The Digital Scratch Pad

I recently had a colleague ask me if he could send an email to me prior to sending off to a prospect. The prospect had recently stood him up for a meeting. He was frustrated and suggested to me that he wanted the prospect to “get the point” while still being polite. I told him to send it over. Upon receipt I noticed that the message was a long paragraph. I didn’t read it. And his prospect wasn’t going to read it either. Instead I suggested that he write this:

“What happened to our call yesterday?
My manager and I were left hanging.
Do you have time Friday to get this rescheduled?”

In the world of b2b correspondence – less will always be more. I told him to talk to that person as if he was talking to me. Just because someone is a prospect does NOT mean that they should be put on a pedestal.

My point: Perceive yourself as an equal of your prospect. We’re all professionals in our fields. Talk to them how you talk to your colleagues. At the end of the day you’ll gain their respect. And people buy from people they respect.

SF

T: @scflaherty
L: www.linkedin.com/in/shaunflaherty
E: shaun.flaherty@gmail.com

I like Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi term “Astroturfing”. Her use of the term (used in her interview on 3/1/10) was to distinguish the difference between traditional organic grassroots campaigns and the well-funded campaign efforts by special interest groups.

The term “grassroots” is often used in the world of sales. It is used to describe the sales approach of reaching out to a large number of company individuals to help create a groundswell approach. The goal is to create a compelling reason for management to express interest in your product or service. Often times grassroots efforts are paired with calling the C level suite. The approach is tedious but often times a great way to penetrate an organization.

When I heard the term “Atroturfing” in reference to grass-roots I immediately thought of the data acquisition tool (and my current employer) Jigsaw. Before having access to a tool like Jigsaw, I found myself working through LinkedIn and Hoovers trying to find new leads and ways to contact companies and create interest in products/services. Hoovers was good for the C Suite and LinkedIn was good for the staff level. But the process was long, difficult to track , and often times took me away from valuable calling time. Now, I am able to directly dial and accurately email into the midlevel management of an company. My sales process is not so much a “Grassroots” approach. It’s an Astroturf approach!

I’m able to reach the right people, have the right conversation and shorten my sales cycles significantly. I know this may look like a shameless plug for Jigsaw – but our story speaks for itself.

Jigsaw has 21,000,000 contact records, 4,000,000 company records and we’re growing everyday by approximately 15,000 records. We use a Web 2.0 wiki approach to acquiring and updating our data. We have 1,000,000 members in our user community. Our corporate customers love us because we let them access 75% accurate data that is constantly appended with the most up-to-date information.

Jigsaw

SF

T: @scflaherty
L: www.linkedin.com/in/shaunflaherty
E: shaun.flaherty@gmail.com

The idea… In a perfect world, your employees are interacting with your customers and creating a positive experience while they are IN your outlet. But is this actually happening? What if your customers had a way to engage with your brand via SMS or phone while in the store? The results could be a better constructed process for handling comments and complaints. That process could lead to better customer experiences.

The beauty of this type of solution is you could prevent your customers from taking their negative feedback to the web. Maybe this is Damage Control 2.0…

I just talked to a company who has recently launched a product that takes the customer/vendor dialogue to a whole new level. It’s exciting to see the creativity that is being generated from the buzz and success of social marketing. Finally companies realize that there is a way to interact with customers and find out what they are saying, thinking, and feeling. Many of us transform our words into actions via Twitter, blogs, Facebook etc. A new product by a company called Jaduka is allowing vendors to interact with customers from within their retail outlets. By using their CommentFunnel solutions it seems that customers can voice their opinion by calling or texting from their mobile device while inside the outlet location. For companies, this means that they can address the feedback immediately while the customer is still in the outlet!

I recommend checking out the site and the PDF to learn more.

Jaduka
CommentFunnel

SF

T: @scflaherty
L: www.linkedin.com/in/shaunflaherty
E: shaun.flaherty@gmail.com

I like the idea of Foursquare (http://foursquare.com/). The ability to know where your friends are and what they are up to could be very convenient. If I know that my buddies are at a bar around the corner getting a beer, and I am well within walking distance and have some free time, it would be great to know that I could easily go join them. But with all the different avenues for people to tell everyone in the world exactly where they are and what they are doing, I think we are losing the mystery in life. I’m happily in a relationship now with the woman of my dreams, but I don’t even ask her where she has been and what she has been up to every minute of every day. The reason: she shouldn’t feel obligated to share every minute detail of her day. The dating scene is full of games, mystery and coy behavior… or at least it used to be. I can’t see how any guy utilizing a program like Foursquare while simultaneously playing games with a recently met girl could be successful. She could know exactly where you are all the time. What’s the fun in that?

SF

T: @scflaherty
L: www.linkedin.com/in/shaunflaherty
E: shaun.flaherty@gmail.com