03 20th, 2009| 
„Every dark cloud has a silver lining“- Jedes Unglück hat auch sein Gutes. Mit der weltweiten Finanzkrise kann dieses ’silver lining’ von einigen europäischen Softwareunternehmen gesehen werden. Diese B2B- Firmen in der Eurozone gehen jetzt über den Atlantik, um neue Absatzmärkte zu erschließen.
I’ve been looking at LeadLander every now and then. I find it’s a very cool product with its ability to track visitors. It does a reverse look-up of the IP address to distinguish between corporate visitors and “home/ISP” users. The idea being that in B2B sales, corporate visitors would count more.
From the sales guy perspective, the sales cycle can often be an exhausting and excruciating road to success. It requires vigilant customer contact, balance between being assertive yet flexible and an exercise of patience. Read more… »
Since my last post on new sales tools, I’ve received some comments about the value of PDFs over interactive portable documents – primarily the value derived from search engines ability to index PDFs. The point is that if you place your marketing collaterals online (such as brochures, datasheets, beat sheets, whitepapers and fast track papers) then you want these to be indexed by search engines as well.
The arguement is valid, but I think most interactive portable documents are also indexable by search engines (see update below.) And I’ve often come across PDFs that make an interesting read, but aren’t optimized for search engines in the first place. So I decided to cover some points that are involved in producing search engine friendly PDFs.
These are the basic points I follow when I publish my PDFs. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Instead of reinventing the wheel, I decided to slap together some good articles on the “Dos and Don’ts” from other bloggers. Enjoy!
I wanted to confirm if interactive documents can be spidered by search engines. I asked Joakim Ditlev from Zmags. He had this to say:
“Yes, Zmags are search engine friendly in various ways. You can read more about it here. Since this article was written back in April we have improved the functionality and in total our customers get around 10.000 visits / day…”
So, in short yes the interactive documents can also be indexed by search engines.
In a recent conversation with Ville Kuusela about sales processes he mentioned that because we work in a B2B environment, we often forget B2C sales tactics still apply. His point was simple: we overlook the fact that we’re selling to people and not just to businesses. Not only do we need to convince buyers on the business merits but also make a human connection – very much as we do with consumers.
Yesterday, I’ve had the opportunity to talk with Paul Marcus from RainKing. Paul has a strong background in corporate sales stemming from a decade of work at Ipreo and Bigdough. He introduced me to RainKing, an interesting concept that combines old fashioned legwork with online networking to yield a reliable, corporate database housing details of decision makers from F2000 companies.
A sales cycle consists of different milestones and stages. The one I’ve listed below is based on 5 mile stones from initial contact to closing the sale. Read more… »
I’m always on the lookout to improve my lead generation process and add to the arsenal of tools for my sales team. So today, I was very keen to get a call from Chris Scarfo from Zoominfo (ironically he has a Linkedin profile but not a Zoominfo profile *grin*.) Chris is pretty much a straight shooter. He got me to try Zoominfo on a trial basis, with the following goals:
- Use Zoominfo as part of my lead generation program. Use it to generate vertical specific leads filtered by various criteria.
- Use Zoominfo to get additional lead data. Learn more about the lead’s company/boss/co-workers/etc and develop multiple points of contact.
What is Zoominfo?
Zoominfo is a business contacts database. The database is generated programmatically through web crawling of press releases, company websites and interviews. The Zoominfo Engine intelligently parses this content and creates profiles about individuals and companies. To see how good it is, I tried a search string of Steve Jobs. This is what I found:
Zoominfo Powersell :
Since Zoominfo has been able to create over 45 million profiles, its a good source of leads. That’s what Zoominfo Powersell offers. I started on a demo account with it today. I’m amazed to find how easy it’s to extract leads from the web interface based on simple metrics, including:
- Industry/Vertical
- Company size (both based on revenue and employees)
- Contact management level (low, mid or high-level manager)
- Geographic location (regions, states, zip code, etc)
For example, I searched for contacts in small law-firms in the UK. I filtered it further to only show IT related contacts who have updated profiles. The screenshot below shows the filtered leads. These leads can be downloaded in a CSV format or exported into SalesForce.
Unfortunately, my demo account doesn’t grant me access to the SalesForce API. But earlier today, I saw a live demo of how it works. It seems very slick. It offered most of the common Zoominfo capabilities through the SalesForce interface. The advantage was that Zoominfo data could be ported without data entry. A feature most sales guys would love.
Since I started using the service today, I’m unsure about Zoominfo’s lead’s quality or resourcefulness as a sales tool. Over the next few weeks, I’ll keep a closer eye on lead performance and conversions. I’ll let my pipeline funnel speak for itself – I’m interested to see how my little experiment with Zoominfo pans out.
I’ve often gone through the effort of making creative ads for print advertisements. Some worked – some didnt. Sometimes it was the medium (Trade magazine, newspaper) that wasn’t the proper fit. But more often than not, it was the ad itself. I’ve found through experience that even if you have the best marketing hook, you need to take care of simple “mechanics’ to get the most bang out of it. I’m including some of these for you to think about when designing your next creative ad.
