Don’t forget to support your internal sponsors
Throw them a life line.
It came up again in our monthly business review. A nice sale in our pipeline has stalled. It’s a simple but substantial software upgrade. It’s stalled because our customer wants to wait a few months until the company makes another software systems change. Our internal sponsor in the company loves us, and wants to get the upgrade now because it will help him do his job better. We’ve already made a couple of site visits, had some conference calls, laid out our reasoning why they should go forward with the upgrade now rather than later. Our proposal has made the rounds. We have a verbal that they are going to go forward…eventually. But of course, anything could happen between now and eventually, so what can we do to make it happen now?
My suggestion was to give our sponsor some support in the form of a clear, concise, and hopefully compelling written argument that he can use as a “cheat sheet” when trying to remember everything we’ve told him several times and are counting on him to remember and repeat. Heck, hopefully he will cut and paste some of what we write into an e-mail to executives higher up.
Sure, this is fairly tactical stuff, and not as sexy as working on a brochure, or the next webinar, but could well be as important a step in closing the sale as that initial direct mail piece was, and should not be overlooked. And it is so easy for the marketer to create. We see it as obvious, because we live and breathe our solution every day. Our sponsor sees it, because he’s drank the kool aid. And yet so far we have left it up to him to sell it for us internally.
Two hours later, after getting some good notes about the hurdles ahead of us, our answer to those hurdles, and our list of benefits for doing the upgrade NOW, I crafted a one-page argument, broken into three sections, using subheads, bullets, some bolded elements, and a “for dummies” diagram. Tomorrow, we will e-mail it to our sponsor, who is grateful for the ammo.
How to Find People with Google for Market Research
I use Google quite a bit for finding and verifying contacts for the 400 or so target companies with private fleets and/or outbound warehouse operations that load pallets onto trucks. Currently my two favorite techniques are the Linked In x-ray search and advanced Google Search in Chrome, employing the Chrome “block sites” filter.
Linked In X-Ray Search
I don’t like the fact that Linked In charges a steep monthly fee for the privilege of searching for people by company name and title and seeing their first and last name. Now, if you search within Linkedin.com itself for people, you only get their first name, last initial. However if you use Google site search and add the phrase “powered by” Google will return first and last names of people on Linked In. You can then click on their Linked In profile and hopefully find a bio to shed light on the person’s role. You can also find their colleagues and boss with the handy sidebar that lists people in related searches.
In Google just type site:linked.com “title of target” “company name” “powered by”.
Google Advanced Search
- It helps to search for 2 or three word phrases within quote marks. For example “private fleet” AND “company name” and/or “possible title” (e.g., “transportation manager”).
- Use Chrome, and block every jobs site that ever comes up. Jobs sites wind up being 50% of the search results, so you want to filter them out. While you are at it, block all the content marketing sites that also return garbage. These are all the directory sites like Manta.com and article sites like ezinearticles.com
- Use other parameters like – before a word to tell google don’t return a page that has this word on it. For example if I am searching for tractor trailer rigs, I want to filter out -monster for “monster trucks” and -Ford -Chevy -dodge -pickup to filter out pickup trucks.
