|
Fighting
the Sawtooth Affect
Control
your business growth by not doing
everything yourself
Is this a familiar scenario? You’re this close to
landing the biggest deal you ever encountered. The
solution you are pitching is nearly one hundred
thousand dollars and will keep you busy the better
part of the long Winter months ahead and possibly
into the Spring. You built into the quote about 4
months worth of consulting and are eager to begin.
Now, at the final meeting with your client, you
are about to get the sweet answer you’ve been
working hard to get for months. There’s not much
else that compares to the excitement of getting a
signature on a huge deal you’ve been working on
for what seems like forever. But here you are,
actually watching the client sign your order.
You’re set. You go out and celebrate that night
with your spouse and talk about how much you
deserved this and what it means to your income,
not to mention your business. The long hours. The
pressure. The sacrifices. But now that’s all
over and you got what you deserve. A huge contract
that will yield a lot of consulting dollars for
your relatively small operation. By the way, if
you're not in high-tech, or even in consulting or
a reseller of any sort, this can still apply to
you. Just be creative and use your imagination
to make the appropriate adjustments so this fits
your particular situation.
The next day you order the software from your vendor.
It arrives in a couple days and having already set
up the first meeting with your client, you set out
with everything you need to begin work. The first
few weeks will include discussions and interviews
for the discovery analysis. Then the planning
phase. And finally the customizations,
implementation, training, and roll out. The plan
is perfect and you are the right man, or woman,
for the job.
Read
More...
|
Getting
the Right Contacts
Jigsaw
Data Corp. helps professionals find each other
I
get asked on occasion if I know of any place to
get updated, quality leads. I hear the usual
complaints about existing services being
expensive, slow turnarounds, and mostly
unqualified and outdated information. I mentioned
a pretty cool service in my latest book, Smart
Marketing, which is GoLeads.com (www.goleads.com).
But I recently discovered another useful and
unique service from Jigsaw Data Corp, called
Jigsaw.com .
Jigsaw
is an online business contact marketplace where
marketers, recruiters, and sales people can buy,
sell and trade business contact information. The
Jigsaw marketplace offers members access to an
online database of fresh and accurate corporate
contact information and increases efficiency by
shortening the time required to find valuable
business contacts. I
started using Jigsaw a few months ago to collect
names of sales and marketing executives in which
to market PEAK Sales Consulting’s services. I
found the names to be accurate, current and quite
valuable. Click
here to check them out.
Jigsaw
has parallels to eBay – it's an online
marketplace for buying, selling and trading. But
you won't find Elvis memorabilia, used CDs or
musical instruments here. The commodity for sale
is virtual business cards. For 60 cents to $1, you
can purchase the name of a company's president,
chief financial officer, or other employee, along
with an e-mail address and direct phone number.
Or, you can trade for the information, entering a
contact into the system, and getting two free
contacts in return.
The
Web site was launched nine months ago by two
former software sales representatives. Jigsaw.com
has more than 1 million contacts, and users are
adding about 8,000 new contacts per day, said Bob
Memmer, director of operations for Jigsaw.
"We've found that most people don't provide
proprietary contacts to the site, but one person's
trash is another person's treasure," Memmer
said. "You may have a list of contacts that
won't be valuable to you, but would be very
valuable to someone else."
Most
of Jigsaw.com's 14,000 users work in sales or
marketing. They can search the site by geographic
area, industry or company size. "We are
catering to professionals who want to market their
services to other professionals. We see business
cards as a public resource. They're something that
people print and hand out," Memmer said.
Mike
Warren heard about Jigsaw.com from a friend. He
works at Electric Light Wave Inc., in Spokane,
which provides local and long-distance phone
service, Internet and data networks to companies.
The field is competitive, and accurate contact
information is vital, Warren said.
"I've
used Hoover and other subscription services, but I
haven't continued them because the accuracy wasn't
that great," he said. "So far on Jigsaw,
I haven't discovered any errors." At Jigsaw,
information is always getting updated, Memmer
said. Users get bonus points for spotting faulty
contact information. The system tracks where the
errors are coming from, and users who routinely
enter bad data get booted, Memmer said.
Scott
Clark, an insurance agent in Yakima, just spent
$200 to sign up for a year of Jigsaw access. He
started the service on a trial basis, and
immediately found three contacts he was looking
for. If he generates new clients from the
contacts, the service will more than pay for
itself, he said. It takes me a lot of time to do
research, to figure out who is really making the
decision about insurance, whether it's the CEO or
the chief financial officer or someone else,"
Clark said. "It's a lot more efficient if the
contact information is out there."
Jigsaw's
goals are ambitious. According to the Web site,
the company's intent is to "map every
business organization on the planet," and
keep the contacts current "through a
collaborative process" with users.
If
you are interested in learning more about
Jigsaw.com or wish to sign up for their free
trial, simply click HERE
and get 25 free contacts when you sign up, or 10 free
contacts when you try the Free Trial. Or, if you
just go to the Jigsaw web site directly and decide to use
the Free Trial or Sign Up, then be sure to enter
“PEAK” into the Promo Code field of the
Registration Form. By using me as your referral,
you and I will each get 125 free points when you
sign up, which equals 25 Free Contacts! See how
that works? Pretty cool stuff.
Good
quality leads don't just benefit your Sales
department. They also help your Marketing efforts.
So, if you like the idea of acquiring new leads
with a service such as Jigsaw.com, you can also
learn how to integrate that data into your CRM
system, and subsequently use Variable Data Marketing and
Digital Printing to economically produce
personalized, 4-color collateral for your
marketing campaigns, by reading my latest book,
"Smart
Marketing", available in hard copy and as
an eBook (click HERE
for more information).
If you have contacts you want to trade (1 of yours
for 2 of theirs) or just want to buy quality leads
economically, then check it out by clicking HERE.
I hope you find some really good leads.
Good
luck and good selling!
Russ
Lombardo
|
