Social Media Marketing and Salesforce.com

22 09 2009

Joe Keller Photo

I spoke to Joe Keller this morning about some of the work he has been doing with Salesforce.com software for some the startup companies he has been working with.  One example he gave was particularly interesting; Jigsaw.

Jigsaw provides business information services that is essentially a database of company information and contacts at those companies.  The service is popular with sales professionals and marketing people looking to run targeted marketing campaigns.  What is particularly interesting about Jigsaw  is that they use crowdsourcing techniques to collect current contact information on the companies that they track.

There are two ways to get access to customer contact information withing the Jigsaw service:

  1. You can contribute contacts to Jigsaw.  For every contact you contribute, Jigsaw awards points that can be used to search for and retrieve new contacts.
  2. You can just pay to use the Jigsaw service and find contacts that way.

Jigsaw claims 900,000 members in their B2B community, so they have collected a lot of contact information.  (Note: Jigsaw will not accept or publish any personal information about the contacts that they track.)

The Jigsaw Sales Model

  • Jigsaw uses viral marketing to penetrate new customer accounts and let individual sales people use and trade contacts using the service.
  • When an enterprise needs help at the corporate level, Jigsaw provides a service where they help you do a customer database update and cleaning.  The service works like this:
    • You send Jigsaw a list of target names by company
    • They will return a report telling you what specific information they have for each of those names, and a quote.
    • If you accept their quote, they will do a database update/merge with your customer database, giving you all of the latest customer contact information.
    • If you want, you can contract to have your database updated on a regular basis.

Joe Keller was able to use the Jigsaw service to update the customer database he was using with Salesforce.com and to run more targeted marketing campaigns with a greater response rate.

This is a great example of using the power of the community to build and update a huge, constantly changing database of customer information.  Similar to how Wikipedia changed the business model of the encyclopedia business by crowdsourcing from the user community, Jigsaw is doing the same with the sales and marketing community.  The result is a database more dynamic and current that would be possible from a conventional data collection agency.

Jigsaw is attacking the entrenched business of Hoovers, a D&B Company.  It will be interesting to see how Hoovers responds.


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Categories : Social Media Marketing, Technology

Is the Sales Funnel Obsolete?

15 09 2009

SM Sales Funnel

There has been a lot of blogging on how Social Media makes the Sales Funnel obsolete.  I would like to argue that it does not, but Social Media does require that we think about the Sales Funnel in a very different light.

The Traditional Sales Funnel

The traditional funnel has the following stages that potential customers pass through in a nice linear fashion.  This has been useful to marketeers because it helps them to think about what they need to do to assist the sales process along at every stage.  The classic steps in the model are:

  • Awareness: gain awareness of product and brand
  • Evaluation: give target customers tools and information to evaluate the product
  • Engagement: get customers engaged with the actual product or service
  • Conversion: get a commitment or sale from the customer
  • Loyalty: build brand loyalty with the customer

Social Media and the Sales Funnel

With Social Media, a number of things change about the sales funnel:

  • Selling and rapidly moving on to the next customer is a bad idea in this world.  The goal is repeat sales, engaged customers, and an enduring two-way relationship with customers, not “drive-by selling.”
  • Loyalty is no longer the endpoint.  The ultimate goal is to get your customers to be enthusiastic recommenders of your brand and product or service (Advocacy).  Advocacy happens at all stages of the process when you are doing social media marketing right. (See The Ultimate Question by Fred Reichheld.)
  • Evaluation also goes on at all stages of the funnel in an iterative fashion.  Customers are always checking with peers, contacts, blogs etc. for the latest information at all steps in the process.  Even after purchasing the product, customers are checking for the experiences of their industry peers.

Social Media Sales Funnel

All of this is in the context of much bigger changes brought about by Social Media:

  • Marketing is no longer messaging at customers.  It is a two way conversation and a relationship.
  • Marketing is not about interrupting people with messages.  It is about delivering genuinely useful information in a timely manner.
  • Marketing is no longer about one-way communication.  It is a two way communication with a very real opportunity for vendors to listen.
  • Brand Reputation is Everything:  companies who deliver poor products or who don’t listen to their customers will suffer immediately as Social Media increases the velocity of negative reviews.   (See United Breaks Guitars, 5.4 million views and counting.)

For more on this subject see:  Your Sales Pipeline is Probably Broken

Comments on the Social Media Sales Funnel are welcomed.  This is my first pass at a visual for this and it is a work in process.  The circular arrows are meant to suggest the iterative nature of Advocacy and Evaluation across all of the steps in the process.  Let me know if this works for you.


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Categories : Enterprise Marketing, Inbound Marketing, Social Media Marketing

Your Sales Pipeline is Probably Broken

4 08 2009

Everybody is familiar with the sales pipeline, but unless you have taken a good look at yours in the last year or so, it probably is not working the way you thought it was.  First, the steps in the process may vary for your product or service, so take a look to see that the steps I have listed in the example sales funnel are accurate for your specific business.  For example, does your sales process have a demo / prototype / product evaluation stage?  Probably.

Now, stand back a step and look again.  Social Media and User Generated Media have changed the way IT managers and executives navigate the early steps of the pipeline prior to the Purchase stage.

What’s different about IT Purchasing Behavior?

  • Your customers do not take a linear path through the sales funnel anymore.  They tend to circle back and fact-check against multiple sources.
  • Customers are also getting their information about your product or service from new and different sources (See earlier blog postings on this site).
  • Their search for information about your brand typically starts with a Google/Yahoo!/Bing search for information.
  • The good news is that they do trust vendor Web sites.  But, vendor Web sites are far from the only source of trusted information.
  • They also trust User Generated Media (like blogs, forums, discussion groups) and peer referrals.  The question for you is: Which specific sites are they looking at?
  • Also, note that I have added a new step at the end of the funnel: The sales process is not complete until you have turned your customer into and active advocate for your product and brand.  See a great book on this subject:  The Ultimate Question

How To Re-Look at Your Sales Pipeline

  • How would your target customers know your company exists or has a product in the space they are interested in?
  • Where do your target customers get their information?  What are their trusted sources of information for business and technical information?  Does your company participate in these social mediums?  Do you have customers who are active advocates for your brand?
  • Do your company have different discussion tracks for the business facts and the technical facts?  Most likely your customers have recommenders and decision-makers who are interested in each discussion.
  • Do you have multiple sales channels?  Most likely you have multiple channels, so you need to take a look at how each works.  Where and how does your channel get qualified leads?
  • If you have indirect sales channels, are you providing them with compelling information on why to sell your product and not the competition?  If not, you may be driving business straight to your competitors without knowing it.

As we have discussed in earlier blogs, one of the most important things you can know about your customers is what Social Media they look at when they are looking to research a product or service decision.

Starting from there, you can build your new sales pipeline.


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Categories : Enterprise Marketing


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