2009 March «

Archive for March, 2009

A completely different approach to job search

Published March 29, 2009 Get Back to Work Faster 1 Comment

Looking for a job, eh?

Blasting out resumes and posting them to Monster, CareerBuilder and the like? How’s that working for you? Undoubtedly, you are in the swamp with millions of other job seekers and it is utterly frustrating and degrading as weeks and months pass with no results.

Does it have to be this way?

I’m the Fearless Competitor and I partnered with the sales expert, Jill Konrath on Get Back to Work Faster — an initiative to help out of work professionals get paid work. GBTWF is a book, a website and a social network and it is all 100% free. (Except a small fee to cover book printing.)

But since I’m the major character in the book, you might expect some very creative and different approaches rather than blasting out resumes.

One of the key principles we teach in Get Back to Work Faster is this:

Find a job by NOT looking for a job.

That sounds odd, but let’s look at how it is done.

We have a seasoned and experienced sales and marketing executive who needs work. Well into his 40′s, one might think he is fairly static — one cannot teach an old dog new tricks. Or can we?

This executive knew he was a good writer. Furthermore, he knew that finding new customers was a massive problem for many companies. Can he use this knowledge and skill to tackle something new and promote himself? He decided to write a white paper on finding new customers.

He researched companies in the marketing space and found a young and fast growing California firm named Marketo. He looked through their marketing materials and found a gap. There was no comprehensive ‘how to find new customers’ white paper. There were plenty of webinars, case studies, etc.

He called the VP, Marketing, and told him of the gap he saw. The VP agreed that this important content was missing and felt that a good white paper would be helpful — especially a workbook style. He asked for a quote.

It took time, but we got a signed order with a tidy sum up from and smaller sum per lead.

At the age of 49, this sales and marketing executive started professional writing for the very first time. That is right. A professional writer.

It was a lot of work with many revisions. But dogged diligence got it done. He finally found his “voice” and wrote a terrific 25 page white paper. He also contracted with a graphics artist and made it utterly beautiful. The California software firm is going to use it and the executive registered the domain findnewcustomers.net.

This executive is me.

Think about this. A software firm is using its marketing budget to promote my white paper on a critical business issue for thousands of business executives. And every single copy that goes out has my personal contact information on it.

Benefits are tremendous. The white paper is sent in lieu of a resume. It focuses on a real business need. I’ve viewed as the expert. I got paid handsomely for writing it. My sponsoring company promotes the white paper, which promotes me. I proved I am truly a professional writer.

I urge all professional job seekers to devise creative approaches like this. Think outside the box. Stop blasting resumes and attending job fairs. They are a waste of time and degrading. Learn something new and apply it.

Good luck.

The Fearless Competitor

For companies looking for best practices in b2b lead generation who wish to improve the way they acquire new customers, Find New Customers is the place to go. CSO Insights says companies need to improve the way they generate leads and implement processes for business to business lead generation.

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor, is a demand generation expert and sales leader, as well as the President of Find New Customers, a lead generation company, who helps businesses create lead generation campaigns and continually publishes the best lead generation ideas, so his readers can determine the best lead generation strategy to find new customers.

The sales goddess takes a fall for me

Published March 28, 2009 Sales knowledge , sales leadership Leave a Comment

My friend Jill Konrath and I set a call with a prospective business sponsor for our big Get Back to Work Faster initiative. Jill emailed me a draft copy of the book and I sent it to my CEO before the call, so he could prepare. The Go to Meeting that afternoon turned into a disaster. Since the CEO had not seen the book, I asked Jill to show him the 118 page book on the fly — Jill was unprepared.

How can the world’s best expert in sales and a very experienced and talented VP of Sales and Marketing both screw up the meeting? This turned into a very popular article on RainToday, True Confessions of a Sales Expert.

In reality, the blame does not all lie with Jill Konrath of Selling to Big Companies. I should have known better too.

I assumed the CEO read the email. Little did I know that outbound email was not working and hundreds of emails were queueing up. I could have called and confirmed it. Nor did I reach out to Jill to plan the meeting. Finally, I did not ask basic qualifying questions — for instance, “If I should show you a way to book $3.5 million more in the next 12 months, but you had to spend $30,000 to get it, is that doable?”

Thanks Jill — undoubtedly you could have done better. But I’ll also add a mea culpa. The moral here is that even two of the very best make mistakes.

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor, is a demand generation expert and sales leader, as well as the President of Find New Customers, alead generation company, who helps businesses create lead generation campaigns and continually publishes the best lead generation ideas, so his readers can determine the best lead generation strategy to find new customers. He can be reached at (516) 284-4930 or jogden@findnewcustomers.net.

Job Search: A broken and degrading process that needs to change!

Published March 21, 2009 Get Back to Work Faster 4 Comments

Does it feel like you’re competing with dozens of people every time you compete for a job? If so, this is for you.

The Fearless Competitor spoke with top experts, like Kathy Simmons, CEO of Netshare, Marc Hovind, CEO of JobBait, Jill Konrath of Selling to Big Companies and an executive recruiter named Jerry Recht. What was the common theme of all? The broken hiring process.

Jerry even said distilling an experienced human being into two flat pages was a waste of time. Paper documents do not resemble living, breathing people.

Think about it. A company has an opening, so we call and inquire about the position. What are we asked to do? “Please email your resume/CV to Human Resources at careers@somecompany.com.”

If you do what they ask, you just went to the Land of No Return. You joined a proverbial flood of resumes and you will never get a call.

How it the process broken? A job search is nothing more than a sales process. I have to say that again. A job search is nothing more than a sales process.

No salesperson worth his or her salt would ever blindly send brochures to Purchasing. But that is exactly what job seekers do every day.

Sending a resume (brochure) about a product (the person and her skills) to Human Resources (the group that does the purchasing of job candidates.), is the same hopeless process. It is a mistake repeated millions of times a day.

With high unemployment, companies are flooded with resumes — and as Jerry told me, companies simply use them as a filter, weeding out all but the most obvious — and as a result throw out wheat with the chaff. Even great candidates miss out if you don’t have the spot on perfect experience (Typically having had the same job for their direct competitor.)

Want a great example of how this process would miss great candidates? My boss in the 1980′s was Bob Greifeld. Bob spent his entire career in technology companies. So what job did he win and he excelled at for the last decade?

Robert Greifeld is President and CEO of NASDAQ/OMX. By any measure, Bob has been a superb CEO. But if one looks at him through a traditional resume process — he would never have been considered. He never worked in finance. He never worked for an exchange.

Kudos to the NASDAQ Board of Directors for a smart and creative choice!

The entire hiring process is fundamentally broken and hopelessly degrading — as the job seeker blasts out more and more brochures (resumes) in the faint and pointless hope someone notices. Companies miss out on potential superstars while job seekers grow desperate.

It is time for radical change!

Jill Konrath and I are doing something about it. Our initiative, Get Back to Work Faster, teaches professional job seekers:

How to package their presence — with a killer website, a thought leadership blog and a strong LinkedIn profile.
Add a video introduction on their website, so they can, in the words of Mark Hovind of JobBait, “interview in their sleep.”
Learn how to target companies and get in at the highest levels.
Stop asking for a job – to win a job.

Best of all, the content is free (except for small fee for the book to cover costs.). Go to Get Back to Work Faster now and sign up.

And if you want to see the example of what is possible, please visit Fearless Competitor, JeffreyOgden and my LinkedIn profile.

A great sales lesson from a doomed fly

Published March 19, 2009 Sales knowledge , sales challenges , sales leadership , sales process Leave a Comment

Aritcle reprinted from blog by Wendy Weiss; (http://www.wendyweiss.com), email addresswendy@wendyweiss.com.

(I loved this story from the book You Squared, by Price Prichett). It hold great lessons for salespeople.

I’m sitting in a quiet room at the Millcroft Inn, a peaceful little place hidden back amongst the pine trees about an hour out of Toronto. It’s just past noon, late July, and I’m listening to the desperate sounds of a life-or-death struggle going on a few feet away. There’s a small fly burning out the last of its short life’s energies in a futile attempt to fly through the glass of the windowpane.

The whining wings tell the poignant story of the fly’s strategy – try harder. But it’s not working. The frenzied effort offers no hope for survival.

Ironically, the struggle is part of the trap. It is impossible for the fly to try hard enough to succeed at breaking through the glass. Nevertheless, this little insect has stacked its life on reaching its goal through raw effort and determination. This fly is doomed. It will die there on the window sill.

Across the room, ten steps away, the door is open. Ten seconds of flying time and this small creature could reach the outside world it seeks. With only a fraction of the effort now being wasted, it could free itself of this self-imposed trap. The breakthrough possibility is there. It would be so easy.

Why doesn’t the fly try another approach, something dramatically different? How did it get so locked in on the idea that this particular route, and determined effort, offer the most promise for success? What logic is there in continuing to, until death, to seek a breakthrough with “more of the same”? No doubt this approach makes sense to the fly. Regrettably, it’s an idea that will kill.

“Trying harder” isn’t necessarily the solution to achieving more. It may not offer any real promise for getting what you want out of life. Sometimes in fact, it’s a big part of the problem. If you stake your hopes for a breakthrough on trying harder than ever, you may kill your chances for success.

The moral for salespeople is that trying harder and more of the same does not work. Like the doomed fly, you push harder and harder, yet the prospect delays and delays. That’s what happens when your company does not use lead scoring. That’s what happens when you don’t find creative ways to engage. For instance, when was the last time you attended an Investor Day, attended a dinner with The CMO Club or posted a comment to a CEO’s blog?

Don’t be the fly. Stop, think and learn. Look for that open door.

I’m the Fearless Competitor, who turns good companies into Fearless Competitors.

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor, is a demand generation expert and sales leader, as well as the President of Find New Customers, alead generation company, who helps businesses create lead generation campaigns and continually publishes the best lead generation ideas, so his readers can determine the best lead generation strategy to find new customers. He can be reached at (516) 284-4930 or jogden@findnewcustomers.net.

The life lesson from “Taking Chance”

Published March 14, 2009 Business relationships , Personal growth Leave a Comment

Movies based on the Iraq War are historically duds.

So how do we explain how the simple story of Lieutenant Colonel Michael Strobl, played by Kevin Bacon, escorting the remains of a 19 year old Marine private, Chance Phelps from Irag to Wyoming became HBO’s most watched original movie in five years — drawing two million viewers – despite a typically slow Saturday night airing?

An HBO spokesman estimates that an additional 5.5 million have watched, not including those who recorded it and watched later. To say it was wildly popular would not be an overstatement.

It is a touching show that is 100% reality with no cynicism. It does not glorify or denigrate the war. It merely treats with respect a very touching event.

This movie teaches us enormous respect for the military uniform. It teaches us to love and honor those young men and women who gave the ultimate sacrifice for us. And it shows the incredible gift that comes back to us when we serve others without recompense. The way Kevin Bacon’s character showed such honor and the enormous respect showed by ordinary Americans for his service and the dead soldier he was escorting was deeply touching and renewed faith in humanity.

We can all take lessons from this. Hug your family, especially your kids. Remember those great Americans who gave their lives at a young age in all wars — not just the last one. We should honor and respect every one of them. And Hollywood should take note of what people truly care about.

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor, is a demand generation expert and sales leader, as well as the President of Find New Customers, alead generation company, who helps businesses create lead generation campaigns and continually publishes the best lead generation ideas, so his readers can determine the best lead generation strategy to find new customers. He can be reached at (516) 284-4930 or jogden@findnewcustomers.net.

Sell more by not selling

Published March 12, 2009 sales challenges , sales leadership , tough selling situation Leave a Comment

Interesting phone call today everyone. I called up the CEO of a business and discussed something I had learned about his business. This led to a long and interactive conversation. Then he changed the subject to me and what I was doing, so I told him. Still not a sales call. Then we discussed his challenges and how we might help him.

Welcome to the new crazy world of sales. The less you sell, the more you sell. People want relationships and trust. Network, build solid relationships and grow trust. That is the world of today.

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor, is a demand generation expert and sales leader, as well as the President of Find New Customers, alead generation company, who helps businesses create lead generation campaigns and continually publishes the best lead generation ideas, so his readers can determine the best lead generation strategy to find new customers. He can be reached at (516) 284-4930 or mailto:jogden@findnewcustomers.net.

Demand Generation interview with Trish Bertuzzi of the Bridge Group

Published March 10, 2009 Management best practices , Marketing , lead generation , marketing funnel , sales challenges , sales funnel Leave a Comment

On March 3, 2009 I had the pleasure of interviewing Trish Bertuzzi of the Bridge Group. Below is a summary of what was concluded from the interview.

What worked in the past for lead generation and qualification, as recent as 2007, no longer works. So a best-practices process of a few years ago is probably ineffective today.
Today you need to look at your inbound marketing strategy first. Web/SEO/SEM, email nurturing, social networks, landing pages and forms etc. All of these things must tie into your sales and marketing strategy.
More than ever before, sales and marketing have to be on the same page. Companies need to define their ideal customer provide and find their “voice” as it relates to buyer personas. Once that is accomplished then they can go out and speak to their buyers in a way they can relate to and that starts a conversation.
Ideal customer profile is very important. e.g. 100 leads with 60 who fit the ideal customer profile is a lot better than 100 leads where 10 fit
What you don’t want to do is flagellate your prospect by blasting out emails and phone calls. Deep understanding is needed. Look at your prospects as people and take the time to understand what they are trying to accomplish. What do they care about and where do they look for information? This tells you how to talk to them and where and when to communicate with them. More than ever before, content is king.
Metrics have changed. They are the crystal ball that predicts success as opposed to the laggard indicators of performance. Old metrics are around activities – how many leads? How many calls? How many emails? New metrics focus on opportunity and movement – how many leads moved from Stage A to Stage B, how long does a lead stay in each stage, how many times do we touch a suspect before they become a prospect etc?
Buyers are educated today. While BANT (Budget, Access to Power, Needs, Timeframe) was question 1 in the past, now it is question 3-4 or even off the table altogether during the initial stages of the conversation.
Testing and piloting are back in vogue. We used to be in such a hurry to get our campaigns out the door. Now, with such limited budgets, we need to take the time to test messages against each other as well as different social media approaches etc.

Thanks to Trish for the great input and as always. call or write if you want to discuss my ideas.

If you cannot be discovered (online), you don’t exist

Published March 8, 2009 Get Back to Work Faster , Online Presence 1 Comment

Max Kalehoff, the VP of Marketing at Clickable, who writes the excellent AttentionMax blog, had a great post yesterday on the importance of your online presence. As I have the kind of robust online presence about which he speaks, I believe it is ideal for me to discuss his post, its advice and conclusion.

Max’s post states and I agree. “A lack of personal optimization can be a serious disadvantage in a down economy. With unemployment rising, job seekers who are highly visible to employers have the upper hand. Those who are not discoverable don’t exist. No wonder LinkedIn is seeing record traffic and a surge in interpersonal recommendations.”

However, Max goes on to say that the day of personal online optimization has not yet arrived.

Digital Personal Optimization: When?

So begs the question: When will serious digital personal optimization services become widely available? There is a mature industry of services firms and software that aid businesses in their attempts to optimize, but there’s very little that’s compelling or affordable for individuals.

I beg to differ, Max. It is compelling and affordable, but poorly understood. This is why Jill Konrath is working with me on an initiative for professional job seekers entitled Get Back to Work Faster — How to Use Job Creation Techniques to Take control and Win. We’re going to teach professionals how to do it.

This will soon be a book, ebook, website and social network. While these tools will be free (except the book) and teach you how to do it, you have to wait till mid April for them to be completed.

Please let me explain how affordable and compelling a personal online optimization strategy can be. Here is the process I used. Click the hyperlinks for live examples.

Create a personal website. Not nearly as hard as you might think. Use good blog software like WordPress.com or Typepad.com and use Pages rather than Posts. Total cost: $30 a year to eliminate ads.
Write a thought leadership blog. Use the same blog software and use Posts rather than Pages. Total cost: Free
Create a strong Linkedin profile. Find an expert such as Patrick O’Malley and review his online posts on how to do it. Total cost: Free, plus the $15 a month or so Linkedin charges.
Sign up for Twitter and start using it. Total cost: Free
Sign up for Facebook and start using it. Total cost: Free
Optional: Develop your own brand. Register a domain at GoDaddy or Name.com. Point that domain to you.
For instance, my niche is sales and marketing leadership — growing revenue. This is highly competitive and stressful. So my brand is this: I am the Fearless Competitor. The video on the home page of my website allows me to talk directly to the hiring manager about my brand. “After all, wouldn’t you like to be fearless?” The brand is a recurring theme throughout everything that I do.

The goal of this blog post is not to teach you how to do it, but mere to illustrate that it is possible and cost-effective, once you know how.

I want to also touch on the age question. Many experienced professionals think websites, blogs, Twitter and Facebook are for the 20-30 crowd — and they are incapable of doing it. Untrue. I am 49 years of age (Granted, I have the energy level of a 29 year old.) but I’ve done it all and you can too. Age is an excuse — nothing more.

I wish I could share my training videos, the book, etc. right now, but I cannot. Jill Konrath is working very hard on it. It will be out in 4-5 weeks. Stay tuned.

Fearless Competitor — a new Linkedin group

Published March 7, 2009 Fearless Competitor , Tough times 1 Comment

Having read the Wall St. Journal and watched news for years, I feel like shouting that line from the movie Network “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore.” Please click that link!

This economy is the greatest opportunity in years for a smart company to take advantage — to find A players; to bond with customers and to invest in R&D.

With that fearless attitude, I created a new Linkedin group called Fearless Competitor. Great friends like Paul Dunay of Avaya and Jill Konrath of Selling to Big Companies were among my first members.

My goal is to make this a very active club filled with great ideas and support for all the CEO’s who read this blog. I invite you to go over to Linkedin and sign up today.

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor, is a demand generation expert and sales leader, as well as the President of Find New Customers, alead generation company

, who helps businesses create lead generation campaigns and continually publishes the best lead generation ideas, so his readers can determine the best lead generation strategy to find new customers. He can be reached at (516) 284-4930 or mailto:jogden@findnewcustomers.net.

Themes from the Sales 2.0 Conference

Published March 6, 2009 Action Items sales , Management best practices , Marketing , marketing funnel , marketing sales , sales funnel , sales leadership , sales process 3 Comments

While I was unable to head to San Francisco for this two day event with some of the leading minds in sales and marketing, my good friend Jill Konrath of Selling to Big Companies and the Sales SheBang was there and she reported daily on her blog and Facebook.

Having read everything Jill posted, as well as what others were saying — and having interviewed five experts myself — the lessons are clear and I share them with my readers:

Get closer to customers

Learn what makes them tick. What are their motivators? Which is most important — fear, greed, ego, safety, etc? Where do they go for information? The better you understand your customer, the better sales and marketing can talk to them.

Test and measure everything

How well does marketing contribute to revenue growth? How effective are you in engaging new customers? What are the steps of your sales process? What content from marketing is sales using in sales calls? What research are salespeople doing to learn about their prospect before going on a call? What kind of thought leadership content do we offer and is it working? The questions go on endlessly, but the point is this: Be inquisitive and question everything.

Tightly integrate Marketing and Sales

We talk above about questioning everything, but so many factors revolve around the relationship between Marketing and Sales. As Jon Miller of Marketo said to me — What is a qualified sales opportunity? The answer: Whatever sales says it is.

Content is also key. What content should marketing focus on developing? The answer: The content sales needs — and that the customers want.

The lesson here is to bond with your VP, Sales. Take him to dinner. Become his (or her) close friend. Meet her team. Ask great questions and listen.

I also had a great comment from Trish Bertuzzi of The Bridge Group. Who is responsible for aligning sales and marketing in your firm? Trish points out that the job falls to one person — the CEO. Yes, it is your job, Mr. or Ms. CEO.

Demand Generation needs to be your strategic focus

While this dovetails with other points, like deeply understanding customers and bonding with sales — it needs a LOT of management attention. Put it at the top of your list. Learn about it. (I suggest you read other articles in this blog, as well as the Marketo blog.)

Bottom line is that if you will simply focus on key blocking and tackling issues like the three above, you will be positioned to deliver revenue results regardless of the state of the economy.

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor, is a demand generation expert and sales leader, as well as the President of Find New Customers, alead generation company, who helps businesses create lead generation campaigns and continually publishes the best lead generation ideas, so his readers can determine the best lead generation strategy to find new customers. He can be reached at (516) 284-4930 or mailto:jogden@findnewcustomers.net.