Web strategies
Networking sites create business leads
For entrepreneurs seeking new ways to find connections and
generate sales prospects, the web has become a virtual candy
store of options. Many small-business owners are giving cold
calling the cold shoulder.
Frank Rumbauskas, a sales coach and author of Never Cold Call
Again (Wiley, June 2006), is convinced that cold calling is
obsolete. Prospects hate getting unsolicited sales call now
more than ever — if they even answer their phone at all.
“Sales people everywhere are learning the hard way that
cold calling just doesn’t work anymore,” says
Rumbauskas. “They are using 20th century sales techniques
to try to lure 21st century customers who have no patience for
the sales pitch.”
Great alternatives to cold calling are the so-called social
networking sites that are all the rage in the Internet world
right now. And darned if some of them don’t actually have
a lot to offer small-business owners.
Perhaps the hottest player in this niche is LinkedIn, an
online network of some 6 million business people worldwide.
While big social sites such as MySpace cater to personal use,
LinkedIn is strictly business.
First, you join and create a profile of your business
accomplishments. The profile helps you find and be found by
former colleagues, clients, partners and prospects. You can add
more connections by inviting trusted contacts to join and
connect to you in web-like fashion.
LinkedIn is free to join but last year added paid memberships
(at $60 to $2,000 per year) that offer premium tools for
finding and reaching the right people. The paid memberships
have been hugely popular, and LinkedIn says it will expand its
free services as well.
The power of these new digital grapevines is their ability to
share lead-generating ideas across large numbers of people and
to provide “introductions” through trusted
contacts. You don’t find your ideal prospect nicely
registered on the site, just waiting for you. Rather,
through an efficient system of contact sharing, it may be one
of your contacts’ contacts that ultimately generates the
introduction and big sale you are seeking.
LinkedIn aims to make the search for business contacts and
prospects as smart and easy as possible. Business owners
already use it frequently to look up people before business
meetings to learn about backgrounds and interests of other
meeting attendees as well as suppliers and potential
customers.
Other popular web-based lead generators for small business
include Jigsaw, Spoke and Zoom Information.
Jigsaw is an online business contact marketplace where you can
buy, sell and trade business contact information. You can buy
leads for cash or acquire names by contributing some of your
own.
Spoke comes off as a more sophisticated service offering
on-demand business contact information designed to help you
find and sell to targeted buyers. Spoke has information on
650,000 companies and 30 million people and also has a social
networking feature that lets subscribers share contact
information.
Another helpful feature is Spoke’s ability to feed leads
and contact information directly into Salesforce.com — a
big bonus for small firms already using Salesforce. A Spoke
subscription is $59 per month, or $495 if you sign up for a
year.
— Daniel Kehrer,
BizBest Media
