Story

Rahul is a Pune based entrepreneur providing recruitment solutions to software companies. His typical clients are from Pune, with whom is connected through local entrepreneurship communities, events. Now he is looking to expand his business and acquire clients from other parts of India. Its difficult for Rahul to travel across India to acquire clients, while managing his operations. Also its always better he thinks, to get at least list of prospective clients, arrange few meetings before he plans travel, maximizing return on investment in client acquisition.

His typical clients are – Small 0-50 people, software companies who are looking to hire programmers. Decision makers in these clients are generally owners/founder or CXOs directly.How Rahul can use Prolinkd to find leads?

Prolinkd Discoverer, is designed to help entrepreneurs, like Rahul. Once he has setup his account and all existing data from his social and professional network is imported, he can create lenses as follows.

A. Geographic segmentation

First step Rahul needs to do is segment his target market based on geographic location. Instead of doing a pan India search, its much better to create multiple lenses based on individual areas.

So lets say Rahul has decided he wants to focus on Mumbai and Surat in first phase of business development process.

B. Industry segmentation -

Once geographic segmentation is completed, he then decides to focus only on Information technology and services companies, as these companies generally have more demand for talent.

C. Decision makers -

Since Rahul is targeting small sized companies, decision makers in those companies are either owner/founders or CXOs.

D. Keywords -

If Rahul is providing only Java/JEE related recruitment solutions, then he can input those as keywords. Lets assume he is providing generic recruitment solutions which are useful for all IT companies.

Rahul then creates multiple lenses in Prolinkd as follows -

• Mumbai_ITSize – smallIndustry – Information technology and servicesSeniority – CXO,
• Owners/FoundersCountry – IndiaArea – MumbaiSurat_ITSize – smallIndustry – Information technology and services

• Seniority – CXO, Owners/FoundersCountry – IndiaArea – Surat

Once he has created these lenses, Discoverer keeps mining the data from Rahul’s extended network on daily basis.


As couple of days pass by, Rahul has more information about his target markets than ever. He also has information about who his prospective clients are, decision makers in those organizations and profile of decision makers. Based on all this Rahul can make much better strategic decisions.

Notes and best pracices -

• Create lenses for such smaller segment of the market you are targeting
• After generally a week, almost all data available for that lense is processed, so you can safely stop the lense.
• Once you have explored couple of such markets, then you can create lenses for other market segments.

Limitations -

• We have hard API limits from third party data sources such as Linkedin and Twitter. Because of that, amount of data we can process per day is limited.
• Number of lenses we process per user with out degrading quality of leads is generally 2-3 depending on market size
• We will support more complex lenses and take care of segments internally in future, but for now its best to create very focused lenses
• Use keywords only when you are sure about it. Otherwise try to avoid using too many keywords. We are working on how to make it much more user friendly

Future -

We are always working on improving the algorithms and process to find most useful information. Some of these improvements will be rolled out in next one weekWe are also integrating with more data sources, to find further informationExporter will be available in May, using which you can then feed these opportunities to your CRM tool such as 37signals.com, Zoho.com or salesforce.comWe have talked with 10 customers so far and taken lot of notes on how to improve user experience. We will have a new release available for all beta users by first week of March with these improvements.

Many thanks to all users who took time to talk with us and given their valuable feedback. Keep your feedback coming. Our website will include all this documentation, help, tips and tricks to boost your experience of using Prolinkd, but till then, please feel free to drop me a line on – sushrut@prolinkd.com

10-12 years ago Google took a quantum leap in search technology and changed how we find information. Everyone was using Google and only Google for finding services/products they are interested in. Decision makers were looking for partners using Google and going through your website to start a conversation with your business. Also you, as a marketer, were using Google to find your prospective customers and starting a sales pitch.
10 years on, people are now searching for services on social media sites like LinkedIn,Xing. Lot of customers are tweeting about what they are looking for and getting real time replies from vendors, service providers. Even though Google search and SEO are still important, but your presence and brand identity on sites such as LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook have become very important as well. These are the additional entry points into your website and into your business. These are the places where people will look for information and decide in few secs or a min or two whether your business qualifies for the requirement they have. Website is still important but identity on these social media sites is also important now.

Referrals have become super easy.

If you are providing a service, your best customers are the ones who come through referrals. Either from your network or from your existing customers. With social media, your entire network is now available as a social graph on networking sites. Who you are connected with, who you did business with, their recommendation and all other information is now available for your prospective customers. If I am looking for a service provider on LinkedIn, I will much rather start conversation with companies which are known to me via my extended network or are recommended by people I know.This means maintaining your brand identity on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook is that much more important for your business. Once you have brought all this information online, it makes very easy for people you know and have worked with before to refer your services to their contacts. With proper management of your presence, you may not even require active referrals, as they will be replaced by passive referrals in terms of recommendations on LinkedIn, likes on Facebook and followers on Twitter and the conversations you are having with peers/experts in your domain.

Participation underlines expertise.

People understand you as a leader and expert in certain topics when they see you participating in discussions with in communities. Until a few years ago, only way to demonstrate your expertise was conferences, publishing in journals. Now with very less cost (only time cost, no monetary cost), you can participate in discussions with best and most knowledgeable experts from your areas of interest. Whether it is using LinkedIn groups or Quora or through Twitter. its important for your business and key people in the business to be actively participating in such groups.

Emails and cold calls may not be dead but ROI is diminishing.

Emails and cold calls were extraordinary marketing tools until a few years ago. But since last few years there value is constantly diminishing. Most important reason for that is – There is plenty of information available about the person and customers you are interested in starting a conversation with. But very few B2B marketers use this information to start a much richer conversation. For example – you can follow your prospective users on Twitter to interact with them, create a mutual trust level before trying to make a sale. Participate in interesting discussions with them on LinkedIn groups, provide your view point on Quora so your peers will understand your expertise levels.A great sale is the one which is started 3 months ahead of time and requires nothing special to be done besides having right conversation with right person at the right time. But to achieve that, you have to be continuously in-the-loop.
As a wonderful side effect, not only you will be able to do more effective sales pitch when the time comes, but you will network and participate in discussion with experts from across the globe.

Keep things human.

When conversation were started using website contact forms or cold calls to switchboards, they were started as if both sender and receiver are business. Now since conversations are started through Twitter, LinkedIn, Groups, Quora and more, it has become very important to put your face with your name. And to create conversation which are between to humans and not just between two businesses. Its not a surprise that all of a sudden lot of companies are underlining this part in their support emails – “Your emails will be responded by a real human”. With reach of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn entire web has suddenly become web of interconnected humans and the information they are sharing with each other. It is extremely important for your business to make sure you understand this and project the right image.
Summary

Like any good sales person you have to be where your customers are looking for you and you have to present an image which they expect you to.