Business Insight Zone

Sorry to shout, but I want to make sure the emphasis is clear:

• CUSTOMERS
• CUSTOMERS
• CUSTOMERS

It’s one of my fundamental tenets of all business, whether you’re running IBM or a taco truck: if you’re finding the right customers, and putting your best efforts into serving customers, and aligning all of your business practices so that you provide maximum value to customers at costs you can live with and prices they can live with . . . you’ll be fine.

Now for a very simple lesson that’s too often overlooked — or undercooked — in companies large and small:

How you collect, organize, and use business information should reinforce your emphasis on CUSTOMERS.

A thousand questions cascade from this one idea, including many that are rather abstract:

• If you’re collecting information by hand — how will you organize it for use in finding and serving customers?
• If you get information from a service like us (and, ahem, we happen to have the most and best business information you can find anywhere), what will you do with it that will help you find or serve customers?
• Do you know all the uses of the information ahead of time?
• Do you have a process for discovering and adopting new uses as you go?
• . . .

And then there are pragmatic questions galore:

• Does everybody in your outfit who needs to know the answers to the questions above know them? (Researchers? Marketers? Salespeople? Your CIO? Your CFO? All the big bosses?)
• Does what they understand mesh with the IT department’s ability to package and deliver the information, whether it’s through a complex data warehouse, a CRM, or simply a set of spreadsheets?
• Does the technological capacity mesh with the ability of your sales ops, fulfillment, and finance teams to track the right account information back to the right customer? Every time?
• . . .

You can fill in the blanks with more questions like these depending on your own situation. (And please feel free to share these questions in the comments.)

Remember that some of the answers to these questions need not be overly complex or expensive. For instance, if you and I decide to open a business together, just the two of us, we might be able to run our whole book of business from a few shared spreadsheets.

Easy, right? Sure — but even then, you and I would need to get some discipline around what information comes in, how we collect it, where we store it, and what we do with it. Even if you run a solo business, you need to answer these questions, because otherwise customers — business! cash money! — falls through the cracks.

Sum it all up, and the real core discipline lies in answering this question:

Which piece of information triggers which action toward which customer?

Until you know that, you can spend all the money you want on a CRM system . . . we could give you the keys to Hoover’s and you could drown yourself in company and industry information . . . you could store terabytes of data . . . and it still won’t drive the performance that your business — and its CUSTOMERS — deserve.

Don’t you agree?

~

Related posts:

• Customer ANYTHING.
• Get on the phone!

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Image by Oran Viriyincy, used under a CC-Share Alike license.

Recently, Aberdeen Group researched the performance of 476 corporate sales teams. It published the results of this research in its December 2009 Benchmark Report, Inside Sales Enablement: “Let Them Drink Coffee!”

Below, you’ll find a copy of Aberdeen’s follow-up report focused on Hoover’s customers — who

“outperform[ed] other companies in both [financial] performance and the adoption of Best-In-Class practices.”

You can access this PDF and download a copy for yourself by clicking on the image below or on this link.

Among other highlights, Hoover’s customers outperformed in terms of:

• Revenue
• Lead response time
• Lead conversion rate

All in all,

“Hoover’s customers have out-performed those that do not use their service, in terms of the percent of companies improving their year-over-year sales metrics, by an average of 25%.”

Take a look at the report, which contains other analysis about the performance of sales teams across the board, as well as a mini-case study that explains how Staples uses our Access Hoover’s product to integrate Hoover’s data into its Salesforce.com CRM.

Here at Hoover’s, we’ve always believed that great business information empowers sales teams to do their best. We’re pleased to share this Aberdeen Group report so that you can see the hard numbers that back up our belief.

Feel free to ask questions in the comments, or to drop us a line so we can help you figure out how Hoover’s can empower your sales teams.

I’ve faced down a few stacks of collected business cards like that one in my time, and a friend asked me to talk about this subject, so I thought I’d share my process here.

1. Collect information at the event. Business cards are still useful, in their way. So is a pocket notebook to jot things down while you’re talking to a new person — including their basic contact information, if they’ve run out of cards. Since I’m a heavy Twitter user and often have a smartphone with me, I’ll follow a new acquaintance on Twitter right then and there if it’s appropriate.
2. When you get home, clear your desk and clear some time for following up.
3. On the newly-cleared expanse of my desk, I spread out the cards from the conference in neat rows. Something about doing this helps me to focus on each card individually, while keeping in mind how many follow-ups I have to do in the allotted time.
4. If I’ve collected a ton of cards, the law of averages suggests that there may be a few from folks I already know or (rarely) don’t care to know better. For speed’s sake, I sweep through the entire grid of cards on my desk and pull out all of these discards (dis-cards?) at once. I keep them in case I need to consult them later, but I file them away in a big plastic binder of a type that Kevin Kelly recommended a few years ago on Cool Tools. I don’t alphabetize the cards or anything — I just tuck each card into the next available slot. (The few times I’ve needed to go back to this binder for reference, it’s been easy enough to find the right card based on the mass of cards around it from people I met at the same time.)
5. Optional step for those as obsessive enslaved to instant gratification orderly as me: tidy the remaining cards into fewer rows. You’ll feel a nice little rush of instant productivity
6. I trawl through my social networks looking for the people whose information is on the remaining cards. I may follow them on Twitter, request to be a contact on LinkedIn, (rarely) request to be Facebook friends, add their blog’s RSS feed to my reader, or any combination of these. Typically I just open up all of these networks at once in a tabbed browser and rotate through them as I handle one person at a time across all networks.
7. After I’ve located a given person on each relevant network, I write them an e-mail or make some other sort of contact via social media. Easiest of all are the people who specifically asked for follow-up on some business issue: you write them an e-mail, remind them of your conversation, and let them know that you’re also following them on Twitter (or wherever) to make it easy to stay in touch. (This would also be a good time to make an entry in your CRM, if it’s relevant.) But even if there’s no immediate business reason to connect, you can comment on one of their blog posts or Flickr pictures, respond to one of their tweets, or, if you can do it sincerely, broadcast a tweet recommending them to your friends, like this: “Met @JohnDoe at the XYZ conference this weekend. Super-nice guy, a pro’s pro in project management, well worth following.” They won’t soon forget that.
8. Finally, you file away each card as you’re done with it. One of my favorite aspects of my process here is that it’s so easy to see your progress as the grid of cards on your desk shrinks and shrinks. (I told you I like instant gratification.)
9. Extra credit: set yourself a reminder to follow up with your favorites from the conference at intervals after the inital contact — say 10 days, 25 days, and 45 days. Don’t make it a mechanical exercise; use it as an opportunity to remember why you liked them the first time, and then really re-connect about something that’s important to you both.

Now, over to you: what do YOU do to follow up with the people you meet at a conference?

~

Photo by J Aaron Farr.

If you’re a fan of informative business webinars, or you just want to get the inside scoop from two of Hoover’s finest, register now for these great upcoming events:

• Wednesday, Feb. 24th — Top 5 Ways to Get Your Sales Team to LOVE Your CRM — Hoover’s VP of Business Development Heidi Tucker knows all the pitfalls that can derail companies’ CRM use — and will teach you how to avoid them. In this session, you’ll learn how to use your CRM system to identify fresh, targeted leads, shorten your sales cycle, and increase customer satisfaction for better retention.
• Thursday, Feb. 25th — Start 2010 Strong: See What’s New at Hoover’s — Hoover’s Director of Marketing Communications Adam Hanin will walk you through the comprehensive upgrades to the content, tools, and functionality that we’ve made to help Hoover’s subscribers build their businesses. Adam will show you how to build targeted marketing campaigns, organize and track the companies that are important to you, and much more!

We hope you’ll make time to join us for one or both of these sessions!

Maybe you don’t need advice for keeping your inbox tidy. Maybe you’re an Inbox Zero devotee from way back. If so, more power to you.

For the rest of us, though, a little bit — or a lot — of Inbox-Fu can come in handy from time to time. To that end, I’m using this post as a landing page for everything I’ve written (and will write?) in the Inbox-Fu vein.

• 25 Feb. 2009 — Ten handy tips to build your inbox-fu.
• 27 Feb. 2009 — 11 Ancient Secrets of the Dragon Claw School of Inbox-Fu
• 9 Mar. 2009 — Inbox-fu: the mystery of ReSaDoTh.
• 11 Jan. 2010 — The Simplest Inbox-Fu of All.

I hope you enjoy it — and I’d be glad if the comments queue here filled up with the tales of your own legendary Inbox-Fu prowess.

What’s your greatest inbox-management exploit?

~

Photo by Martin Kingsley.

That’s what I talked about this week with Matt Krantz of USA Today . . .

IPOs find struggling market a tough go for new stocks

. . . and Emily Thornton of Bloomberg/BusinessWeek . . .

Blackstone IPOs Show Barriers to Returning Fund Cash

Here’s my take on the IPO market in a nutshell:

• It has lost some momentum since the 4th quarter of 2009. There’s still plenty of time in February for both filings and actual market debuts to pick up, but filings peaked in December and debuts were fewer in December and January than they were in September, October, or November.
• Most of the offerings coming to market are small — less than $250 million.
• We’ve seen more downward re-pricings and delayed offerings for IPO aspirants. (Lynn Cowan of Dow Jones covers these like a hawk.)
• The weather for IPOs seems to have gotten worse as the broader stock markets have slid this year.
• In general, it seems that investors are grappling with a new IPO pricing calculus growing out of (a) a slow, uneven, and jobless recovery; (b) a lower tolerance for risk among investors; and (c) an unwillingness by investors to stomach debt-laden balance sheets from private-equity owned IPO aspirants. (For more on the last point, see this item from the New York Times DealBook.)

For all the specifics of filings, debuts, pricing, and so on, check out Hoover’s IPO Central.

~

Related posts:

• 22 Jan. 2010 — My thoughts on the IPO market.
• 6 Nov. 2009 — The IPO drumbeat continues.
• 20 Sept. 2009 — More of my IPO opinions, in long and short form.
• 24 Aug. 2009 — Increased volume and average value of IPO filings in Q3.

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Photo by Bruce Tuten.

In The Shawshank Redemption, the Tim Robbins character petitions the Maine Board of Corrections (or whatever it’s called) to start a library in the prison where he’s incarcerated. He writes two letters each week, over and over and over, until finally the powers-that-be send several cases of books to the prison with a plea that he stop writing all those letters.

The joke is that he increases the frequency of the letters, to three per week, until finally the authorities break down and build a proper library for the inmates.

Some sellers are like that. In fact, many very successful sellers are like that. They don’t take “No” for an answer. But when does it go too far?

I’m thinking of this because of an e-mail that landed in my inbox the other day. It was short and sweet — just 32 words, one link, and the seller’s signature. It was also polite: the sender opened with a nice greeting wishing me well, and remembered to say “please.”

But it also asked that I tell the salesperson a convenient time when I have a few minutes to talk, and then told me to take a minute to follow the link and read a press release.

Okay, fair enough, I get it — everybody’s got to make a living. This seller couldn’t know how I loathe talking on the phone when I can avoid it, and maybe doesn’t realize just how overrun I am with press releases every day. Fine.

But the seller could know, and should know, what I said in response to their last solicitation e-mail a few months back. Here’s the whole thing:

Hi, [Salesperson]–

In hopes of saving time for us both, I’m going to beg off. Two reasons:

(1) We have a [Company X's stock-in-trade] solution in place, and there’s zero chance that we’ll be changing from it.

(2) We have no budget for bringing on new [Company X's other product line] tools, and this will be the case for at least several quarters.

I appreciate your time and attention to us, but we’re just not a prospect for [Company X] for 2009 or 2010.

Best regards,

Tim

I have a ton of respect for sellers. It takes a special skill set and a lot of tenacity, and in fact a big pool of Hoover’s own customers are salespeople. I go out of my way to emphasize this because I don’t mind being contacted by salespeople in general, and my experiences with this particular seller have been cordial.

But now I’m not feeling so cordial. I’m feeling like my earlier message was ignored. When I wrote it, I genuinely was trying to save time for us both. Why string the seller along, much less waste my own time doing it, when we’re simply not in the market?

So, salespeople in the audience, you tell me: am I just being a curmudgeon, or is this seller making a mistake by contacting me now?

I really don’t know.

~

Image source.

Two ideas have run into each other for me this week:

Two Lists You Should Look at Every Morning
(by Peter Bregman, writing at Harvard Business Review)

+

Our big new platform release

===

Time to rethink my work priorities.

Bregman’s idea is timeless: you should know what you’re focusing on, AND you should stay alert about which tempting-but-secondary things belong on your “Ignore List.” (Among others, he’s channelling Peter Drucker here.)

Any occasion to review and revise these lists could be a good one, but at the beginnings of new projects, new jobs, new responsibilities — those are the axial periods when it’s particularly worthwhile. What got you to the last milestone in your work might not get you to the next one. It might be time to add or subtract from either your Focus List or your Ignore List. In fact, you might even be surprised to find out that something previously on your Ignore List ought to move over to your Focus List.

The moral of the story: don’t lose ANY ripe opportunity to THINK about your work. We’re not robots, and for all that we gravitate to routine, we ought to be ready at any time to use our best-quality thinking to drive our decisions about how we will spend our precious attention.

When do YOU review your areas of focus and areas to ignore?

~

Image by Anderson Mancini.

That is the question. Please let us know by answering our poll below:

(If the poll doesn’t render correctly, you can answer via this link.)

Many months of work by hundreds of people across Hoover’s have com to fruition for our customers: today we began migrating our subscribers to the new Hoover’s site.

Over the coming weeks we’ll be moving all of our customers to this new platform, which offers a wealth of new features, plus enhancements to existing tools. (Don’t worry — we’ll give you plenty of warning when it’s your turn to make the move.)

I won’t take the space here to tell you about all of the improvements, but here are some highlights:

• Many more company and contact records: you’ll now be able to get information on more than 65 million enterprises and 85 million people worldwide.
• CRM-style tools to help you manage and track your customers and prospects.
• Simpler record layouts, with quick and easy navigation to any part of any record.
• An enhanced List Builder tool that lets you find relevant records using more criteria than ever.
• Improved Competitive Landscape tools, complete with customizable financial charts and graphs.

All of us at Hoover’s are excited to bring these improvements to our customers. Speaking personally, I’m also eager to see some of the inventive things that our customers do with these new capabilities as they drive their businesses forward despite the soft economy.

You’ll hear plenty more about our new platform in weeks to come, but for now, let me emphasize just two things:

• If you weren’t sure about subscribing to Hoover’s before, we think this new launch will convince you to join us. And if you’re already a customer, prepare yourself for the best Hoover’s experience you’ve ever had.
• If you have any questions about the new site, its capabalities, your timetable for migration, or whatever else, please don’t hesitate to ask a question in the comments here,  via Twitter, or by any of our customer support channels.

Stay tuned — there’s lots more to come.