dimitri Sirota, market-
ing vice president at software-and-services company
Layer 7 Technologies Inc. in Vancouver. "It's above
just getting a raw list. IProfile helps us better
understand the organizations we target."
Hoover's Inc., a subsidiary of Dun & Bradstreet
Corp. based in Austin, Texas, offers lists of the
top officers at a host of companies. "Dollar for
dollar, Hoover's does a very good job of identify-
ing the companies, what they do, and some senior
contact information," says Larry Casey, president
of Marketing Connections Corp., Bedford, N.H.,
which handles business-to-business sales for other
companies. He adds that his Hoover's subscription
is a bargain compared with the salary he used to
pay for a sales-prospecting employee.
Other entrepreneurs use broader information tools.
Seligence's Ms. Evans, for example, often uses
ZoomInfo from Zoom Information Inc. in Waltham,
Mass. The online service culls information from
Web sites, press releases, electronic news services
and SEC filings and then summarizes that inform-
ation into profiles of millions of companies and
tens of millions of businesspeople. The information
can be as personal as someone's work history,
schooling or even hobbies.
Ryan Murray, co-founder of Seligence, says one of
the company's analysts had tried repeatedly to get
through to a senior IT executive in Oklahoma City.
Then, through ZoomInfo, the analyst found out that
he and the executive had a mutual interest:
triathlons.
So the analyst left the executive a voice mail
saying, "I saw you were in a triathlon and saw
your time -- I was in the race as well. I wondered
if you'd have a minute to discuss some business,"
Mr. Murray recalls. The analyst finally got a call
back.
The sales-lead service from CI Radar, of Norcross,
Ga., combines detailed company monitoring with a
database of contacts. Frank Sanders, president of
Customer Service Marketing Inc., an Atlanta market-
intelligence firm, says the service lets him
search a database of potential contacts to pinpoint
the type of executive he wants -- marketing vice
presidents at companies with annual revenue between
$100 million and $1 billion in a half-dozen sectors.
Then the service gives him background data and
news articles about the companies he identifies.
The articles may show, for example, who just got
hired to run marketing and what goals the new
executive has in mind, explains Donna Wise,
Customer Service Marketing's market-strategy vice
president.
No Easy Answers
Of course, such tools don't answer everyone's
lead-generation problems. These tools work best
for businesses that court other businesses as
clients, and so aren't much use to retailers,
notes Yankee's Mr. Aggarwal. Keeping data current
is also a constant challenge for each of the tools.
If contact information is out of date, it can lead
to lots of frustration for users. And users ulti-
mately have to make the sale -- the tools just
smooth the path to potential customers but can't
actually close any deals.
Still, for all of these potential drawbacks, some
businesspeople's biggest fear is that their
favorite lead-generation tool may become too
popular. The more popular these tools become, the
less of a competitive advantage they offer.
"I worry every day that our competitors will find
out about it," says Customer Service Marketing's
Ms. Wise.
DID YOU KNOW?
One of the best ways to keep yourself out of credit trouble
is to be your own most rabid critic by monitoring your own
credit report for damaging information. Get a professional
credit report done every year and before any major purchase.
This gives you the opportunity to see yourself the way lend-
ers, insurance companies and other businesses do. And it
gives you a chance to correct any false or damaging inform-
ation before it hampers your ability to get financing.
Finally, it can spur you to take the hard steps required to
clean up your credit.
So what did you think about this issue? Drop me a line and let
me know at mailto:mandi@gophercentral.com
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