Turning Sales Into Science

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LinkedIn users build connections by asking friends and business associates who are already LinkedIn members to join their networks. You also can solicit others to join; indeed, a downloadable toolbar that runs in Microsoft Outlook makes inviting people to join your network a two-click affair. Once you've joined, it's easy to search for specific types of users--say, a network manager at a large company or a record producer in Los Angeles. The catch is that you can connect only with someone who is within three degrees of separation--in other words, a friend of a friend of a friend--and it must be done by asking a direct connection to pass on your message via an introduction. Contacting those you're not connected with can be done, but only for a fee. Memberships range from free to $200 a month. Other business-oriented social networking services, such as Ryze and CompanyClick, work in a similar fashion--though neither boasts as big a network as LinkedIn's.

Meanwhile, other new and intriguing sales tools figure out ways to harness the collective network of an entire company. So-called relationship mining software made by San Francisco-based BranchIt, for example, combs through all of the correspondences and files on a corporate network to create a map of each employee's external relationships--allowing individual salespeople to tap into the collective knowledge of their organizations.

Case In Point
Roy de Souza, CEO of Zedo, an online advertising company in San Francisco, was surfing through his LinkedIn network, which has 271 direct connections, when he noticed that one of his friends knew the COO of BitTorrent, a company that makes software that allows Internet users to download software, videos, and music faster. Zedo sent a lunch invitation to the COO through LinkedIn via his friend. "I only wanted to have lunch and talk about the company. He told me to talk to their head of advertising technology, as they were shopping for ad servers," says Souza. "We signed a contract a few weeks later." De Souza loves the way LinkedIn can essentially take cold calls and warm them up through shared friends and shared background information.

3. Find better sales leads

The Product
Spoke

How It Works
In years past, marketers approached lists of sales leads with extreme wariness. They'd take a deep breath and pray that the data was decent. Spoke removes at least some of the faith from the equation. The company takes existing list data and checks it against online information, even going so far as to send e-mails to individuals on lists asking them to validate their information. It then maps relationships between list leads and salespeople in a manner similar to what LinkedIn does, and allows users to search by such criteria as industry, location, and revenue. Checked against multiple sources of data, these new lists eliminate a lot of bad information. Spoke is free if you're willing to share your own data; otherwise it runs about $50 a month. It's not perfect. But it's far more likely than old-school lists of leads to contain sales gems.

Case In Point
Scott B. Marsh, vice president of sales at recruiting software company SonicRecruit, based in Emeryville, California, has never been a big fan of lead lists; in fact, after wasting hours trying to contact people who'd long since changed jobs, he'd sworn off them entirely.

Nonetheless, earlier this year, Marsh decided to try Spoke, which boasts 32 million personal profiles culled from nearly a million companies worldwide. Almost immediately the service began paying off, saving Marsh and his sales team precious time. He estimates that since his sales force started using Spoke, it has sliced a full 25 percent off the time required to find the right contact in a company. "I can't remember what it was like before we used it," he says.

4. Make the buyers come to you

The Products
Leads.com, Ingenio, eStara

How They Work
For businesses that primarily serve local customers, the promise of the Internet has long been tantalizing. However, the inability of search engines to match up customer queries with truly local ads has made collecting sales leads online difficult. That has begun to change, as Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO), Google (NASDAQ:GOOG), MSN, and AOL (NYSE:TWX) have ramped up their local search functions. Indeed, online local advertising is poised to jump 53 percent, to $2 billion in 2007, according to Web research shop eMarketer.com. Meanwhile, a number of start-ups targeting local advertisers are providing new vehicles for local online advertising.

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