Janet Lee Johnson | The Art of Marketing

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…

Go here and view this presentation on the future of marketing by Paul Isakson - it’s really, really good. With thanks to Scott from Attensa for the pass-along.

I was over on ChiefTech’s blog (thanks for the link, James!) checking on the latest reception for the Enterprise RSS Day of Action on April 24 (it’s been good) and he found an excellent article and illustration (below) on enterprise 2.0 from Fred Cavazza that I just had to post about.

Fred’s 2007 article is extremely well-researched and thorough - it’s a classic if you take the time to read it. For most people, it’s likely TMI, but a great reference piece for many of us. What I found most interesting was the illustration of enterprise 2.0 - replicated here (click on it and you can see it larger).

RSS is clearly an enabling technology for any “enterprise 2.0″ application - and we’re talking enterprise-capable RSS, not merely Google alerts.

So with this foundational understanding and knowledge, I’m about to jump into the “mashup” or “buy” options available for enterprise RSS applications… stay tuned.

But that’s why NY Times’ David Pogue is a writer, and I’m a blogger… his post yesterday on Web 2.0 and why businesses should embrace Web 2.0 concepts is perfectly written and sound. Check it out.

Okay, I’m going to go out on a limb on this one - but after a couple of months of using it, I’m hooked. And I can already see how it’ll be one of the top marketing tools I’m going to use moving forward:

Tool #5 - Twitter

I have known about Twitter since everyone was all atwitter (sorry, couldn’t resist) about it (way back in March or April of 2006) at one of the blogging conferences I was attending. It seems the social media geeks generally portend what the rest of us finally ‘get’ years later.

Why I’m enthusiastic about Twitter as a marketing/business tool?

1) I can get glimpses of the real lives of the people I’m following - which is important when you’re building virtual teams. And whether you’re a contractor working remotely, a geographically dispersed team working for the same company, or even a team with people on different floors, the more we stare into our little screens to get our work done, the more we need to find ways to get to know people from the little screen.

I know, for example, when someone is extremely busy - because their twitters go silent for awhile. Perhaps it’s time to check in with them?

2) I can pick up knowledge from others in a quick-hit fashion. I’ve learned a few gems in the short time I’ve been twittering, just by following other people’s tweets. And you can follow conference news from people who’re on site, twittering live - you get their impressions in the moment.  Blog posts follow, most people tweet their postings.

3) I’ve become more aware of my words. You can only use 140 characters to post in twitter… and that’s a great forcing mechanism to refine your writing.

The convention (for those of you who haven’t been there yet) is to acknowledge other’s tweets by saying something like @thiskat when I’m referring to something she has said.

So here’s a hint - don’t pick a long username like I did. @janetleejohnson is a ridiculous waste of 15! characters. Had I to do it all over again, I’d go under an assumed name like mktgmvn or smrtpdx or mrk8r… think in terms of license plate monikers, and you’re set.

Another hint - check out an URL shortner tool like twurl - which also allows you to track clicks…

Happy twittering…