Dave Currie
CMO The List and CEO Catapult New Business
A fast and effective addition to your list of new business tools.
Guest post by Dave Currie, CMO The List and CEO Catapult New Business
I’m constantly searching for process improvement, it’s at the very core of the way we do things, and just good business practice overall. Part of my role as a coach to my customers (both internal and external), is to seek out innovative solutions, test and then share them.
I’ve always made an effort to know who in my social sphere is ‘on-the-move,’ changing job roles, companies and so on, as major events (triggers) like these typically lead to new business opportunities. A CMO moving from one company to another means change. 47% of the time this means changing marketing services providers within the first 4 months according to our latest research at Catapult New Business.
So this sales intelligence is big money, if you’re the early bird.
Logging into LinkedIn every morning and scrolling through the status updates is let’s say – tedious. I needed to find a way to cut through the noise, to get to precisely the sales intelligence I need – Marketing decision-makers on the move. And as a millennial, I also want it now, in an easy to read, interpreted and actionable format.
Solution found!
I was an early adopter of what was (6 months ago – or maybe more?) a very small, Beta version technology named Salesloft. When I connected Salesloft to my LinkedIn account I was promised that each morning I’d get an email sent to me of every position change of everyone I was connected to. Brilliant. In the beginning it also told me whose birthday it was today – ‘Hey Jim, Happy Birthday mate!’
They’ve come a long way now, and I’m a huge fan because it’s free, it’s easy and it works.
Each morning I get a detailed list of every Position Change and Headline Change for every one of my LinkedIn connections. Talk about time saving, this is big. I immediately scan the email (or web portal for real-time) to see when corporate marketers are changing their LinkedIn status to their new gig. News feeds and PR newswire’s pick up the big stuff sure, but what about the other 95% of CMO’s and marketing decision-makers? That’s where Salesloft scores in my books.
Salesloft notes that 3% of your network changes jobs every month, so if I’m connected to 500 people that’s 360 new business leads a year. That gives me 180 opportunities to seek out something with my contact at their new company, plus another 180 from the vacancy that they just created. I like those stats.
Recently they’ve added a feature called ‘Prospector’ that allows me to connect a plugin to Google Chrome, so I can search and then export into Excel the top 40 search results for specific people I might be looking to connect with. Within seconds I can search for CMO’s in New York, and export their first name, last name, company, title and LinkedIn URL. Done.
What I do with that information is the topic of another post, but let’s say that combined with having their verified email address, phone number, direct dial, assistant’s name, media spend, agency relationships, creative work, news feeds, analyst insights and more from The List provides somewhat an upper-hand in targeting and engaging them for new business. Why not do the same?
If you’re the proactive type, and want to be the first to the worm (so to speak) – Salesloft.com and their job change notifications are a great addition to your ad agency new business tool set.
You can connect with Dave Currie on LinkedIn, his blog NewBusinessDingo (www.newbusinessdingo.com) or on Twitter @newbizdingo.
