Most CRM implementations fail. This is a fact. Look it up.
In my years in the industry, I’ve worked with many vendors on the consulting side to help reduce the possibility of CRM failure. While there is a whole host of reason that failure occurs, I have a very unique perspective into one of those reasons. The Nature of Contact Information.
The nature of contact information is fairly finite (i.e. Company, URL, Name, Title, Email, Phone, Social Network membership, etc). In addition, the concept of contact information is a simple one to grasp. It is so simple, in fact, that if often gets overlooked.
One of the most important concepts in business is “be brilliant at the basics”. If you are brilliant at your basics many more complex processes will fall naturally into place. So how are you treating contact information?
The miss-handling of contact information can lead to dire consequences across your company.
Take the following work flow as an example:
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I blog when I am inspired and I blog when I am mad
Today I am mad… and I figured I would give an education to those people who just don’t get it. Listen up oh ye job posting spammers.
Here is the problem: 10-15 years ago, someone profited from sending mass emails to every contact they had an email for. What did they send? A job posting or a candidate.
This was not a common thing, “back in the day”. So it worked, and a handful of people made a bunch of placements due to an enhanced network reach and the wonders of email.
Please be a student of history here. Follow this logic
Things change. New technology usage of any type tends to be simple and adopted by the few. Next, the technology gets wider adoption and it gets more specialized, due to changing needs. So sending 1000 people your candidate or job posting (henceforth “blasting”) worked 10 years ago, but today it adds to noise and has reduced impact.
Today, I got “twitter spammed”. Someone I added to my network, posted a bunch of job postings to their account. I was following them so the entire first page on my iPhone was filled with their postings.
I am no-longer following him. In fact, I removed just about everyone I was following, and will only adding people that don’t do the “pizza post”. What is a pizza post? It is when someone has nothing better to do than tell every detail of their life. Even if they have great thoughts sometimes, I refuse to follow anyone who used the medium for the drab and uninteresting… give me ideas and make me think!
Back to job order sharing and candidate blasting. The problem is that if you do this despicable act, you are part of the problem, creating noise, creating spam, LinkedIN spam, twitterSpam, etc.
Here is how to do blasting right.
- Build a solid network of OPTS-IN that want to accept candidates or open Job Orders.
- Build a strong network of people in your field, you will have better luck sending to a targeted group of 25 than a mass spam of 1000.
- DO NOT assume that because someone is connected to you on a social network (ie LinkedIN) that they want to get blasts from you. THIS IS NOT OK.
- If you want to use Twitter, create a separate account for blasting.
- Use a network that is highly specialized for blasting. Don’t use a medium like LinkedIN unless you are in a group specifically for sharing of Jobs and Candidates.
- Actually TALK to people that are in your network. If you are to do business with them, adding that human element sooner rather than later will help make you a better partner.
- If you are one of the people that gets a blast and did not opt-in. Remove them from your social network
There is so much possibility in candidate and job order splits, if done right.
For vendors creating new offerings in this space (taking advantage of existing social networks)
- Think your model through so you don’t add more noise for all of us
- Understand that people are best served if they can separate the blasting from their social network personas
- Give your users the tools to be targeted.
- Above all, make sure your venue has some sort of opt-in
A few months ago, I suggested to Reid Hoffman, Founder of LinkedIN to create a “flag” in LinkedIN that told you when a message was mass-mailed. This should be very simple for them to implement. If someone sends THE SAME message out to over 50 people on LinkedIN, the “mass-mailed” flag is set. This would give LinkedIN users the ability to immediately (1) delete the offending email and (2) remove that person from your network
Reid replied that they were looking at such an option already. Sure. I’m still getting spam Reid. Spam is good for LinkedIN, I would be surprised and impressed if they added the feature.
So here is an idea for someone to build a useful service:
-Create a system that you can forward a linkedIN (or any social network) spam message to
-Pick some reasonable threshold. If any one person is reported over that threshold they go on a “block list”
-Create a LinkedIN application that automatically deletes those messages
SocialSpam.com domain is available;)
I will give a $10,000 coupon/bounty, good for any Broadlook software, to anyone who builds this application.
I really hate spam.
In 2002, I was excited to get phone calls or even emails from anyone. My company was a start-up. 2 guys in a office with a dog and a bunch of computer servers.
Today it is different. Perhaps I am partly to blame. My contact information is on the Broadlook website, I’m the registration contact for 100’s of domains, and I freely put all my contact information into my email signature.
And…yes, my company, Broadlook, makes software that pulls information from the Internet to empower sales and recruiting professionals. Again, I am guilty, but having my contact information is not an excuse to sell badly to me.
Here is a secret: I love being sold to. Truly being sold to means that somebody has done their homework, looked at my needs, my company needs and has a solution to my pain. To save those hundreds of sales reps time, I’ve decided to (1) define the rules of engagement of how to sell to me and (2) post them on my corporate bio. If you follow the rules, I promise I will respond. It may be an email that only says “no thank you”. Or try me next quarter, but if you take the time, I will take the time.
I like the transparency of establishing the rules of engagement. When I passed this idea by a few of my peers, leaders in both small and large companies, they all liked the idea of establishing the engagement rules and being transparent. My rules are not the next persons rules; they are mine. Everyone should craft their own and make them transparent. If more people did this, selling would be so much more efficient and enjoyable, for both sides. Imagine that!
In order to sell at a high level, you need more than an email address. Perhaps having Broadlook’s lead generation tools at my disposal for the last 7 years has spoiled me. When I reach out to someone, I know something about them and I always personalize my message.
I titled this blog verbosely so people looking to sell to me would find it. SEO stuff. We’ll see where it lands…
Rules to sell to Donato Diorio
- Get my name right. I can see how people mistake my first name for a last name, but it’s not brain surgery. It shows respect.
- Personalize. I will not respond to a mass emails. Period.
- Understand what my company (Broadlook) does. Can you believe that there is some idiot out there that keeps trying to sell me a list of recruiting firms? Talk about selling ice to an Eskimo.
- Show me that I am special. Customize your sales pitch for my company. Don’t use generalities. Research what my company does and ask me good questions. I don’t have a burning need to seek others approval, but if you take the time to tell me.
- Call and email. You will probably get voice mail, but I will listen to it. The email will give me your contact information if I like what I hear. Tell me you will also be sending me an email. Be articulate, gosh, I’m sorry, but if your accent is so heavy that I have to listen to your voice mail a few times to understand it, it will get deleted at the very beginning.
- In your voice mail, say your phone number two times. Give me a chance to write it down if I like what I hear.
- Don’t use a voice mail script. If you do, you are not at the level yet to successfully sell to me. Try again next year.
- Don’t use a negative sell. i.e. The economy is bad, and you can help. Bad for who? Do your homework. I’m an optimist. I love hanging up on pessimists. Realists welcome.
- Know your product inside out. If you can’t answer nearly all my questions, you should not be reaching out to me. Have you manager or top sales rep do it.
- Don’t call me if someone else at my company makes the decision. I don’t make the decisions on office supplies.
- Did I mention… get my name right?
Here is the email that put me over the top to write this blog. It was nth in a series, polite but impersonal. I will not be working with this company.
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Dear Danato, (got my name wrong)
Hope you are doing fine. (does he really?) (the DELETE button was pressed when my eyes hit this line)
This is with reference to my previous mail dated 4th March 2009. (reminding me of his spam) I hope you have received it. I eagerly await your reply as I look forward to exploring a potential business opportunity with your company , which I am sure would prove to be mutually beneficial. (he has no clue what Broadlook does)
Please let me know your interest and your availability for a short introductory call at a time that would best suit your schedule. During the call, I would primarily like to introduce XXXXXXXXX, our services, capabilities and address any specific queries that you may have.
Eagerly awaiting your reply. (and 50,000 others he spammed)
Thanks and best regards,
XXXX
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There has been a recent rise of the term “Boolean blackbelt”, while I am not familiar, specifically, with all the people stating to be a a boolean black belt, I wanted to add some perspective.
“Boolean Blackbelt”, may be a great marketing phrase, but it is the equivalent of saying “basic math blackbelt” or “kindergarden green beret”
Why? because Boolean is extremely simple. It is the basis for logic which includes logical operators AND, OR, NOT, and XOR (exclusive OR).
I do know some people out there that would qualify as “search string black belts” and what they do is a combination of understanding boolean logic along with the myriad of Internet sources. They have vast knowledge of the process of search. The magic they bring is not the boolean, it is the business process and understanding. What they do is tweak out the special commands allowed by the search engines, like Google, MS Live. Shally Steckerl and Glenn Gutmacher from Job Machine are examples of masters they are “beyond boolean”.
So please, hold the angry emails, I am not knocking the “black belts” out there, I think they are actually selling their skills short. My goal is to add clarity that being good in boolean may take few minutes. Being good at the complex search commands available in the search engines may take a few days to learn. To know HOW to apply the search fundamentals means you must understand and live with all the sources of information that are available. Search engines, blogs, social networks, etc. To know all that requires total immersion.
What is beyond boolean? Remember, boolean equates to: AND, OR, NOT, OR. Some popular search engine commands include: NEAR, Site, inURL.
(By the way, I just checked the domain: beyondBoolean.com is available!). Who is going to be beyondboolean?
What is beyond boolean? What is missing? Here are some that we have developed at Broadlook. We call it, what else, “broadlean”. The next major versions of Broadlook product engines will be supporting it (some already do). I would like to hear from the searchologists (i prefer that term), what else would you like to see in the broadlean specification?
WARNING!!!!! – The rest of this blog is for the tech geeks out there. If you don’t know your way around a search engine, STOP HERE!
Here are some BROADLEAN commands:
SS: Same sentance as
SP: Same paragraph as
SC: Same concept as
PERSON:
CORP:
DATE:
EVENT:
SS, SP, SC are operators. PERSON, CORP, DATE, EVENT are what we call entity operators.
example usage:
“Project manager” SS PERSON – find all pages that mention the term “project manager” in the same sentance as a person. The value here is that you don’t have to know the person’s name to succeed with your search.
Google, MS Live, Yahoo are all toys when it comes to weeding through results. I am excited to see the technology that comes out over the next few years in terms of targeting results. What fun!
Shorter domain names are better. One syllable words are simple, short, and memorable. This weekend I was looking for a domain name for a new project I was working on. Everything I initially tried was taken. What I did know was that I wanted to add a one syllable word to the end of my “anchor word”. It had nothing to do with recruiting, but for this example, I will use the anchor word RECRUIT.
I needed to create a repeatable, semi automated process to conquer this task. Here is what I did:
1. Create a list of one-syllable words. One of Broadlook’s software engineers, Kevin, had developed an algorithm to do this. It is a great thing when you have a team with 7 years of software code to pull off the shelf.
2. Pass this list of one-syllable words past a good set of text to get a frequency count. Kevin suggested to run it past the Brown Corpus. It was a good idea. Once I had a frequency count, I could remove words of very low frequency from the list. The end result was about 6100 one-syllable words
3. Build a simple Excel spreadsheet. The spreadsheet allows me to type in a single word and it will create about 6100 lines of potential domain names. You can get this spreadsheet here at a site I set up.
4. In batches of 500, paste them into GoDaddy’s bulk registration system. All the domains that are already registered will be culled out of the results.
If you are looking for a domain name in the recruiting space, you can try RecruitWho.com, RecruitGo.com or RecruitGun.com. All of these domains were available as of this writing. Below is the full list of 5700 available domain names starting with the word RECRUIT. Within this list are some good domains, and many very bad ones. They are listed in the order of occurrence of the word in the English language, starting with “the” being the most used. While this may seem daunting, check your premises. Try manually thinking up a domain name, checking if it is available, and trying again, again and again vs. looking through this list. This way is much faster. If someone picks one from this list, let me know, I’d love to hear that I saved you time. Go get em!
RECRUIT THE.COM
RECRUIT OF.COM
RECRUIT AND.COM
RECRUIT TO.COM
RECRUIT THAT.COM
RECRUIT IS.COM
RECRUIT WAS.COM
RECRUIT HE.COM
RECRUIT FOR.COM
RECRUIT HIS.COM
RECRUIT BE.COM
RECRUIT AT.COM
RECRUIT BY.COM
RECRUIT HAD.COM
RECRUIT NOT.COM
RECRUIT ARE.COM
RECRUIT BUT.COM
RECRUIT FROM.COM
RECRUIT HAVE.COM
RECRUIT THEY.COM
RECRUIT AN.COM
RECRUIT WHICH.COM
RECRUIT WERE.COM
RECRUIT SHE.COM
RECRUIT WE.COM
RECRUIT THERE.COM
RECRUIT WOULD.COM
RECRUIT THEIR.COM
RECRUIT BEEN.COM
RECRUIT HAS.COM
RECRUIT WHEN.COM
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