I’m pumped to announce I’m starting a new interview show. I’m aiming to interview people who’ve done really cool things in order to expose their knowledge to others.
My first interview is with Biz Dev pro Alex Taub. In our interview he reveals:
How he “broke into tech”
The most important thing he’s done for building his person brand
One major reason he left to join Dwolla
What BD means at Dwolla (for him)
The one thing he wish he knew when he started out in the tech space
This interview also reveals how excessively I move my eyebrows when I talk. Geez. Going to work on that for next time.
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My next interview will be with “America’s Youngest VC” Alex Banayan. Subscribe here or follow me on …
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About 2 weeks ago, I realized I made a huge business development mistake that could have easily been avoided.
Rewind to mid-December: I connected with an ideal prospect via a cold call that told me to reach back out in the new year. Immediately following the call I made an annotation to call them back in the new year so that I remembered.
It’s early January. Jogging through my hitlist, I see the note and excitedly decide to reach back out. I start constructing an email that read “I just wanted to circle back on connecting like we chatted about on Dec 12th”….and then it hit me:
Someone who receives 40 cold calls a day like this person probably has no recollection of …
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I’ve been doing some smiling and dialing recently and thought I’d share some free resources to find corporate phone numbers. I’m listing these in the order of how I approach finding one. The hierarchy of this list is determined by a combination of accuracy and speed.
1. Company Website
I’ll spare you a proverbial explanation. Many company sites contain the corporate phone number on the “Contact Us” or “About Us” page.
Note* it’s important to understand that many phone numbers on company sites are customer service numbers instead of corporate office numbers. Make sure the number explicitly reads as “Corporate Office” or “Headquarters”.
2. ECorporateOffices.com
ECorporateOffices.com has pretty accurate phone numbers. Their data set isn’t as robust as some other sources, but you can search …
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I’ll make this short and sweet. I previously wrote about how to find prospect’s full name when you encounter a private profile like the example below (sorry Marco for using you as a a guinea pig!).
Unfortunately, this trick doesn’t always work because some people choose not to display their public profile…sigh.
Fear not! I found a work-around that almost always solves this problem. Check out the brief video below to learn this tactic.
Note* if have trouble viewing the presentation it’s because BContext files might not work with older versions of Chrome, Safari, and Firefox…update that guy.
Linkedin Hack Addendum
Do you like Lifehacks and creative ways to do things more efficiently? Check out my online community HackingNYC where hundreds of people share their …
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I recently had an interesting business development conversation with a founder that I thought others might find interesting.
His company is just about to finalize a deal with their first marquee partner. He was wondering at what point he should start using their name in conversations with other prospects.
The social proof of another of big name in the space is tremendously valuable for them. It provides optics that can be leveraged to attract new partners/customers. Thus, the earlier they can take advantage of this the better.
One (dangerous) Approach:
You could start telling other prospects that you’re working with the partner despite the fact it hasn’t been finalized.
The upside is that you might be able to expedite landing additional partners.
The downside is that …
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Many startup founders are deathly afraid of building their own sales team. They default to channel partnerships to try and get distribution. Sigh.
For those unfamiliar with the term, a channel partnership is when a person or organization sells products on behalf of another company. An example of this is how Duda Mobile uses Webs.com as a channel partner. Customers of Webs.com can mobile optimize their website through a partnership DudaMobile. Webs.com benefits from the partnership by filling out their offering to prospective customers and DudaMobile benefits from the distribution to Webs.com customers.
Partnerships like this can be great for both parties. But they also can also barely move the needle and be extremely time-consuming to develop.
Here are a few things startup …
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The tactic I’m about to share is not only for sales and business development professionals; it’s a unique strategy that can literally be used to start an email dialogue with anyone who has an online presence.
One of the most important things in writing an effective cold email is to keep it short. However, communicating all the things necessary to elicit a response in 3-4 sentences can be extremely challenging. One way I’ve been able to overcome this and start dialogues with many c-level execs and big time entrepreneurs is by communicating my message in a more visually engaging format that’s easier to consume than text.
I’ve written about how to write effective cold emails before. The formula is simple:
Keep it short
Personalize it …
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In the first part of this post, I shared how calling for a former employee can help you find a decision maker. Here’s a few other strategies to isolate the right contact at a large company.
Use Implicit Data on LinkedIn
Let’s revert back to the conundrum of there being 12 people in the marketing department and limited transparency to which one is responsible for your particular initiative. There’s a few places on a LinkedIn profile that contain implicit data from which you can draw conclusions.
The Skills and Expertise Section
The skills and expertise section contains granular endorsements (i.e. email marketing, social media, SEM). These can provide a strong indication what someone is responsible for at a particular company.
Say I was looking to …
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