Selling Geek 013-Best web browsers for sales pros [41:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

In this episode of the Selling Geek podcast, we review the top five most popular web browsers, and evaluate them in terms of their utility to sales professionals.  We also provide specific web browser recommendations to salespeople using Macs, Linux-based systems, or Windows-based computers.

Links to resources mentioned in this show:

• List of available web browser applications
• Flock
• SeaMonkey
• Microsoft Internet Explorer
• Mozilla Firefox
• Google Chrome
• Apple Safari
• Opera

Please give us your comments and feedback on our U.S. toll-free message line: 877-345-7763, or from anywhere in the world at: +1 404-418-4970, or leave your comment below.  In each podcast episode, we award US$20 to the best voice mail, email or blog comment we receive.

Tags: Apple, Chrome, Firefox, Google, Internet Explorer, Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera, Safari, web browser

The popular voice-to-text service, Jott, which heretofore was completely free, announced that they are now “out of beta”, and they have introduced a tiered services pricing plan.  In other words, most users will now have to pay monthly fees to get Jott’s most desirable features.  (See our earlier review of Jott, posted here, for a full description of the handy transcription service.)

Users can still use Jott for free, but only in a very limited form, and only if they are willing to see advertisements on their Jott.com page.  The “Jott Basic” option allows unlimited voice-to-text note and reminder recordings of up to 15 seconds each.  However, Jott Basic will not support management of notes and lists via email - users will have to go to the Jott.com site to access their lists and notes directly, and they will see ads displayed there. Further, Jott Basic does not support sending emails or text messages to other people - users must upgrade to higher-tier services for this popular feature.

According to Doug Aley, Jott Networks’ VP of Marketing and Business Development, “While we may serve ads in Jott Feeds (the service that reads RSS feeds back to you) eventually on the phone, we will likely not mess with the voice user interface, even on the free service. We plan to serve ads on our web site.”

Also, Jott Basic will support only a limited number of external links to other web services, which are:

• Micro-blog messaging platforms: Twitter, Jaiku and Tumblr
• Blogging content management systems: Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad and WordPress
• Third-party information sources: Amazon.com and Zillow

The regular Jott service tier is now US$3.95 per month, and includes:

• No advertising
• Unlimited 15-second messages (just like Jott Basic)
• Management of notes and lists either online at Jott.com or through e-mail
• The ability to send e-mail or text messages through Jott to other people
• Links to many more web services for calendar management, task management, and additional web-enabled information sources
• Automated voice-to-text transcription of tasks and appointments into Microsoft Outlook

The highest tier of service, Jott Pro, costs US$12.95 per month and includes all the features of the regular Jott service tier, plus:

• 30-second messages (instead of 15 seconds)
• The ability to reply to email on a BlackBerry device using Jott voice recordings

All tiers have access to Jott Feeds - which will read blog feeds to you over the phone - and they all also include Jott Express - an Adobe AIR-based desktop application that provides client-side management of Jott messages and reminders, and Jott for iPhone - a similar application for the Apple iPhone.  Users may cancel or change their Jott plans at any time without penalty.

What does this mean to sales professionals?

As we said in our earlier review, Jott is a very handy utility for salespeople on the go.  The ability to leave reminders and to-do items with a quick phone call, and then receive those messages in text form, almost immediately, is great for sales pros that need to keep track of myriad details without touching a keyboard.  Further, the ability to send emails or instant text messages to other users by leaving a quick voice recording on Jott is a godsend to mobile sales pros.

When the service was free, Jott was a no-brainer addition to any busy salesperson’s toolkit.  We think the free Jott Basic tier is now almost worthless - in other words, you get what you pay for.  However, getting all the functionality of the previously freebie Jott service for less than four bucks a month ain’t bad - in fact, we still think it’s a great bargain, and we still recommend it.

We only wish we didn’t have to pay more than three times the standard service fee, just to get BlackBerry integration.  That seems too big a step in Jott’s tiered pricing plan to recommend it, especially since BlackBerry users (and we are one of those) can get virtually all the voice-to-text functionality they need from the regular Jott service anyway.

We previously awarded the free Jott service a Sales Pro Value Score of 4.5 out of a possible 5.  With their recent change to a “for fee” service, and considering the enhancements they’ve made to Jott functionality, we’re downgrading that rating, but only slightly - to a 4 out of 5.

UPDATE: TechCrunch reports Jott has over 420,000 customers

Tags: Jott, Jott Basic, Jott Express, Jott Pro

 

 Selling Geek 009-PhoneTag [13:26m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I hate voice mail.

Oh, I remember back in the early 80’s when the software company I was working for first got an automated voice mail system, and we all thought it was cool. You can forward a phone message to group of people, all with a couple keystrokes? Cool. You can retrieve your phone messages anytime, from anywhere, whenever you want? Cool. No more mounds of little “when you were out” notes waiting on your desk when you got back from a trip? Cool.

Oh, yes, back in the 80’s, voice mail was great. We loved it.

But then, somewhere in the 90’s, something happened. Just about everyone started replacing their live operators and receptionists with automated systems, and suddenly, voice mail became voice mail hell. That’s when all of our calls to customers and prospects started to sound like this:

“Hello! Your call is very important to us. That’s why we’ve made it impossible to reach a live human being! Press 1 if you want to buy something, press 2 to leave a message for customer support. Press 3 if you find this mildly annoying. Press 4 if you think this is extremely irritating. Press 5 if you are starting to get angry and frustrated. Press 6 if you’d like to hear all these options over again. Or, just hang up and leave us alone. Have a great day!”

Also, by then, we were all carrying mobile phones, which was great – no more hunting for a pay phone anymore. But it also meant that we had multiple voice mailboxes to check – the mobile voice mail, office voice mail, and sometimes our home number voice mail.

It’s now 2008, and I must sadly confess that I am the proud possessor of no less than six voice mailboxes: my corporate office number, my home office number, my business mobile number, my personal mobile number, the Selling Geek US toll-free line, and our international SkypeIn number. Yep, that’s six numbers, all with their own voice mail system.

It takes me a long time to check six voice mailboxes. I have to dial each number, check status, listen to each message and then act on it. And, of course, all these voice mail systems don’t talk to each other. So if I get a message on my business mobile line, I can’t forward it to my office system, or vice versa. This means that I have to call my office line and leave another voice mail for my colleagues there – which takes even more time.

Like I said, I hate voice mail.

Enter: PhoneTag

So, when I first heard about PhoneTag, I was intrigued. Here’s a service that will pick up your unanswered calls, record messages, transcribes those recordings to text, and then forwards them to you as e-mail or text messages or both.

I was skeptical at first. Could PhoneTag transcribe messages accurately enough to be readable and useful? Would it be outrageously expensive? Would it work with all my different numbers and services? Could it really save me time?

I’ve been using PhoneTag for a few months now, and I’m delighted to report that it works superbly in every respect. If you are a sales professional, and you hate voice mail as much as me, do not delay – go, right now, and get PhoneTag. It is that good.

PhoneTag’s value and quality

Since adopting PhoneTag, I have saved between one and two working hours every week. I don’t have to dial in to six different voice mailboxes anymore – all the messages come to me. And it takes much, much less time to scan a text message than it does to listen to spoken voice. And because all my messages come to my Blackberry as email, I can forward them to anyone in seconds, or just highlight the phone number, and press one button to call the message sender back.

The call transcription quality is very good. It’s not perfect, by any means – sometimes PhoneTag transcribes proper nouns phonetically, and then indicates such with a “(?)” designation. But I’ve never had any trouble figuring out what PhoneTag is trying to tell me. I estimate that it gets about 98% of every message transcribed perfectly, and so far, it has correctly captured 100% of the all-important phone numbers left by my callers.

How does PhoneTag work?

PhoneTag is also easy to set up. I configure my phone services to “call forward / no answer” to a dedicated number that PhoneTag provided when I set up my account. This required some special combinations of phone keypad entries, which can vary according to your mobile service. PhoneTag sent me a detailed list of instructions when I registered, and all the required key sequences were included. With PhoneTag’s help, I set up forwarding from Verizon, Sprint, Skype, my toll-free number service, and my office system – each requiring only a few minutes.

When a caller dials one of my numbers, and if I don’t answer, they hear a typical “please leave a message” recording from me, but also a plea from PhoneTag that says, “Your message will be transcribed by PhoneTag.com – please speak clearly.” You can turn this feature off, but I’ve found it does help to prompt people to enunciate more carefully, and that means fewer transcription errors.

I then receive each message as an e-mail. You can also receive transcribed voice mail as text messages – but if it’s a long voice mail, it may be broken up into several text messages on your device. I’ve found that single e-mails sent to my Blackberry are much more convenient.

Recordings of messages, in WAV, MP3 or GSM format, are also appended to e-mails from PhoneTag, so you can hear the audio if you wish. I rarely need to do this unless I want to make sure I understand specific parts of a transcription.

PhoneTag also keeps copies of all your messages and recordings on their website, which you can access by logging in to your online account.

You can also upload your contacts to PhoneTag from Outlook, Apple Mail, Yahoo Mail, GMail, Hotmail or any application from which you can generate a properly formatted comma-separated value file. PhoneTag will search for each caller’s number in your contact list, and if it finds the matching contact name and/or the company name, it will send you a notification message from that contact name, e-mail and number, instead of from a generic PhoneTag address. This makes it easier to reply to messages.

What does PhoneTag cost?

PhoneTag offers three levels of service: an unlimited number of messages for just under US$30 per month, or up to 40 messages for just under $10 per month (plus 35 cents per message received over the 40^th every month), or a pure per-message charge of 35 cents per message.

(So, if you do the math, you should buy the per-message plan if you receive less than 28 messages a month. Buy the unlimited plan if you receive more than 98 messages per month. Otherwise, buy the 40 messages per month plan.)

There is also a variably priced Enterprise option for organizations that want a company-wide license.

Like mobile phone charges based on a designated number of minutes per month, PhoneTag can get a little pricey if you opt for one of the limited plans and go over those limits. Note that PhoneTag’s plans do not include any fees for data or text messaging that you may also incur from your wireless carrier, so you may want to change your mobile phone plan before investing in PhoneTag.

Other uses for PhoneTag

Besides saving time, I’ve found PhoneTag useful for all sorts of other reasons. For example:

• I can now access my most important messages first. PhoneTag brings “visual voicemail” capabilities to my Blackberry. Now, instead of having to listen to every message sequentially, I can jump immediately to the most critical messages from my customers and prospects.
• My voice mail is now searchable, copyable, pastable, printable and forwardable. Now I can use the Find command on my Blackberry or in Outlook to search my voice messages for specific phrases or keywords. I can also forward voice mails, from all of my voice mailboxes, to colleagues much easier in e-mail. And it’s a lot easier now to save phone numbers into my contact list.
• Ever try to listen to voice mail in a crowded airport or train station? And did you ever find yourself trying to memorize phone numbers left in voice mails because you couldn’t write it down at the moment? I no longer have these kinds of annoyances, thanks to PhoneTag.
• And the best thing of all: I am finally able to tactfully educate some of my co-workers about how to leave a proper voice mail message. Whenever anyone sends me a long, rambling, incoherent voice mail, I just forward the PhoneTag transcription to them in an email, and ask them to interpret the message for me. Nothing works better than seeing your unintelligible babblings in print to make you realize that you need to think first, then speak. It works.

Sales Pro Value Score

So, for liberating salespeople from the chains of voice mail, and for its easy set-up, usability, immediate productivity gains, moderate pricing, and value-added messaging and communication features, Selling Geek gives PhoneTag a Sales Pro Value Score of 4.5 out of a possible 5.

UPDATE: PhoneTag has generously provided a free 30-day trial for Selling Geek blog readers and podcast listeners!  Click this link for your free trial: https://apps.simulscribe.com/signup/a/sellinggeek

Tags: free PhoneTag 30-day trial, PhoneTag, Podcast, Timothy Sullivan, voice mail to text

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch posted an intriguing column called “Think Before You Voicemail“, in which he points out the ever-decreasing value of leaving recorded voice messages in light of more efficient new alternatives.  He says:

…Now an increasing number of people are just plain avoiding voicemail… It takes much longer to listen to a message than read it. And voicemail is usually outside of our typical workflow, making it hard to forward or reply to easily.

Typical voicemail messages today include things like “Please don’t leave me a voicemail, I rarely listen to them. Please just email me at xxxx@xxxx.com” Many people don’t bother setting up their voicemail accounts at all. Then there’s my favorite method, the one I use personally - let the message box get full and then don’t empty it. Caller ID still tells me who called, and I can simply call them back.

How many times have you called someone back and said “I saw that you called but didn’t listen to the voicemail yet, Is it anything urgent?”

I must admit, he’s got a point - I just said exactly that to a work colleague.  In our increasingly time-compressed professional lives, the luxury of sitting back and listening to rambling voicemail messages just doesn’t make sense, especially since there are so many good ways to communicate via text now.

For example, our sales team uses Skype for quick messaging, and it’s much more efficient.  I sometimes have two or three Skype messaging sessions open on my PC, all going at the same time that I’m on the phone with a prospect or customer, and I can manage the workflow quite easily.

Of course, there’s the danger of text overload, especially in our e-mail inboxes.  But getting rid of a text message only takes a few seconds for a quick scan and a click, whereas a voice mail requires you to listen all the way through, which consumes precious minutes.

And here’s what I find most annoying about voicemail: you’d think that people would know how to leave a decent message by now.  I’d have to say that at least half of the voicemail messages I receive are long, sometimes incoherent three-minute soliloquies that could easily have been compressed to just a few seconds. I can’t count how many times I have groaned halfway through a voicemail message, and muttered between clenched teeth, “C’mon, get to the &%#ing point!” I’ve now mastered the “666″ key sequence in our voicemail system, which speeds up recording playback and makes everyone sound like Minnie Mouse, but at least I can get through my voice messages in one-half the time.

How voicemail hinders sales

Voicemail has replaced the stern administrative assistant as the principal means of protecting high-level buyers from salespeople, and for two very good reasons: it’s cheaper, and it’s harder to penetrate.  In the “good old days”, at least one could find a way to develop a relationship with an “admin” and then gain access to a high-level decision maker, but no longer - it’s impossible to develop a relationship with an impersonal voicemail system.

So, in order to reach potential buyers, sales pros now must decide to either (1) game the voicemail system, or (2) play the game.

I have heard dozens of tricks that salespeople use to get over, around, under or through a voicemail system, seeing it as some sort of electronic obstacle course.  Here are a few:

• Leaving a dramatically-spoken message like… “This is Bob, at 555-555-5555, and this is an urgent message for Mr. Prospect!  Please call IMMEDIATELY to resolve… (click)” — yep, they just hang up in mid-sentence.  The key word here is “resolve”, which implies some sort of legal or financial problem.  OK, that might get them to call you back, but what then?
• Dialing random extensions - if you get voice mail, just start dialing numbers until you get through to someone, then act lost and ask to be transferred to your target prospect.  But what do you say when the prospect asks, “How do you know (name of person that transferred you)?”
• 0, 0, 0… - just keep hitting zero to get to an operator, then harass them until they connect you with your target prospect.  If they send you to voicemail, simply repeat and get increasingly more agitated with each cycle.  This assumes that they have live operators somewhere, of course - which is becoming increasingly rare.

Those who decide to play the game try to leave short, pithy messages intended to pique a prospect’s interest.  This is certainly the more professional route, but it may be less effective.  We all know that the callback rates on these kinds of messages is low, and probably getting lower - after all, your prospects have the same kinds of time constraints as you do, and it’s so easy to just hit “delete”, no matter how perfectly phrased your carefully crafted voicemail script might be.

And, of course, we all have our stories about being trapped in “voicemail hell” - where you try to navigate through endless loops of “Press 1 for…, or press 2 for…” menus, never getting closer to your objective.  I’m convinced that the designers of voicemail systems are all laughing at us, delighting in the lost productivity time they are causing to sales pros everywhere.

So, what’s a sales pro to do about voicemail?

It’s time for sales professionals to recognize that a shift in behavior is taking place today.  Just as the introduction of voicemail in the 80’s changed how businesses operate, so too are text-based alternatives now affecting how people interact.  Continuing to bang one’s head against the insurmountable voicemail wall makes as much sense as trying to sell “riding on a smile and a shoeshine” - and that wasn’t effective in Death of a Salesman either.

We need to recognize that our prospects are under the same kind of pressure to use their time more productively as salespeople are - and that they are going to continue to steer further away from voicemail towards faster, more efficient means of communication.  There are a number of emerging new technologies that promise to at least make voicemail more helpful, or better still, to replace it altogether.

Michael Arrington points out a few good examples of these in his column:

There are startups that are trying to make voicemail more useful. Pinger, GrandCentral and YouMail are among them. The iPhone’s visual voicemail feature helps clean up the clutter, too. But at the end of the day you still need to take time to listen to those voicemails, and that usually comes after other equally urgent but less disruptive tasks.

The services that really make voicemail more usable are those that convert voicemail into text and then send it to you via email or SMS (Spinvox, PhoneTag, Yap and Jott, for example).

More mobile carriers are offering text conversion for a monthly or per-message fee. It’s my guess this will become more and more common. Voice is here to stay as a data input method, but listening to messages will certainly become an increasing luxury, to be reserved for loved ones or those messages that aren’t transcribed properly (or you need to hear it for tone or emotion).

He’s right.  The world is changing, and while I don’t think that voicemail will ever go away completely, it will become relatively unimportant in lieu of new text-based services.  We’ve already reviewed Jott, and liked it a lot — we’ll definitely focus more attention on some of these other emerging services.  Sales pros also need to understand this trend, and adapt - or else they will just keep battling against automated systems, with ever diminishing results.

UPDATE: Here’s another interesting web-based voicemail application, Say2Go, offering “asynchronous voice messaging”.

UPDATE: Here’s a new service that enables you to go right to someone’s voicemail: Slydial

Tags: end of voicemail, Michael Arrington, sales voice mail messages, TechCrunch, voice mail alternatives, voice mail hell, voice to text services

 

 Selling Geek 005-LinkedIn [24:20m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

One of the essential principles of good selling is: people buy from people. No matter how much we might like to live in a world where buyers make purchase decisions without human involvement – or on second thought, perhaps not – the fact of the matter is that person-to-person interaction is a requirement for most kinds of sales.

And as a result, for many sales professionals, success depends as much on who you know as it does on what you know. The best salespeople are expert social networkers – they develop relationships with customers and prospects, with suppliers and business partners, with anyone that might help them find new buyers. In the past, this was all done at industry conferences, trade shows, and business meetings, and also in civic organizations, social events, or on the golf course or tennis court.

But today, we live in a web-enabled world, and this provides sales pros with whole new ways to connect with people – ways that reach far beyond the physical limitations of the old network building standards. And one of the key web-based tools that has emerged to help foster interpersonal business connections is LinkedIn.

Today, more than 23 million registered users in more than 150 countries have joined the LinkedIn site. LinkedIn is arguably becoming the standard social network hub for business professionals all over the globe.

Why has LinkedIn become so popular with business people? And, more importantly, what value does this facility provide, if any, to sales professionals?

What is LinkedIn?

Basically, LinkedIn is an online facility for recording your connections with other people. It records those with whom you have developed trusted business relationships, and enables you to leverage the relationships with those to whom you are connected, thereby extending your network. Over time, through LinkedIn, you can develop an automated network of business contacts that enables you to reach out and interact with literally millions of people, all in a secure, well organized system.

This is a potential gold mine of interpersonal contacts for salespeople – but we’ll say more about that later.

Registering on LinkedIn is free, and after doing so, you can create a profile. Your profile is similar in structure to a typical business resume. Here you can put all of your professional credentials, background and experience. In fact, most LinkedIn profiles read exactly like their resume – my own included. Your profile is searchable, both to those in the LinkedIn network, and to those who aren’t members, too. This enables your profile to be found by current and former business colleagues, fellow employees, customers, and other industry contacts.

LinkedIn, in a word, is where you can build connections with other people. After establishing your profile, you can send invitations to record a connection on LinkedIn with other people. If the recipient of your invitation is a LinkedIn member, they just have to accept your invitation, and the system lists each of you on your respective profile as connected. If they are not a LinkedIn member, they are invited to register, and if they do, then your connection is forged. As people find your LinkedIn profile, they can likewise send you invitations to connect to their network.

You also have the option to upload your contacts from your personal information management system, if you wish – LinkedIn supports import of contacts from Windows Live Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Gmail and AOL. Or you can import contacts from Outlook, ACT!, Lotus Notes, Palm Desktop, or the Mac OS X Address Book, or from any contact file in the correct comma-separated or tab-separated format. LinkedIn will analyze these contacts and establish invitations for each.

You can also register to join Groups on LinkedIn, which gives you access to “networks within the network.” For example, I joined a couple Notre Dame fan groups (Go Irish!) and a few sales profession industry groups. Further, LinkedIn makes it easy to search for former colleagues or classmates, or for specific people inside the network, and you can then invite them to your list of connections. By importing my contact list, doing a few searches, and joining some relevant Groups, I expanded my immediate network to more than 500 people – through them, I have over 100,000 “friends of friends”– and through them, I can reach nearly 5 million professionals in LinkedIn.

Here is where the power of LinkedIn can be brought to useful purpose. Let’s say I want to make a sales call on… Xerox, for example. I may not know anyone that works there right now, but by going to the “Companies” tab in LinkedIn, I can search Xerox, and discover that 29 people who work there know someone that is in my direct network. I can then issue a request for an introduction to the appropriate contacts in my network, and they can forward my request to the person I want to reach. This is a great way to generate “warm” leads, instead of just cold calling.

Paying the LinkedIn Piper

Here is where we discover how LinkedIn makes money. In addition to some advertising displays in the LinkedIn system, which are presented in a fairly unobtrusive way, LinkedIn also charges for advanced access to their network. A free personal account allows only five network introductions at a time, and you can’t take advantage of some LinkedIn features, such as the ability to send mail messages directly to people in your network. A Business account costs US$19.95 per month or US $199.50 a year, and allows up to 15 introductions, and more in-network communication options. A Business Plus account costs $50 per month or $500 per year, and allows up to 25 introductions. And there is a variably priced Enterprise subscription as well, for large organizations. LinkedIn also charges other fees for services targeted mostly at corporate clients such as US$195 for a 30-day job posting.

Are these premium subscriptions worth the money? Well, that depends on the value of your network. As you add more connections, the ability to reach more business contacts grows geometrically. I had a free account for several years, before I discovered that I was hitting the introduction limits consistently, and then I decided to upgrade. If you use the LinkedIn network a lot, you won’t mind paying the small fees required. If you don’t, there’s always the free option.

The Answer is… 42!

If you get a premium LinkedIn subscription, you can use the Answers feature, which I have found interesting, and sometimes very useful. You can post a question to your network, and collect responses. For example, I asked a selected group from my network if anyone was using LinkedIn as a sales prospecting tool. Within one day I received over 40 responses, including these:

I did have a LinkedIn connection contact me recently asking for a referral to a company on my list. I didn’t even realize I had a connection with the company. I was able to make an email introduction and the two of them are now doing business. It was as simple as this guy searching his LinkedIn connections to see if anyone had a connection to his targeted prospect.

You have to be careful about using LinkedIn as a sales tool. Someone that prospects blatantly will quickly ruin their reputation and destroy their own efforts. There was a group on LinkedIn that went into hard-core sales mode and they quickly got squashed with complaints.

I use Linkedin to look for specific people to see if they are connected to anyone within my network. Linkedin provides the ability to become connected to a potential prospect through a “warm call.”

I use LinkedIn for qualifying sales opportunity, but not to identify them. When I have a qualified lead, I will usually see who else is at the company. If I happen to know somebody in the account, I reach out to them for information and guidance. I get “inside” information on how the company runs, and the potential issues, etc. This way I am usually much more informed than my competitors.

If you have a question, LinkedIn Answers capability is an interesting way to get some diverse perspectives quickly. But you have to be careful – if you use it for questions like, “Hey, anyone wanna buy something?”, you can get in trouble quickly. People don’t like being harassed in any medium.

A Little Trouble in Network Paradise

Although LinkedIn can be very valuable to aspiring salespeople, it is not a perfect solution for all sales problems. There are a few blemishes on LinkedIn that take away from the beauty of the system.

First, building a good network on LinkedIn takes time and effort. And the more connections you add, the more work it takes to maintain. I must admit that after reviewing some of my 500+ connections recently, I had no recollection who some of these people were. I had to view their profile to remind myself why I had added them – and for a few of them, I decided to disconnect them because we no longer had a real relationship. I now mark my calendar to review my LinkedIn contacts, import new ones, and cull out some of the old, stale connections, every quarter. It takes a few hours, but I think it’s worth the investment to keep the network current.

Second, as a LinkedIn user, you will discover that there are two types of network builders: I call them conservatives and liberals. Conservatives, like me, keep their networks limited only to those people with whom they have a real relationship. This is important to me as a sales professional, because I use my network for introductions, and I want those introductions to be of high quality, for both me and for the person I want to meet. On the other end of the spectrum are the liberals, who want to be “friends” with everyone – or, more precisely, they think everybody should be connected to everyone. These people drive me insane, as they care nothing about the quality of connections. Rather, they think only about the number of people with whom they can connect.

Here is where LinkedIn users discover the positive and negative aspects of recruiters, who use LinkedIn extensively, and who are all ultra-liberal connectors. There isn’t a week that goes by before someone I’ve never heard of invites me to connect to their LinkedIn network. Invariably, they are recruiters. When I first joined LinkedIn, I thought, “What the heck? Why not?” What a mistake. I was immediately deluged with repeated requests to pass on introductions through my network. Total time consumed: considerable. Total value to me: zero. I’m in sales – time wasted is money lost. So, goodbye connections to recruiters. (snip) Ahhhh, welcome back, peaceful, productive network.

I must admit, however, that my ultra-conservative stance on network purity made things a little too quiet. I found that without a few liberal connectors in my network, it was difficult to get introductions to some prospects without having to go through several degrees of people, and that made for some awkward introductions. So, I carefully reviewed some of the super-liberal recruiter connectors, and invited two of them to connect – they both immediately accepted, of course. Those two connections increased my network size by almost one-third, so I actively cultivate those relationships, helping them with their occasional recruiting requests, in exchange for introductions to key people. Indeed, I’ve learned that a little diversity goes a long way, when it comes to LinkedIn: a couple liberal friends I can tolerate – but more than that, and I start to get a headache. I leave it to your own sensibilities to determine how open you choose to be with your own LinkedIn connections. For me, a moderate conservative model works best.

I also discovered one of the problems with having a substantial network: poachers. You can, if you wish, leave your list of connections open on your public profile. This allows anyone that finds you to review all of your connections at their leisure. I figured that was the right thing to do, since the purpose of LinkedIn is to help grow business networks. But I didn’t take into consideration that some of my competitors are also LinkedIn users, and one of the brighter ones found my list of connections to be very, very interesting indeed. I suddenly found that my clients were getting calls from one of the “bad guys.” It took me a while to see the pattern, before I realized that he was trolling through my LinkedIn connections. I toyed with the idea of setting up a dummy connection and creating my own “sting” operation, but that seemed like too much work for dubious results – and besides, that is a violation of the LinkedIn user agreement, and I’ve found LinkedIn too useful to risk getting banned. Instead, I simply turned the visibility of my network off. People can still request introductions through my network, but they can’t browse it on my profile. That stopped the bad guys cold. So, learn two lessons from my experience, please: first, if you are a sales professional, guard your network, and second, if you know who your competitors are, check out their profile – you never know what you might find there, if you know what I’m saying. (nudge, nudge, wink, wink)

Sales Pro Value Score

Earlier, I asked why LinkedIn is so popular. The answer is clear – it’s darned useful, especially for sales pros who want to develop their network of valuable business connections. Is it the perfect social network for salespeople? No – it takes time and effort to become truly useful, and it has a few non-fatal but potentially annoying flaws. But if you are willing to make the effort, and if you are aware of the possible trouble spots, LinkedIn is fertile ground for development into an invaluable sales tool.

So, for it’s widespread user base, invaluable potential as a sales research and prospecting tool, a fair value-based pricing model, and interesting group networking features, despite a few minor flaws, Selling Geek gives LinkedIn a Sales Pro Value Score of 4 out of a possible 5.

UPDATE: LinkedIn starts new targeted advertising program.

UPDATE: LinkedIn and Moo form alliance to print business cards.

UPDATE: LinkedIn updates groups features, and breaks them

Some useful resources about LinkedIn and business networking

• Dave Stein gives a good example of what business networking is really all about on his blog…
  
• …and Dave also makes a good point about what salespeople should have on their LinkedIn profile
• Jill Konrath wrote a great post and a white paper on how LinkedIn can be used to sell better
• Jason Alba wrote a terrific  book on how to use LinkedIn, and has a very good related blog
• Sales Team Tools blog asks: “What does your LinkedIn profile tell others about you?”
• Blogger extraordinaire Chris Brogan advises: “Write your LinkedIn Profile for Your Future“

Tags: business network, LinkedIn, LinkedIn as a sales tool, Podcast, Review, selling geek, social networks

 

 Selling Geek 004-Twitter [19:40m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Let’s take a critical look at what is arguably becoming the biggest “Web 2.0” fad. Since it’s inception in 2007, Twitter now serves over 1.7 million users, and that number is growing by over 2,000 new users every day, and accelerating.

What is Twitter? Why is it generating so much buzz? And most importantly, does it have anything to offer salespeople? In this review, we hope to answer all things a-Twitter for the curious sales professional.

What is Twitter?

Twitter is a very simple idea – so simple, it sounds trivial when you try to explain it. Imagine you have your own private billboard, but anyone can see it, if they care to look. You can put anything on your billboard, as long as it’s text, and as long as each addition is no more than 140 characters. Any time you add something to your billboard, anyone that is interested will see a copy of what you posted, instantly.

And that’s all Twitter is, really. Except that your billboard is a web page on the Internet, and it is called a Twitter feed.

Twitter users can update their Twitter feeds by browsing their page on the Twitter site, or by using their mobile phones to post through SMS text messages. Likewise, users can view the Twitter feeds of others with their computers or their phones, at their option. And there are a large number of independently developed Twitter applications that make it easy to post to your feed, or monitor other people’s feeds.

In order to get notification of updates from someone else’s Twitter feed, you have to become a “follower”. You do this by looking up their Twitter name in the search bar, going to their Twitter page, and clicking the “follow” button. Some Twitter users actively recruit large legions of followers. For example, as of June 2008, tech guru Leo Laporte had over 42,000 followers, all reading his 140-character posts about his observations on technology trends, people, and life in general.

UPDATE: As of July 8, 2008, Leo Laporte had garnered 46,473 followers on Twitter.

Twitter is Like Love, Gone Wrong

As a social networking phenomenon, Twitter sounds like a neat idea. What’s wrong with trying to bring people together, after all?

Perhaps the best way to summarize my evaluation of Twitter is to share a personal story, from many years ago…

Back in my single days, long ago – well, perhaps long, long, long ago – I dated a nice girl in college. She was great – still is great, as far as I know. She was attractive, and very popular. I felt I was definitely in the “in crowd” when we were together – there was always a party at her place, with lots of interesting, entertaining people around. But something was missing. I never felt like I really knew my girlfriend very well. There just wasn’t a lot of depth to our relationship. And those parties – while fun – always felt superficial and shallow. I never had a conversation there that lasted more than a few minutes.

At first I thought it must be me – perhaps I was the one that was odd. After all, she seemed to be extraordinarily popular – there had to be good reason, right?

Eventually, I came to realize that we just didn’t have much in common, really, and she didn’t have the means or desire to build anything deeper. So, we broke up. She took it well – in fact, I’m sure she didn’t really miss me at all.

I tell you this personal tale of love gone wrong because it echoes all my feelings about Twitter perfectly. It’s a very popular platform, and it has a lot of initial appeal. But there just isn’t a lot of depth there, and ultimately, it’s unsatisfying, especially when the suitor in this technological courtship is a sales professional. After trying to use Twitter for a while, I think that most salespeople will wonder what the fuss is all about, and go find something more productive to do.

If that sounds equivocal, you understand me perfectly. I want to like Twitter – after all, so many people do, there must be something good in it – but the more I use it, the more mystified I become as to why so many people are attracted to it. Sort of like Paris Hilton – I can’t figure out the popular appeal there, either.

Twitter Problems Galore

Although Twitter is admittedly trendy and fashionable, it has a number of critical flaws.

Too Much Information

First, Twitter is just too darn open. Just because you can put anything in your Twitter posts doesn’t mean that you should. But, unfortunately, some do. For example, I started following one Twitter feed from a well-known sales best practices expert, hoping he might have some interesting insights to share. Instead, I received a steady stream of messages like this:

• “Got up this morning, feeling good!”
• “Sitting on the back porch, enjoying life!”
• “Just realized what a lucky guy I am!”

I am all for having an optimistic outlook on life. However, I am not a fan of having that optimism forced upon me in an endless stream of greeting card platitudes. Every time I read one of these little gems of anti-depressant inspired wisdom, I thought, “Thanks for stealing another five seconds of my life, pal.” It adds up, after a while.

I stopped following this fellow, when I realized that he never really said anything important. Sort of like Paris Hilton, come to think of it.

As bad as this example is, there are other Twitter feeds that are worse. Does anyone really think that the entire world needs to know when they are heading for the bathroom, and what they do when they get there? Apparently, some Twitter users are so narcissistic that they feel compelled to share every aspect of their life with the world, in real time, no matter how mundane.

To these people, I say only this: no one wants to know you that well. Trust me.

A House Built on Sand

Second, Twitter’s infrastructure just doesn’t work very well. It goes offline, inexplicably, at frequent but random intervals. It stops working so often that there are websites dedicated to the frequent downtime of Twitter. When people start memorializing your failures, it’s not a good thing. During my evaluation, I observed that Twitter went down an average of at least once every other day, for intervals lasting between twenty minutes and more than two hours. It wouldn’t be so bad if it went down at scheduled times – Twitter’s outages are generally unpredictable.

Tech analysts speculate that Twitter’s unreliability is due to the underlying technology, which was never intended to support so many users. Also, no one predicted that nearly two million people would be running up the Twitter curve this quickly, further compounding the performance problem. Which means, most likely, that Twitter outages are going to get a lot worse until the system gets a complete overhaul. And Twitter isn’t saying when or if that might happen.

Who Are You, Really?

Third, Twitter is wide open to spoofing (and so is Jott, which we recently reviewed). Spoofing, for the uninitiated, is when other people masquerade as you by falsifying data. As Twitter is set up today, anyone that knows a Twitter user’s authorized cell phone number can update that person’s Twitter page, with relative ease. Imagine, for a moment, that one of your unscrupulous competitors gets your mobile number, goes to your Twitter page, and posts obscenities about your prospect or customer, and then directs them there. This is why I have not connected my mobile phone to my Twitter feed – I don’t want anyone else to put words in my mouth, especially in a public forum.

A Selling Time Vampire

Finally, Twitter offers almost nothing of value to sales professionals. Let’s walk through some essential elements of a salesperson’s job, and see if Twitter provides any utility:

• Can Twitter help us to find new prospects? Maybe, if you have a lot of followers, they might be able to refer you – but that sounds like a bit of stretch – and frankly, there are other services far better suited to build referrals than Twitter.
• Can Twitter help us to research accounts? Highly unlikely – and there are many other much better resources designed for account research, too.
• Can Twitter help us to qualify opportunities, provide proof of concept, justify our offering’s value, negotiate or close new business? No.
• Can Twitter help us to manage and improve account relationships? Well, maybe, if your customer follows your Twitter feed – but remember that most of the interaction on Twitter is public. Do you really want customer inquiries to you to be broadcast to anyone who cares to read them? That doesn’t sound like a good idea to me.
• Can Twitter reduce administration or help salespeople to be more efficient? No – in fact, it will consume precious selling time.

One Good Use for Twitter

You may notice that I maintain a Twitter account, and in fact show it on the SellingGeek.com website. That’s because I use my Twitter feed only to share updates from the Selling Geek blog, using a handy RSS-to-Twitter utility called Twitterfeed. You’ll find no posts on my Twitter page about my personal life – ever – I promise. So, if you use Twitter, feel free to follow me – my Twitter name is TimothySullivan.

Sales Pro Value Score

As a tool for sales professionals, the pretty, popular, and lightweight Twitter doesn’t have much to offer. So, because of its low sales utility, lack of identity security, annoying user practices, and yet, a significant “cool factor”, Selling Geek gives Twitter a Sales Pro Value Score of 1.5, out of a possible 5.

UPDATE: Twitter to get “fixed” by John Adams (the technologist, not the patriot…)

UPDATE: Twitter to abandon its unscalable architecture?

UPDATE: Open source Twitter competitor Identi.ca emerges

UPDATE: FriendFeed catching up to Twitter

UPDATE: Twitter to buy Summize for search

UPDATE: Apparently, people don’t care about Twitter downtime

UPDATE: Twitter testing new design

UPDATE: The case of the missing Twitter followers

UPDATE: Tweet your files with Drop.io

UPDATE: Twitter usage not as high as expected

Tags: Podcast, selling geek, Twitter as a sales tool, Twitter review, Twitterfeed

 

 Selling Geek 003-Jott [13:10m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Have you ever been driving to your next sales appointment, when suddenly you hear something on the radio? Realizing that this means a potential sales opportunity, you search frantically for a pen and a scrap of paper. One hand on the wheel, and the other fumbling around in the glove compartment, you take your eyes off the road for only a second… and are surprised when you look back, seeing yourself en route to an impending collision.

Clearly, this is not the best time to be jotting down your ideas.

Jott to the rescue of lost ideas

When do you get your best ideas? For me, it’s usually not when I’m sitting in my office, in front of my trusty computer, or with a pad of paper and writing implement in hand. No, usually it’s when I’m doing something else – driving, walking, eating, showering – it never fails. That’s when inspiration seems to strike me.

And what happens to most of those ideas? If I don’t jot them down, they evaporate away, lost forever. I shudder to think how many of my “million dollar ideas” have wafted away into the ether, never to return.

But now, as long as I have my faithful mobile phone nearby, I never have to worry about losing a good idea. For the last few months, I’ve been using the well-named Jott, the incredibly simple but supremely elegant voice to text service. With Jott, I simply call a toll-free number and dictate a message up to 30 seconds long. The resulting audio file is received by a dedicated call center, transcribed into text, and sent back to me in an e-mail or text message. It’s a very cool thing.

Jott CEO and co-founder John Pollard realized that people have some of their greatest ideas when they’re away from their PCs, and that the only real appliance they have with them almost all the time is their mobile phone. And he’s built a simple but useful system that takes this fact into account.

Jott: more than an idea recorder

Since its inception at the end of 2006, Jott has expanded and enhanced their original concept into a wide variety of links with other popular services, such as a Jott to Twitter link, where short messages are transcribed into a Twitter feed. (Twitter is a microblogging service that is rapidly growing in popularity… but that’s another show.)

Jott has become very popular with professionals on the go – this is especially true for salepeople, who seem to be in transit far more than most.

The best way to illustrate the elegant usefulness of Jott is simply to experience it… (Click on the player button at the top of this article, and you’ll see what I mean.)

You can also send Jott messages to groups of people, provided that you’ve entered them into your account on the Jott.com website. Imagine being able to send a text message about your latest deal to your entire sales team, just by calling Jott, dictating a message, and sending it to “Team” – all without touching a keyboard.

Or, you can Jott a message to yourself, then stand by – Jott will ask you if you want to send that message to yourself as a reminder at a future date and time. Jott will send an email or SMS text message to your phone at that time – it’s almost like having your own personal secretary.

Other Jott links include integration with:

· Internet-based calendars, including Google Calendar and 30 Boxes

· A wide variety of online task management and “to do” lists, including Tumblr, Remember the Milk, IWantSandy, FortyThree Actions, KeepUp, Kwiry, Mentat, Nozbe, Smartsheet, Toodledo, and Vitalist

· Blogging services, including the aforementioned Twitter, Jaiku, WordPress, TypePad, LiveJournal and Blogger

Jott is also becoming a mobile phone gateway for all sorts of other niche applications, including the ability to:

· Get price quotes and information about items on Amazon.com

· Get real estate cost estimates on specific property addresses from Zillow.com

· Leave questions for investigation and response from Mosio’s people-powered research service

· Poll the Recommendr consumer community about favorite products and stores

·Leave alerts about speed traps and get updates on highway police monitoring in your area through the Trapster.com service

· Record business expenses through the Xpenser service

… all this, just using your voice, your mobile phone, and Jott.

As I said, it’s a very cool thing.

Is Jott too good to be true?

So, what’s the catch?

So far, there really isn’t one. Jott’s service is free, at least for now. But Jott’s management team has hinted that eventually, they will probably introduce advertising in some form in it’s free service, or charge fees for access to premium features, or both. For example, Jott recently announced a new service called Jott Feeds, where users can request Jott to read text from syndicated weblog or news sites. Jott intends to insert ads into this text to spoken word service, and share revenues with the publishers.

But today, Jott is no cost and a no-brainer addition to my sales toolkit. It doesn’t require any special software. It’s practically brain-dead simple to operate. And it’s free. What’s not to like?

My only complaint after using the service for a few weeks is that it is not perfect. About one in every ten messages seems to have a mis-spelling of some sort. This usually seems to happen whenever I’m recording the name of a new product or Internet website – and let’s face it, some of those are hard to spell anyway. Now I’ve gotten into the habit of spelling out proper names – bingo, no more mis-spells in my Jott text messages. Having real human beings doing the transcription seems to work exceptionally well. I shudder to think what Jott would be like if its transcription engine was generally automated – that technology has a long way to go before it’s ready for prime time… but that’s another show. I also wonder if the Jott team can keep up with the workload as the application’s popularity rises. And finally, when and how will Jott figure out how to make money – and how intrusive will that become on what is currently a delightfully simple, straightforward service? These questions give me pause, and make me wonder about the future of Jott.

But today, as the summer of 2008 dawns, Jott is just plain cool. And darned useful, too, if you are a busy sales professional. And did I mention that it’s free?

Sales Pro Value Score

So, because of its ease of use, high utility, and (so far) zero cost, Selling Geek gives the Jott service a Sales Pro Value Score of 4.5, out of a possible 5.

UPDATE: Here are some great ideas for using Jott from the Sales 2.0 blog

UPDATE: Jott introduces tiered pricing plans

Tags: Jott, Jott to Twitter, Podcast, Review, sales tool, selling geek, voice to text

 

 Selling Geek 002-YouSendIt [9:50m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Last fall, I was working on a sales improvement project for a client in the UK. They asked me to develop several short videos for their team. This was a rush project – with a very short deadline. They couldn’t wait for me to burn the videos to a DVD disk, and ship the disk overseas – they wanted the files right now.

“No problem,” I thought, “I’ll just email these 150 megabyte files to them.” Ah, not so fast, grasshopper. Did you know that most corporate networks reject media attachments to emails, or at least block emails with attachments over 10 megabytes in size? For some reason, my usually geeky brain had forgotten that even Google mail and Yahoo mail have file attachment size limits. (Duh!)

“No problem,” I thought, “I’ll just set up a little FTP site on my home server using FileZilla. (A very cool file transfer protocol server program – but that’s another show…) And so I did. But, alas, my client was most displeased. I’d forgotten that my AT&T DSL broadband service provided lightning-fast 6 megabytes per second download transfer speeds, but my upload speed was limited to just 512 kilobytes per second – and so my client was pulling his hair out and cursing my now twice-demonstrated technical naiveté. (Argh!)

So, what was I to do? Enter, my savior… YouSendIt, the slickest file transfer service I’ve ever used, and clearly of immense value to any sales professional that has to send large files to prospects or customers.

YouSendIt enables you to send large electronic files to anyone with an e-mail address. And it’s a breeze to use. You simply use your Internet browser to log in to the YouSendIt.com website and upload your file, which is stored in a secure, private location. YouSendIt sends an email to your intended recipient, and provides them with a web link to your file. They simply click the link and download the file to their computer.

Also, YouSendIt can be used by your customers to send you large files, too. They simply upload their file to your private dropbox location on the YouSendIt website, and you receive a notification e-mail that it’s there, ready for you to transfer to your PC.

Costs

What does YouSendIt cost? Well, that depends. For most sales pros, the totally free Lite subscription will meet the needs of salespeople with occasional large file transfer requirements – the Lite plan allows file transfers up to 100 megabytes in size, with a monthly transfer bandwidth limit of 1 gigabyte, and a maximum number of 100 downloads per file. That means that you can send up to ten files per month if they are the maximum allowed 100 megabyte size.

If that’s not enough capacity for you, the next level subscription, called the Pro plan, costs US$9.99 per month, and allows file transfer sizes of up to 2 gigabytes each, with a monthly download bandwidth limit of 40 gigabytes, and up to 500 file downloads per month – it also gives you 2 gigabytes of online storage space, and more control over your file tracking and distribution.

For sales teams, YouSendIt also provides even more advanced subscription plans – the Business Plus plan at US$29.99 per month, and the variable tier priced Corporate Suite plan with unlimited bandwidth and downloads. These advanced subscriptions also provide the ability to brand your download pages with your company logo and colors, if you wish, or integrate YouSendIt capability into your own website, and other flexible features.

Even if you have the free Lite subscription, YouSendIt provides for exceptions, allowing you to transfer a file larger than 100 megabytes (up to the maximum of 2 gigabytes), for a one-time fee of US$8.99. That’s pretty pricey for a one-time exception fee – but it’s still cheaper than most overnight express shipping charges, and of course, the transfer is instantaneous. And, you can always upgrade your free Lite subscription, if your transfer needs grow beyond what you expected.

Add-Ins and Extensions

While most salespeople will be happy to use the simple-to-use website to transfer individual files, YouSendIt also provides optional software and plug-in extensions for Photoshop, CorelDRAW and Aperture, so you can upload multiple files from directly within those programs on your PC. There’s also an Outlook plug-in that adds a YouSendIt file transfer icon to Outlook’s toolbar. If you do a lot of file transfers, these special YouSendIt applications and extensions can save you time, as they increase transfer speed and do away with the need to access the YouSendIt website with your browser.

Minor Complaints

What’s not to like about YouSendIt? Well, if you need to send files that are larger than 2 gigabytes, this service isn’t for you – that’s the maximum file size allowed, even at the most advanced subscription levels. Also, one missing feature I would like to see is a notification email back to me, telling me that my intended file recipient successfully retrieved my file. There’s no way to do this automatically within the YouSendIt site, so when I send a file, I always tell my recipient to let me know when they got the file by reply email, which is a minor inconvenience for both of us.

Sales Pro Value

These small complaints aside, YouSendIt is a godsend to sales pros that need to transmit large files safely, securely, and with a minimum of fuss and bother, both for themselves and their customers. The next time you need to transmit a large proposal or RFQ response, YouSendIt might give you that small but important professional edge that helps you get ahead of your competitors – and all this at little or no cost.

By the way, using YouSendIt, I was able to transfer my large files to my UK client in just a few minutes, and they loved how easy it was to retrieve them. Their perception of me quickly changed from “blithering idiot” to “good reliable bloke”.

So, because of its ease of use, reliability, scalability (to a point) and low cost, Selling Geek gives the YouSendIt service a Sales Pro Value Score of 4, out of a possible 5.

UPDATE: YouSendIt secures additional venture capital funding

Tags: file transfer, Podcast, Review, sales tool, selling geek, YouSendIt