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