I had never really put much thought into the methodology behind having a good Coachella experience – I have always gone with my sister and a few other friends, and it’s been inherently fun. However, this year I couldn’t help but notice how my experiences camping at Coachella are a lot like the outbound prospecting and sales I do at FullContact.

The 5 basic lessons below are things I stick to at work – and I saw them in action during my weekend of meeting new people at the festival.

1) Generating Leads

At Coachella, you can either camp on-site or elect to stay in a nice hotel/condo somewhere in the area.

Camping is an interesting cross-section of festival attendees with similar interests who are willing to forgo creature comforts for the sake of being closer to the music. The campgrounds open on Thursday (the day before the festival starts) to allow campers to get settled in.

There are tricks to successful camping at Coachella: you come with a lot of ice, water, and beer (no glass). You bring food that is non-perishable and lots of snacks. Most importantly, you mentally prepare to make friends while probably not showering or getting much sleep for four days straight.

I’ve camped all four years at Coachella, and mostly – other than ease and proximity to the music – I love the atmosphere and culture. It feels like a community. Fellow campers will inevitably have something you forgot to bring (like toothpaste), know of a great band you had previously never heard of (Lord Huron), and may have even brought their living room loveseat from San Diego. There are lots of opportunities to make new friends.

Lead generation is essential to making a sale – and there’s no better way to generate leads than to position yourself where the leads are. Go to events, read industry specific material, be social. It’s like dropping yourself in the middle of the Coachella campsite – there are people with common interests and goals; you just have to approach them.

2) Reaching Out

Inside the campsite there is a farmer’s market, craft stands, yoga classes, and DJ booths. The number of people and activities is almost overwhelming. Who should I talk to? What should I do first?

Just like in sales when we start with a seemingly endless list of leads – the best thing is to just jump in and get started. Results will never come if you don’t take that initial action.

In this case, the first people my sister and I talked to were my neighbors. Although they were also there to enjoy the music, they were much older than us and had a different schedule planned. We knew we wouldn’t be hanging out all weekend – and that was okay.

The second people I talked to were the neighbors on the other side: a group of sorority girls from USC who had a tricked-out campsite complete with a hammock and a grill. Good people to be neighbors with, but not necessarily people I wanted to spend the weekend with.

The third group of people I talked to because they were playing the song Happy by C2C at their campsite when I walked by on my way to the music tent (C2C is a French DJ group that is just gaining traction stateside). When I stopped to tell them I liked the song choice, they offered me a drink – I knew they were my type of people.

The most important part about prospecting is not being afraid to reach out, time and time again, until you find a good fit for you and the customer. REMEMBER: not everyone will be a good fit. I had to talk to two groups of people before I found a good fit for friends at Coachella. Don’t waste the prospect’s and your time by forcing something that just won’t work.

3) Overcoming Indifference

This particular group of “prospects” were college and grad students from San Diego and were around the same age as me. When I met them, they already had a group of seven people who were close knit and did not necessarily benefit from adding more people. (Bummer). However, I could offer more beer, food, buddies for shows, and most importantly in the desert – a cooler full of water and ice. This is like gold in a place where a bag of ice costs $20 and will melt in minutes outside of a cooler. This was my unique value proposition. It was what I offered (other than being generally awesome).

Value propositions: different things for different people.

We talked for a while and quickly found we had the same concerts on our radar and conflicts in set times.

In sales, once a good lead is generated and qualified, you must position your product to highlight the value for the client – why they need it. Some prospects won’t know that they will benefit from what you have to offer. It’s your job to show them.

Don’t let indifference be intimidating – it should be treated as an opportunity to showcase your product. At FullContact, for instance, this may be as simple as highlighting the reasonable cost of our Person API vs. the much higher cost of an additional salaried employee to do the work.

4) Asking for the Sale

So I had introduced myself based on a common interest or hotspot (Coachella, C2C) and proposed my value while gaining rapport (beer, friends, music knowledge, and a cooler full of ice and water).

What do I from here? Should I say thank you for the drink and leave? Should I continue to hang out? Should I ask for their phone numbers and plan to meet up the next day?

I decided to get their phone numbers, and made plans to go to the C2C show with them the next day. I asked for the sale and set expectations for a follow up.

This can be the hardest part in a sales job. You might become buddy buddy with someone and genuinely like them – but if you don’t ask them to pay for your product, you have wasted your time. Don’t be afraid to ask for the sale. The worst thing that can happen is that they say no.

5) Selling After the Sale

In the end, I ended up spending most of the weekend with my new friends from San Diego. We went to the C2C show, and then continued to hang out.

Over the weekend, the group that started with the seven San Diegans, my sister and I grew (and probably doubled). There was always at least one person available to go to a show with, to get a drink with, or to just wander around Coachella. We even made friends with some Swedes.

Initial success won’t make a company. You can’t stop selling when the deal is closed. You need to retain customers while continuing to gain more. If I had never shown up for C2C or stopped talking to them after that I wouldn’t have ended up with a large and fun group of people. Just like in business, keeping customers happy and having them reccomend you can be the best marketing.

The key here is that things we do naturally to interact in groups can be vital to success in a sales role. You just have to keep putting yourself out there and trusting your product (and yourself). You will inevitably be successful if you do – even if it takes a few bumps in the road to get there.

5 Things Outbound Sales Reps Can Learn from Coachella

Recently, many of our API users have asked for FullContact to ensure that social profile image links returned via the Person API are always accessible. And you’ve also asked that we provide secure access to those images.

We heard you.

FullContact is pleased to announce that we now cache all Person API contact photos along with the rest of a contact’s information. When querying the Person API, you no longer need to worry about links to photos expiring or being unavailable due to 3rd party website outages, or using insecure links to access contact photos.

How do these changes benefit API Users?

Because FullContact now caches contact images, as a developer, you’ll see a change in the image URLs returned in Person API responses. Rather than returning an insecure URL to an image for a social networking site, the Person API now returns a secure (HTTPS) link to resources – all of which are now hosted on FullContact’s cloud infrastructure.

(Don’t worry – there’s no change to the FullContact Person API Response Schema, which would necessitate changing code on your side. Everything on your end can stay the same.)

To give you an example, when retrieving a contact from the Person API in JSON format, if the contact has a Facebook account, the former response used to contain a URL for an image on Facebook’s servers for the contact’s photo:

"photos": 
[
  {
    "url": "http://profile.ak.fbcdn.net/hprofile-ak-snc4/41508_651620441_4210927_n.jpg",
    "typeId": "facebook",
    "typeName": "Facebook",
    "isPrimary": true
  }
]

But there were problems with this approach. If the contact deactivated their account on the 3rd party social network – or if the social network site changed the way they were storing images – or if the 3rd party site had an outage, the link would fail.

So we decided to change things. Now, the Person API returns a URL value for social profile photo links that looks like this:

"photos": 
[
  {
    "url":"https://d2ojpxxtu63wzl.cloudfront.net/static/76fa9f05dce661f3dfbff6c2ea680cd7_c3360fe21ad70bde88addb0517369e17b6de0d94b85268e20688deda96d6b0a9",
    "typeId": "facebook",
    "typeName": "Facebook",
    "isPrimary": true
    }
]

The URL now returned is secure, so it can be incorporated into secure Web pages – eliminating annoying (and concerning) web browser warnings for the end user.

The image is also hosted in FullContact’s cloud infrastructure, so it takes full advantage of the extremely high availability of Amazon CloudFront – you’re no longer held hostage to outages or rate limits imposed by 3rd party systems. No more broken links, no more security warnings and no more “faded photographs!”

Give Us your Feedback

This improvement was a direct result of feedback from our awesome API developer community. FullContact values all feedback from our API developers – and we want to hear from you! What other improvements to the FullContact APIs would you like to see?

Please visit our API Developer Feedback Forum to submit your ideas (and vote on ideas submitted by others).

Happy coding!

FullContact Person API Images Get an Upgrade

During the FullContact Address Book private beta, one of the most requested features has been the ability to import LinkedIn contacts into FullContact.

Message received.

Today we’re pleased to announce FullContact users can now import and manage their LinkedIn contacts using their FullContact address books. If you’re a current FullContact Beta user, you’ll now see this feature appear in your account along with already-present integrations like Google Contacts, Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare.

Why LinkedIn?

It’s easy to see why our users want to import LinkedIn contacts into their address books.

LinkedIn is HUGE.

As the biggest online professional networking service, LinkedIn ended last year with approximately 202 million users. LinkedIn is also well-positioned to experience continued growth in the future. At FullContact, we view your LinkedIn contact data as an important part of your address book, so this integration was a natural step towards accomplishing our larger goal of solving the world’s contact information problem.

How Our LinkedIn Import Works

Our LinkedIn integration allows you to periodically import your LinkedIn contacts in a few short steps. It’s quick and easy, and it allows FullContact to pull in the following pieces of information from your LinkedIn contacts:

• Name
• Title
• Company or Organization
• Email Address

Of note, you can edit these details in FullContact, but your changes will not be sent to LinkedIn. Like most social networks, LinkedIn contacts are read-only – you wouldn’t want someone else editing your LinkedIn page, would you?

Once your LinkedIn contacts are in your FullContact address book, you can add new information to contacts that isn’t present in or can’t be imported from LinkedIn, such as phone numbers, additional email addresses, physical addresses and more.

Periodically, we will prompt you to refresh your LinkedIn contacts to make sure new contacts and updated information are captured in FullContact. Currently, we are unable to automatically refresh your LinkedIn contacts on a regular basis due to LinkedIn’s terms of use. This should not be an inconvenience for the vast majority of users, as the import is a quick process.

Get Started!

For current users, you can find instructions here. Once you’ve set it up, let us know what you think!

If you’re still on our beta wait-list, we’ll send you an invite as soon as it’s ready. Rest assured, we’re building great things while you wait!

More Integrations Are On the Way

And we’re not done…we’ve only begun to integrate.

At FullContact, we have an extensive roadmap for future integrations. We want you to be able to pull in all of your contacts – wherever they may be – and manage them in one easy-to-use application.

What other integrations would you like us to build? In the app, you can view a collection of possible integrations and submit your vote. You can also go to our feedback forum and submit your ideas and votes there.

Thanks for using FullContact!

FullContact Address Book – Now With LinkedIn Import

If you’re in sales or business development (or even if you’re just an everyday person doing something like buying a house), you know it: trying to e-sign documents is a royal pain. Who wants to go through the hassle of printing/scanning/emailing/faxing? (And that’s if you can even find a fax machine these days.)

Most online providers aren’t much better. You have your choice of a few different enterprise electronic signature software packages that each require you to jump through a lot of hoops…and then only work half the time.

What most people don’t know is that you can quickly sign documents using Google Drive/Google Docs without any of the above hassle. If you’re using Gmail or a Google Apps account, check out this quick hack. You’ll be glad you did:

…and that’s pretty much all there is to it. Happy e-signing!

Got an idea for a marketing tool, app, or tip we should feature on the Two-Minute Drill? Let us know in the comments!

Two-Minute Drill – How to Add a Digital Signature to a Google Doc

I have a confession to make. I don’t love social media. At times, I loathe it.

This might seem ironic since I work at FullContact, but I’m mildly introverted and the concept of sharing my life (or hearing every minute detail of others’) bothers me. I use social media reluctantly because I know it’s where the winds of society are blowing. No sense burying my head in the sand.

That said, there can be great value in social media. I have smart friends and colleagues who read interesting articles, explore the world, and share valuable insights. For many friends who live far away, I would have no connection if it weren’t for social media. Furthermore, some people in my network employ Twitter and Facebook to great professional effect. My realtor and dentist both use social media to share useful information and stay relevant as service providers.

So, as a professional, how do you make good use of social media when you dislike it?

Here’s a quick and dirty (and completely optional) guide to finding value in social media without letting it take over your life. It won’t work for everyone, but it’s helped me save some time.

NOTE: If you’re a social media lover, STOP READING NOW. I’ll just anger you. Open up Twitter and see what’s trending.

“Ahhh, that’s better.”

1. Find a Good Reader

Before you can share content on social media, you need a good place to aggregate inbound content. Now that Google Reader is being axed, my personal favorites are Flipboard for iPad and Feedly for the web. There are plenty of options, so pick one that works for you. I like Feedly because it has a clean interface and integrates with Buffer (more on this below). A good reader will allow you to plow through your inbound content in dedicated blocks of time, like weekend mornings. I personally don’t like Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn as my sole news feed, since it’s harder to categorize and segregate content, and you can’t avoid the annoying advertisements.

2. Identify Reliable Sources of Useful Content

Social media lovers, I thought I told you to stop reading. Seriously, you’re not going to like what is coming. Continue at your peril.

On a rainy day, take an hour and add key sources of professional content to your reader, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. For example, I follow 5-10 tech blogs that do a reliable job of creating valuable content, as well as various thought leaders. I also follow sources of interest to my personal network, such as my hometown sports page, the police and fire department, the local business journal, and other community institutions.

The test should be, “Do I find myself talking about this source in verbal conversation?” If so, try it out and see if the content is worth sharing. If you’re interested, similar people in your network will be too.

3. Time-Box Your Reading

You mean I have to read more than 140 characters?

Yes. It’s what you’re doing right now, and it’s a dying art.

I check social media on my iPad in the morning as I’m eating breakfast, which provides a convenient hard stop after 20 minutes. In that time, I can catch up on most activity from the day before. After that, I try to avoid checking during the day. On busy days, I might check my feeds after work, but I avoid doing so late at night due to the adverse effect of backlit screens on sleep. If you’re not careful, you can build up an addiction to checking social media. Just because it releases dopamine and makes you feel good, doesn’t mean it’s adding anything to your life.

4. Use an App to Schedule Your Sharing

Schedule my sharing? What?

Yes, that means social media lovers will have to do something productive during the day rather than tweet your every thought and Instagram your every meal.

There’s no reason to spend hours logging in to different social networks and posting content, especially when you want to post the same thing in several places. There are several apps out there that allow you to queue content in one place for future posting on multiple networks. For example, Buffer builds a queue of content and later posts it where you want, according to a schedule that you set ahead of time. I generally plow through all of my reading in a few sessions per week. As I’m reading, I add items to my Buffer queue. No manual posting necessary.

5. Pick Good Times To Post

You mean every second of the day isn’t a good time to post?

Yes, that’s exactly what I mean. Why are you still reading?

You might Tweet the most amazing thing your network has ever heard, but if you do it at 4 A.M., you’ve wasted a post. Much ink has been spilled on the most effective times to post on social media, so I won’t try to beat that analysis. You can use a service like RetweetLab that will tell you what the best times are for your particular account, as well as provide other useful stats.

6. Delete Phone Apps

This is where you social media lovers who didn’t heed my earlier warning will get really mad. I warned you not to read on. Run along now.

As in healthy eating, sometimes you just need to get the junk food out of the fridge. Do you really need to check Twitter while you’re sitting at a stoplight? How about stealing a glance at Facebook during dinner with friends? It just contributes to a short attention span and annoys your friends – and that’s before Facebook Home arrives. Even as a reluctant social media user, I found myself checking Twitter and Facebook for no good reason. Just because I was bored. So I ditched the phone apps entirely. Out of sight, out of mind. Plus, you’ll save data and battery life.

But don’t delete them from all your devices, which brings us to…

7. Segregate Your Devices

Like many people, I tend to use different devices for different purposes. I mostly use my laptop for work, since typing on a tablet is suboptimal. I use my phone for quick searches, GPS, and on-the-go activities. Lastly, I use my iPad for entertainment and reading. For that reason, I dedicated my iPad to entertainment, pleasure reading, and social media. All other apps got the boot. On the other hand, I removed every app from my laptop that didn’t relate to work. Same goes for my phone and truly on-the-go tasks.

The benefit here is that you won’t be tempted to check your Facebook or Twitter while you are working or on the go (say, at a traffic light). Your social media time will be limited to when you’re using the device that is dedicated to personal activities.

8. Slash and Burn

I’m not talking about the famous corporate raiders of the 1980’s. Rather, I’m talking about periodically curating your incoming content. If the people and sources you follow are not regularly adding value or making you laugh, unfollow or hide them. Would you keep talking to someone at a party if all they did was self-promote? Probably not.

You can also set an upper limit for number of people you follow, say 100 or 200. If you have less content in your feed, you’ll come closer to reading all your traffic in a short period of time, which gives you a feeling of accomplishment. You can’t possibly follow everything relevant that’s out there, so focus on sources that reliably deliver the goods.

FullContact (now in beta) can help you figure out where you can make cuts. By linking up your Twitter, Facebook, and other social accounts, you can see which networks have the most engaging friends on them. By taking a quick look at the numbers, you can determine which social network will help you get the most bang for your buck.

9. Re-Evaluate What Your Network Cares About

You mean my network doesn’t care about everything I have to say?

Wait, you’re still here?

You might find yourself wondering, “So I’m sharing all this content, but is anyone reading it?” There are ways to test. For example, you can create a Bit.ly account and link it to your Buffer account. Bit.ly shortens your links (giving you more room in your Tweets) and tracks how many people click on those links. That way, you can go back and look at your last month of posts and see what was useful for your network.

10. Take a Digital Sabbath

The crashing sound you just heard is the sound of all the social media lovers collectively passing out and hitting the floor.

One of our investors, Brad Feld, recently blogged about the value of a Digital Sabbath – basically, a day where you ditch all your electronic devices. His post resonated with me, so I’m starting my own sabbath this weekend. Before, when I’ve done this unintentionally, I’ve always found myself refreshed, focused, and energetic to dive back in afterward. Unless you turn it all off for a while and remind yourself that there’s a world out there beyond your inbox, newsfeeds, and the coffee machine at work, it’s easy to lose perspective.

Remember, it’s okay to be a social media hater, just as long as you don’t ignore the value hidden behind all those cat videos and Instagram pictures of trendy meals.

Good luck, and Godspeed out there in the Twitterverse.

The Hater’s Guide to Social Media

This week’s 2-Minute Drill focuses on Mention – an awesome app to let you track online mentions of your company or brand.

But wait, you say. I already use Google Alerts for that.

And you’re right. You can use Google Alerts for this type of thing.

So why should I change now?

Because Mention beats it out in a ton of ways:

Where Mention really shines is its interface (which is top-notch, and includes an iPhone app, Android app, web app, and Mac/PC/Linux desktop apps). Additionally, unlike Google Alerts, you can monitor online mentions in near-real time – which is a pretty useful feature if you’re looking to stay engaged with your target market.

Lastly, let’s be honest – we probably all use Google Analytics, Gmail, and about 20 other Google products. But after the demise of Google Reader, do you really want to keep relying on Google for all of your marketing and business intelligence? Neither do we.

Take a look at Mention:

Want to try it out? Head over to Mention and sign up for free. You’ll be glad you did.

Got an idea for a marketing tool, app, or tip we should feature on the Two-Minute Drill? Let us know in the comments!

Two-Minute Drill – How to Track Mentions of Your Brand

Lately you can’t turn around without getting hit in the face by another article or blog post talking about how enterprise is the new big thing in tech startups. The articles run the gamut of proclaiming that consumer plays are dead and enterprise is king, to enterprise has already jumped the shark, and even some really good content on how to do enterprise sales from Mark Suster (here, here, and here).

But most of these articles are doing a disservice to startups that are making something other than a consumer focused product because they are completely misusing the term enterprise. The term they should be using is Business-to-Business, or B2B.

What’s the big deal, right? Everyone knows that enterprise and B2B are synonymous.

Not even close! Just because you are selling to businesses doesn’t mean you are enterprise.

What’s the Difference?

Enterprise is just a segment of the B2B world and a segment with very different characteristics of other B2B markets. If you are creating or running a B2B company then you need to know if your segment is enterprise or another B2B segment. It is going to affect every part of your go-to-market strategy.

So let’s take a look at the different B2B segments and some key characteristics. The first step is knowing what segment your business will target. You can attack multiple segments, but you will likely need to build different product/team mixes to do it successfully.

In the US the Small Business Administration breaks down the business segments by number of employees, which you can then associate with annual sales. Here are those segments:

I am going to define each segment using three characteristics of your typical sale.

1. Sale Size (Annual): How big is the average sale in annual revenue?
2. Sale Cycle Length: How long does it take you to close a sale?
3. Sale Complexity: How complex is the sale? How many people are involved in the sale?

Obviously there is always going to be some overlap between the segments. There aren’t necessarily hard lines defining each one. The numbers I’m providing are observations based on my experiences selling in the different markets.

For simplicity’s sake let’s pretend that we are looking at these markets through the lens of a tech company with a subscription based product.

Small Business

Sale Size (Annual):

Most deals for Small Businesses are going to be between $1,000 and $10,000 annually. It’s possible to do bigger deals, but those tend to take on the characteristics of a Large Business sale because you are such a large percentage of the customer’s spend.

You will obviously need a higher volume of Small Businesses to build your top line revenue.

Sale Cycle Length:

Most Small Business sales can be closed in less than a month. The sale complexity is low enough and the sale size small enough that your customer can quickly make the decision if they are going to buy.

If your sale cycle gets too long, you are going to run into serious problems because the small size will hamper your growth rate.

Sale Complexity:

Chances are your user, decision maker, and buyer are all the same person. Makes it simple (unless that person sucks). Small Businesses are usually comfortable doing most billing frequencies (monthly/quarterly/annual) and structures (Credit Card or invoice).

Pros:

Can often be done without a traditional sales force (and the traditional sales force expense) through content, SEO, or distribution channels. There is less risk in churn because of the large number of customers you will have.

Cons:

Rapid growth selling to Small Business requires excellent distribution through the web or appropriate channels (marketplaces, partners, etc…). Can be difficult to get immediate effects when you “step on the gas.” If your operating and support costs get too high you can easily eat through your margins.

Summary:

Selling to Small Business is a volume deal with some similarities to consumers. It’s all about having a high enough volume with good enough conversion and churn rates to grow. Lower customer Lifetime Value (LTV) also means your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) budget is lower. Lower cost to enter, but also harder to gain initial significant revenue.

Medium Business

Sale Size (Annual):

Medium business are comfortable buying deals of $10,000-$50,000 annually, or $800-$4,200 monthly. The bigger deal the longer the sales cycle and perhaps more complex the sale.

Sale Cycle Length:

The size of your sale for a Medium Business requires a bit more time for the decision to be made. It also may take multiple touches across multiple channels (email, phone call, maybe visit). If your sales cycle gets much over 3 months, you are going to need a higher volume of opportunities to maintain good revenue growth.

Sale Complexity:

Bigger deal means more people involved in the sale. The user of your product is likely not the decision maker. The decision maker might not even be the buyer. This means you are going to have to engage multiple people through the sales process and might even to frame your offering differently based on their needs.

Medium Business still will be comfortable with most billing frequencies, but be prepared to support invoicing in addition to credit card, especially as the size of the sale gets to the upper limits.

Pros:

You can close individual deals that are starting to be real money without needing to build a large sales organization. Having a great product that meets an identifiable need obviously makes these even easier.

Cons:

You are starting to venture into the deep end of the pool. It can be a balancing act to maintain your standard product and pricing to keep your operating costs down as your customers begin to ask for more concessions and customizations because of how much they are paying.

You’ll probably need to get comfortable reading contracts for the higher end of the spectrum.

Summary:

Medium Businesses are kind of like Mama Bear from Goldilocks. Not too little and not too big, maybe even just right. The problem is there can be some big variance in the types of customers you have going from $10,000 a year to $50,000 a year and you can run into difficulties trying to keep your product and go-to-market strategy aligned with the customers.

A lot of times this means saying no to the extremes of the spectrum in order to maximize your efficiency in the middle.

Large Business

Sale Size (Annual):

$50,000 to $100,000 annually. Starting to talk real money here. But that also means we are starting to talk real issues associated with getting that money.

Sale Cycle Length:

Expect these sales to take 3 to 12 months to close. There are going to be starts and stops and you’ll likely be handed off to different people. A key thing is going to be identifying if your sales cycle is closer to 3 months or 12 months. That will have a big impact on how quickly you must fill your funnel. You also may find your sale tied to the budget cycle (see below)

Sale Complexity:

Welcome to the party. Not only do you need to identify a qualified lead (inbound or outbound) but once your foot is in the door you need to identify the customer’s buying process, who makes the decisions at each step of the process (probability is high that it changes), what their legal requirements are, and how their budget process works.

No, the budget process is not the same as the buying process. You don’t necessarily need to get in the discussion for both, but it definitely helps.

This is also the point that security audits and documented processes usually come up. Some of it is very useful, some of it is junk, but you are going to have to do all of it to close the sale.

Oh yeah, also get used to SLAs with penalties…

Pros:

Close nine $100,000 deals and you are doing $1 million annually. Just nine deals, right?

Cons:

Have you ever tried to get $100,000 from someone? It’s takes a special kind of person to be able to get someone to give them $100,000. And those people tend to not be cheap.

Summary:

Some people lump Large Business into Enterprise, and I would probably agree. It really becomes a matter of degrees at this point. You are going to need to put some serious resources into your sales organization and you should expect some serious results in return.

And don’t expect the high touch factor to end after the sale.

Enterprise

Sale Size (Annual):

Welcome to big game hunting. Enterprise deals usually run at least $100,000 per year and often creep up to and above $1 million per year.

Sale Cycle Length:

Start early because you are in it for the long haul. If you can clear all of the gauntlets in less than 12 months than spend all of your money on hiring more sales people because your product is incredible. The more likely scenario is it will take at least 12 months to close the sale and it might be 18 or 24 months. It’s not unusual for employee turnover to have a big impact on Enterprise sales.

Sale Complexity:

If Medium Businesses are algebra and Large Businesses are calculus then Enterprises are Fourth Order Differential Equations. You might have to deal with people in multiple divisions, subsidiaries, and countries. There also will now be a number of “influencers,” people who have a say but aren’t directly involved in the process. And they might have competing priorities.

Do you know your customer’s key financial metrics? If one of the metrics is EBITDA then you probably don’t want to try and sell them on a MRR model.

You’ll also have the legal requirements, security requirements, and SLAs that go with all of that. On-site demos, customizations, integration support, and dedicated customer support are all part of the standard package.

Pray that your enterprise prospects are in fun places to visit because chances are you will log some miles visiting. It might be for a demo, a chance to deepen a relationship with a key contact, or to beg for the deal at the end of the quarter.

Pros:

One elephant can feed the village for a long time and the head looks awesome on the wall.

Cons:

Big game takes a caliber of sales skills that will cost you more than any developer. You also may run into cases where those hunters are less than loyal to your company. They just kill and will kill for the biggest bidder. Your product needs to be industrial strength or you that huge sale will become a huge daily burden of support.

Summary:

Enterprise sales will always involve a level of relationship building far above the other segments. You’ll see a lot of people disagree with that, but I still firmly believe that the enterprise sales person with the relationship will beat the enterprise sales person without the relationship, even if the latter has some advantages in product and price.

There is huge reward and huge risk in enterprise. You need to make sure that you build your product and team appropriately.

The Enterprise is not necessarily the best ship in the B2B fleet

If you read this and realize that you aren’t doing Enterprise sales, or that you definitely don’t want to be doing Enterprise sales, don’t worry about it. It’s all about making sure that you align your product and go-to-market strategy with the B2B market segment that you want to target.

Each segment offers pros and cons. It also isn’t an all-or-nothing game. You can go after multiple segments, but probably not to start out. Pick one. Build your product and team accordingly. Then when you see success figure out what adjustments you will have to make to attack another. This often means creating completely new teams or products, but it also helps by diversifying your revenue streams.

So next time you hear the word “enterprise,” do not automatically translate it to B2B. Figure out what segment it applies to and apply to your own situation accordingly.

Next we’ll discuss what go-to-markets strategies best align with the different B2B segments above.

Targeting the Enterprise? Think Again.

Very few companies can master all three X’s:

UX = User Experience.  CX = Customer Experience.  BX = Brand Experience.

One of my favorite quotes from Steve Jobs is:

You‘ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology – not the other way around.

I couldn’t agree more with this statement. Often, I think software engineering companies forget about this because we’re so obsessed with conquering difficult technology problems.

FullContact is no stranger to this phenomenon – I wrote openly about our struggles here.

As a result, the past few months I’ve been obsessed with everything UX. I’ve read 6 books on the topic and I’ve talked to dozens and dozens of UX candidates. We’re currently hiring a Director of UX and I feel this new role will be vital to future success at FullContact.

Along the way, I met with Brian Baker and Michael Pastko from The First User. Brian’s firm has been around since 1994 and he’s a renowned UX expert.

Brian recently posted about Four Rules for World Class UX. Please go read it. This blog post will be here when you get back.

I’ve been thinking deeply about these rules in the context of my own thinking about the topic. Here are my thoughts and some expansions on Brian’s ideas:

1. Name a UX Champion for every product you build.

Currently at FullContact, we don’t have a UX Champion. This is what started our search for a Director of UX. Brad Feld pointed this out during a board meeting and wrote about it in this blog post. When Brad asked everyone at FullContact: “Who absolutely owns FullContact’s UX Philosophy?” – nobody’s hand came up.

I am no UX expert. Plus, I’m a big fan of firing myself at every opportunity.

And sure, we had a few people that thought they could own it, but at the end of the day, my gut told me that we didn’t have a killer person who was really schooled in the art and science of UX.

My subsequent search for a killer UX person and exposure to people like Brian and Michael have only reinforced and confirmed this belief.

As a result, we decided to hire a UX Champion.

2. Put the UX Champion in the right spot in your organization

Brian argues that this person should be either be a) on the executive team or b) a stakeholder with an executive mandate.

This is something I’ve been thinking deeply about for a few months. Does it really make sense for the UX person to be in Product? In Sales? In Support? In Marketing? In Engineering?

I don’t think UX truly ‘belongs’ in any of these departments. Perhaps from an HR perspective, Product makes the most sense, but a UX person should be given broad latitude to help improve the customer’s experience.

This UX Champion acts as an advisor, a coach, an internal consultant – fiercely loyal to the company’s mission and the keeper of the brand – with the full weight of the executive team behind them. This doesn’t mean the UX Champion can tell everyone what to do – but they should have strong influence and help align everyone towards the same mission.

A user’s experience is about every single touchpoint. From target identification, to first exposure, to lead capture, to customer conversion, to product usage, to support, to upgrade, to referral, to retention, to downgrade or cancellation.

UX encompasses the entire user lifecycle and thus encompasses the entire organization.

But I’ll even take it a step further than Brian: it’s about more than users; it’s about anyone who interacts with your brand.

It’s the overall Brand Experience, or BX.

This includes job applicants, vendors, partners and the media.

I truly believe in the power of BX: See Exhibit A and Exhibit B and pay close attention to the comments.

You never know where the next customer is going to come from. UX, BX – they should both be holistic, cross-organizational and baked into the DNA of a company – it shouldn’t be relegated to a single functional silo.

My household has some unusually strong opinions on this topic. My wife Sarah helps companies with their CX. I’ve started thinking that “CX” and “UX” and “BX” are close to the same thing, so I’ll use UX, CX and BX interchangeably.

Sarah is a CX and service branding queen with over 15 years of 5-star service operational experience. She has a highly regimented 1,800 point checklist (yep, that’s right) for delivering a killer customer experience. Great experience is not an accident or just a function of hiring “nice people.” Like UX, CX is an absolute science and an organizational discipline.

However, many companies Sarah works with try to lump her into the Customer Service organization and use “Customer Experience” as a fancy phrase for “Support.”

Those companies are doing it wrong.

The companies where Sarah is most successful at improving CX allow her to roam between Sales, Support, Product, Engineering, Accounting, Marketing and most importantly – the Exec team and the Board.

All of those departments are usually initially resistant to change (“We’re already doing it great – we don’t need improvement – blah blah blah”) and it requires an Executive mandate to make changes.

In the ideal situation, the whole company obsesses about CX and the CEO is obsessed with the product and how customers and users experience it.

Great examples of CEOs that obsess about customer experience are Walt Disney and Steve Jobs.

Brian told me about his first job at Disney. His ENTIRE job was to watch the audience and log the results. He’d log if they were laughing, clapping, yawning, picking their nose – and at what time and at what frame. Disney would do this obsessively and collect data throughout the pre-production and post-production process.

Steve Jobs used to hide in the bushes near his local Cupertino Apple Store and watch customers in the store interact with iMacs, iPhones and iPads. He collected the data directly and that’s what allowed him to obtain keen insights about user and customer behavior.

My friend Yoav Lurie of Simple Energy says one of his jobs as CEO is to “Violently Defend Our Users.” I think that’s appropriate for a CEO to do. I’ve heard too many people say things like “Dumb Users” or “Idiot Users” or “They just don’t know what they’re doing” rather than admit fault with their own creations and look inward for improvement opportunities.

The bottom line is – the UX Champion has to have an executive mandate to align each business area and identify opportunities for improvement. Otherwise, it simply won’t happen.

3. Keep your UX Champion out of daily development

Brian believes that a weekly or bi-weekly iteration is too fast for real meaningful UX work to get done as part of an agile sprint. UX people need to conduct experiments. They need to conduct usability testing. They need to talk (in person) with users. They need to collect data, gather the results, and make improvements.

More importantly, UX people need to step back from the day-to-day building of the product to have an objective view. They can’t be too close to the actual development activities. If they’re doubling as a developer, chances are they’re missing something.

Writers have Editors for this reason.

4. The UX Champion works the entire product lifecycle

Somewhat related to point #3, Brian believes that UX should be part of the holistic product management and development process.

Mediocre companies don’t treat UX holistically. They treat it as a ‘product’ thing. I’ll use another Apple example to illustrate this:

A few years back I ordered an Apple iMac and an HP Printer. Both arrived on the same day. The Apple iMac’s packaging was sublime. It was a perfect ‘open the box’ experience and gorgeous.

The HP Printer? Well, there was noisy styrofoam, styrofoam peanuts and a hard-to-open box with crappy plastic tape. That was followed by instructions that made my head hurt and plastic stickers that I needed to tear off everywhere.

I’ve never seen a better UX juxtaposition than those two products, shipped side by side.

Great companies don’t settle for a great product only during usage. They involve packaging, shipping, logistics, retail and the entire product lifecycle from beginning to end.

The UX Champion needs to follow and be ever present in this product lifecycle.

5. No matter how good you are at UX, always get a fresh set of eyes on the problem.

Always get a fresh set of eyes as a sanity check.

Most psychologists have their own psychologists for a reason: to make sure they have sound mental health.

Great CX companies pay mystery shoppers handsomely for this task.

With UX, make sure you budget for external UX consultants as a final sanity check. You may have a brilliant UX Champion, but there’s nothing wrong with a fresh set of eyes to spot a few minor flaws.

6. Track Every Nosepick

As I mentioned earlier, Walt Disney would literally log every nosepick, tear and laugh by observing the audience.   Data is vitally important to the process.

Ignore the data at your own peril. At the end of the day, through interviews and usability tests, you’ll collect a ton of data about your UX. As a product manager sincerely interested in improving your UX, you can’t ignore it based on your gut feel and your own personal biases.

Don’t dismiss the data as ‘Those stupid users – they just don’t know what they are doing’ – there’s something to be learned from every single user.

Watch the patterns of data. Collect data via automated systems like KISSMetrics.  Also collect qualitative data with usability tests and UserTesting.com. Patterns will emerge and you need to act on them.

7. Always perform ‘the Drunk Usability Test’

This is one of my favorite rules to follow, especially at bars. Go visit threesheetresearch.com for some awesome examples.

In summary, these 7 rules should get you well on your way to building a world class CX and UX organization. If you need help getting started, I recommend contacting the guys at The First User. They know their stuff.

I’m also interested in discussing new and innovative approaches to UX and CX. Feel free to comment below to continue the discussion!

The X-Factor: Seven Rules for a World Class UX

“Man I really love receiving lengthy, non personalized, bulleted sales emails!”

… said no one ever.

If you’re like a lot of the world, you’re quick to hit the “Report Spam” button as soon as that first bold and italicized Call To Action pops out at you. It’s the classic sign of a mass email, usually from a purchased email list, and the person on the other end knows nothing about you.

Below is an example of exactly that, which I received yesterday. I have removed some of the text to protect the guilty.

Hi,
Are you looking for the right source to get OPT-IN ( permission based ) email lists for your company?
Our Services Includes: Opt-In email lists, Tele-Marketing Lists (DNC Scrubbed), Direct Mail Lists for Businesses, Data Appending and Email Appending.
Title Specific Lists: C-level, All Key decision makers, HR Executives, Marketing Executives, IT Executives, Finance Executives, Healthcare Executives, etc
Industry Specific Lists: Healthcare, Chemical, Retail, Software/Hardware, Construction, Oil and Gas, Hospitality, Food and Beverage, Transportation, Automotive, Telecom, Finance/Banking, Publishing, Media, Manufacturing, Education, Wholesalers, Distributors, etc
Profession Based Lists: Doctors, Physicians, Nurse, Attorneys, Lawyers, Accountants, etc
Technology/Software Lists: Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, IBM, Peoplesoft, Salesforce, JD Edwards, Citrix, Intel, etc
Please fill in your requirement below and we will revert back to you with details of the number of email contacts we can provide you along with a complementary sample and an economic quote.
Target Industry : ____________________________
Target Geography : ____________________________
Target Job Title : ____________________________
Looking forward to your response.
Best Regards,

Needless to say, I had my mouse on the Spam flag, but decided to keep this one around to help show you how to send effective sales emails in just 4 sentences:

Sentence 1: Make your introduction human.

Yes, this means use the person’s first name (I’m looking at you random spammy salesperson above), as well as their company name. Note the fact that you’re reaching out to them specifically – not just a mass list of faceless companies.

Sentence 2: Briefly explain what you do.

Tell them what you do in 1 sentence. “My company _________.” Think of this sentence as your company’s elevator pitch, but even shorter (and not nearly as awkward).

Sentence 3: Personalize by tying your pitch into what they do.

WIIFM. “What’s in it for me?” There is a reason you reached out to this person and this company specifically. Your next sentence should paint the picture for them, and allows them to decide whether or not they should give a shit.

“I think our _______ could be a great tool/fit/resource/etc. for your _______ users”.

Sentence 4: Ask for a next step.

Don’t leave the reader wondering what to do next. Do I reply? Do I click a link? Do I hit the Spam button? Make your last sentence an easy call to action that is very clear.

“Do you have 10-15 minutes for a quick demo sometime next week?”

End your email by thanking them and get the hell out of there.

In today’s sales environment you need to stand out from the rest, and you need to stand out quickly and concisely. Human connections don’t start with a mass email. They start with a genuine introduction of 2 people and 2 companies. Now go introduce yourself.

**Bonus: Below is an example of the turning the above spammy email into an effective sales email. Granted, we at FullContact don’t purchase lists so their email would be in vain anyway…but you get the point.

Hi Adam,

I hope this email finds you and rest of the FullContact team well. I am with No Spam Inc., and we provide technology sales teams with SAAS prospect lists, with titles/positions including VPs of Product and Product Managers.

Given the technical nature of your APIs, I thought our lists could be a great resource for your sales team’s efforts. I’d love to introduce myself and our product if you have a few minutes for a quick chat sometime next week? Thank you and talk to you soon.

Friendly McFrienderson

From Spam to Gold in Just 4 Sentences

I’ve just posted three new FullContact positions on our jobs site.

Web App / Front End Engineer:
http://fullcontact.theresumator.com/apply/aH5Xny/Web-App-Front-End-Engineer.html

QA Engineer:
http://fullcontact.theresumator.com/apply/H6cMzY/QA-Engineer.html

Senior Java Software Engineer:
http://fullcontact.theresumator.com/apply/ZI8OGU/Senior-Java-Software-Engineer.html

And yes, all of them include Paid, PAID Vacation along with other awesome benefits outlined here.

As always, if you know someone who might be a fit, feel free to pass along!

3 Awesome New Jobs Available from FullContact