SALES + MARKETING: "MAKE" OR "BUY LINKAGES?
Janet Lee Johnson - The Art of Marketing

MARCH 31, 2008

Article by Janet Lee Johnson, Read the original post

A great marketer cannot succeed without a great understanding of the sales process. Period. Anyone spending money to generate leads needs to understand exactly what happens to them from the sales perspective.

I’ve been cold-calling for a couple of hours twice a week for one of my clients for several months. It’s been one of the best things I could do as a marketing “consultant.” In fact, every marketer earning a paycheck should spend a few hours every month (at least) cold calling… which means finding prospects on your own and calling into them.

Why Cold Calling is Good for Marketers:

• It refines your positioning in real-time. It’s amazing how short your “script” becomes - get in, get to the point, get to the next-step.
• It defines your prospect - no longer is the “VP of HR” a “Persona” - she becomes a person. She’s an (im)patient voice on the phone with whom you have a real conversation (if you’re lucky) in real time.
• Your internal customer (the sales person) suddenly becomes very real as well. You’re living in his world, doing what we ask him to do every day. Nothing says loving like hearing someone say, “Is this a sales call?<CLICK>”
  

No wonder he wants decent leads. Cold calling is hard.

Intelligent Leads - Handcrafted with Care

For other clients I’ve pulled together lists of highly targeted leads, complete with market intelligence. Here’s the methodology I used:

• Create a vertical/geographic prospect list based business objectives (BTW, leading a business strategy session to uncover them is always a plus, making the linkage even stronger, you can do this as well)
• Profile prospect companies, products and managers in HighBeam, LinkedIN, Technorati and various other web sites
  • With the luxury of time I set up persistent searches on company keywords for a couple of days and “listen” to the market - via RSS
• Develop an up-to-date, accurate picture of the state of the company’s:
  • Ecosystem - including public filings, blog posts, “memes”
  • Leadership profiles - including potential LinkedIN connections
  • Partner contacts, etc.
• Create pain points, provide possible scripts
• Deliver in an Excel spreadsheet with fields and notes carefully mapped to my client’s CRM system

It takes hours. Gathering market intelligence isn’t easy.

Buying Better Intelligence

Two weeks ago I received an email from Raksha Varma from InsideView who thought I might be interested in looking at their new product, SalesView…

From their web site:

“…it’s no longer just who you know that will make business deals happen but “what you know about who you know” tightly synched with “when and where you should know it”. You need to be able to combine the best enterprise-ready information sources with the best insights from social relationships and buyer behavior to identify the right opportunities at the right time and determine the right people to contact.”

When Raksha offered me the opportunity to chat with InsideView CMO Rand Schulman, I jumped at it.

Basically, InsideView’s SalesView automates what I’ve been doing for clients. Their model is built to leverage social media, score and rank results based on algorithms they’ve developed and common sense - for example, a ZoomInfo profile is not ranked as highly as a LinkedIN profile - and (I think) rightfully so.

I like their pricing - SalesView PRO is $79 a seat, and they offer a free version to whet the appetite. The cool thing about the content that SalesView scrapes? With the two paid versions, you can map fields of SalesView into SalesForce or other CRM solution, and content can be updated immediately so content is always contextually relevant (SFA “enrichment”).

I need to use it for awhile, but I’m predicting that SalesView is likely to make my Top 10 Marketing Tools list within months. I’m sold on the concept, having built it by hand for months…