May 22, 2006
No More Cold Calling
By JEANETTE BORZO
Ever since Anu Shukla launched RubiconSoft Inc. three years ago, she and her team have been so busy building the business that there’s been precious little time to hunt for new clients. The online marketing service didn’t even have a full-time sales executive until early this year.
Yet the company has managed to land a dozen or so big-name clients, including Tower Records and Ritz Interactive Inc., which manages a host of retail Web sites.
Ms. Shukla’s secret? Software tools and online services that help her generate sales leads without the usual legwork and the often-inefficient cold calling. For instance, she used an online social-networking service to get a foot in the door at Tower and Ritz. The service, from LinkedIn Corp. of Palo Alto, Calif., allowed her to search through lists of her contacts’ contacts for potential leads. When she found names at Tower and Ritz, mutual acquaintances gave her an introduction.
For Ms. Shukla, services like LinkedIn, as well as Jigsaw, Spoke and iProfile, are much more effective than simply cold calling. “You know who you’re calling and who they report to, to make the call more fruitful,” she says.
These days, entrepreneurs can choose from a host of tools that help them address an old problem: how to sign up new customers when you have small or nonexistent sales resources — and must compete with corporations with deep pockets and big reputations.
Some tools, like LinkedIn, let you find sales leads through mutual acquaintances. Others are more like beefed-up phone directories, offering exhaustive lists of corporate personnel and their contact information. Still others offer comprehensive background information on prospective clients, culled from press releases, news reports and other sources. Some offer a combination of these features.
“Sales is a challenge for any company, but especially for small businesses — small firms don’t have the resources or the channels that bigger companies have,” says Sanjeev Aggarwal, a senior analyst at Yankee Group, a consulting firm based in Boston. “These new tools have made it more manageable.”
Most of these services charge a fee for full access to their information — in some cases, hundreds or thousands of dollars. But many offer stripped-down free versions as well. For instance, a directory site might let you see the names of a company’s personnel, but you wouldn’t get their contact information.
Even these limited resources can be valuable, Ms. Shukla notes. “We didn’t pay a penny” for any of the tools that landed clients, she says.
Finding Contacts
One of the most popular categories of tools allows users to browse through extensive lists of potential sales leads.
Jigsaw.com, created by Jigsaw Data Corp. of San Mateo, Calif., offers a database of contacts submitted by members. To get access to those names, you must either pay a fee or contribute new contacts of your own. Twenty-five dollars a month, or 25 contributed contacts, gets you access to 25 new names. You can also earn points toward buying more contacts by correcting mistakes in the database. Users can search the list by a number of criteria, including company size and industry.
At Great Outdoor Network Inc., a West Palm, Fla., company that offers online services for media planners and buyers, Chief Executive Robert Shockey uses Jigsaw to track down leads. His target: advertising executives in the “out-of-home” market, such as billboards and bus stops. “It’s imperative for us to reach vice presidents of marketing,” says Mr. Shockey, whose company has 15 employees. “We use Jigsaw to locate the right people.”
The fact that users police the information appeals to many small businesses. “They really monitor the accuracy,” says Mimi Evans, co-founder of Seligence LLC, a 23-person firm in Lawrence, Mass., that provides companies with information they can use to boost sales.
Spoke.com, from Spoke Software Inc. in San Mateo, Calif., also offers a searchable database of contacts, but combines it with a social network. The company — using online sources, users and data providers — has created a list of more than 30 million people across more than 600,000 companies, which users can search by name, title, geography and other criteria. Once users have zeroed in on a potential contact, they can use Spoke’s social network to see if they have a common acquaintance who could provide an introduction.
