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[I had the opportunity recently to ask Jim Fowler, CEO of Jigsaw, some questions about his company. Jigsaw is a fast growing company with interesting concepts regarding leads that will be of interest to many sales professionals.]

1. You are the CEO of Jigsaw. What is the history of Jigsaw?

Jigsaw was founded in late 2003 with the mission of mapping every business organization on the planet. The concept was that salespeople could work together to build a gigantic shared Rolodex.

Jigsaw launched in late 2004, has raised $18M in venture funding, currently has ninety employees and has over 500K members (mostly sales professionals) who build and maintain the collaborative database.

2. Who do you consider your biggest competitors and what are the differentiators?

Jigsaw competes most directly with traditional data companies like Hoovers and InfoUSA. Jigsaw differs from them in several key ways:

They build and maintain their own databases. We believe there is no way a few dozen or even a few hundred employees can compete with an army of 500K motivated salespeople who build and maintain the Jigsaw shared Rolodex.

We have many more contacts and they are much better. Specifically, every single Jigsaw contact is complete – including email address and phone number. Seventy-two percent of Jigsaw contact records have a direct dial phone number. Virtually none of our competitors’ records have either an email address or a phone number.

We give our company data away for free. Members can download up to 50K complete company records at a time in the format of all of the major CRM systems.

3. As a sales professional what are some of the compelling reasons for me to use Jigsaw for leads versus more traditional ways of lead attainment such as leads lists and networking groups?

Jigsaw’s data is not only complete, but it is also much fresher than any other lead list. Jigsaw’s 500K members constantly clean the data, updating records and graveyarding dead ones.

Jigsaw is, in essence, the largest networking group around. There are currently almost nine million complete contact records on Jigsaw.

In essence, Jigsaw is doing to the traditional data companies what Wikipedia has done to Encyclopedia Britannica.

4. Is Jigsaw responding to a change in how professional salespeople network and acquire leads?

We prefer to think that Jigsaw is changing the way sales professionals network and acquire leads. Never before have leads of this quality been so easily obtainable. We believe the increase in transparency of data will fundamentally change the way salespeople sell. We believe that it will no longer be about just getting the data, but about how to rise above the noise. We believe salespeople are going to have to become better marketers in order to get a prospect’s time.

5. What is your sales demographic and industry demographic? In other words, are you marketing Jigsaw to certain types of sales professionals that operate in certain industries?

Technology sales professionals were the early adopters, but now sales professionals from all industries and company sizes use Jigsaw. We offer a Jigsaw Team product that allows entire sales teams to use Jigsaw. We have over 600 of these corporate accounts.

Members use Jigsaw for two main purposes – to find prospects and to map organizations in order to understand the buying influencers for deals farther in the pipe. Our market must almost always perform one or both of these tasks on a regular basis.

We also sell our CRM cleaning and maintenance services to CRM owners/administrators. This is the fastest growing part of our business.

[Thank you, Jim, for answering my questions. I think many readers will be interested in looking into Jigsaw further. Scott]

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[I recently interviewed Gary Halliwell, CEO of NetProspex. This company is representative of the tools and resources that are increasingly becoming available to sales professionals and are fundamentally changing how we work.]

1. You are the CEO of NetProspex. What is NetProspex and how did it all start?

I’ve been a part of several successful online business information companies (President of Thompson Financial/Intelligence Data and President of ZoomInfo) that all shared one thing in common - technology transition - which always lets you do things differently and find new ways to deliver value to an online community. The power of user-contribution and Web 2.0 blew me away as soon as I saw it. While user contribution increases quantity tremendously, the lovely chaotic creative environments of sites like MySpace lack an aspect critical to the business user. Simply put, a business user needs accurate information. Why? Because they are going to take important actions in their workday on the basis of that information.

We thought there was a great opportunity to leap ahead of the competition by solving this issue. Jeff Clewley (NetProspex’s CTO and co-founder) and I both come from backgrounds in financial electronic markets where quality is paramount because the information is used to support multi-million dollar decisions. Our experience serving business users made us very aware that success in the space was going to be dictated not just by the amount of data collected but also by the quality of the information presented back to the user. We believe the majority of the early entrants were more Web 2.0 than Business 2.0 and have lacked this appreciation. NetProspex is a B2B sales contact exchange marketplace built on the premise that sales people need accurate content so they don’t waste important time in the sales process.

Fundamentally, Jigsaw relies on the user community to “clean” their data. We don’t think that makes sense. Sales people don’t want to spend precious hours fixing problems in a sales contact database; they have a job to do and that is to make money. NetProspex takes responsibility for cleaning data completely off the shoulders of users. Our trading system is designed to be quick and easy so users can upload contacts in less than 1% of the time it would take on Jigsaw. Then we put the data through rigorous quality processing, so that only validated contacts are added to the system. The result is that new contacts added to NetProspex are 100% validated when they are added to the database.

Before a contact is made available to users it undergoes a validation process that is the most rigorous in the industry. And we don’t stop there. Contacts are assigned an accuracy rating based on their age between 1% and 100%. When we add a contact to the database, it is 100% validated. Then, as the contact ages in the database we know the probability of that person being in that role decreases. This reflects the issue that people turn over at companies, and any group of contacts will get progressively inaccurate. We know this happens at an average rate of 20% per year, so we provide an accuracy rating to the contact that reflects the average accuracy for contacts as they age in the database.

Anything less than 50% is simply thrown out. Over time we continuously re-validate and re-score each contact. Because contacts are a perishable commodity, like fish, they go off after a while, so we purge all contacts more than two years old.

Yes, technologies like NetProspex provide a definite evolution of traditional sales processes, improving and scaling those processes to the point where information useful to business is becoming more network-like, rather than created by a single source. To illustrate, cooperation in the sales environment has always happened at a human level. If you knew someone who could help you get into an account, you’d probably ask them for the name and contact of that person. Executive directories grew out of this fundamental demand. The change is that the community is clearly prepared to share certain types of information like contact information, and the common benefit is that we can now start to see more deeply into a wider array of target organizations and find mid-management decision makers. That’s a big change and benefit to a sales person that speeds up the sales cycle enormously.

We cover a very wide range of industries as our customer is basically anyone who needs to find and reach another business person or group of business people. That is a fairly broad user base when you think about it. We have concentrations in B2B industries such as technology and business services, but we also range into healthcare, financial and manufacturing. The sales demographic is very broad and includes most transactional B2B sales environments where the sales person simply needs a targeted, accurate contact name.

[Thank you to Gary Halliwell, CEO of NetProspex, for answering my questions. If you are currently using NetProspex please feel free to provide us with your review of the site and its benefits by commenting on this post.]

Please tell your business associates about Scott R. Sheaffer’s Sales Tips and Sales Advice Blog. To subscribe: <click here> to receive by email or <click here> for the RSS feed. © 2008 Scott R. Sheaffer

For us to be most effective in attacking our target markets we must first define them and, secondly, be able to identify individual companies within them. This sounds really simple but it is amazing how many companies haven’t taken the time to do this.

One of the primary ways that we have traditionally identified markets and individual companies within those markets is by assigning them SIC codes. You remember SIC (Standard Industrial Classification) codes; they’ve been around since the 1930’s. The problem with SIC codes today is twofold. They were created when the U.S. was predominantly a manufacturing oriented country and SIC codes only have four digits, which can be limiting.

SIC codes needed to be updated to better reflect a changing North American economy and provide more options for classification. To do that, NAICS (North American Industry Classification System) codes were created and are replacing the old SIC codes. This industry coding system was jointly developed by the U.S., Canada and Mexico and has six digits. The Federal Government has been using NAICS codes since 1997.

NAICS codes can help us in several ways:

1. SIC codes are falling out of favor and are being rapidly replaced by NAICS codes. What a golden opportunity for us to take a fresh look at how we segment our markets.
2. Many industry reports that are now available either from public or private sources use NAICS codes. If we are still using SIC codes we won’t be able to use this new information very effectively as a benchmark for our own businesses.
3. NAICS codes can open our eyes to many service industry opportunities that were missing in the old SIC codes, which could play a prominent role in how we re-segment our markets.

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems are giving us increasing abilities to segment our markets through automation and NAICS codes are playing a key role. NAICS codes can be a very helpful tool in helping us focus our sales efforts. For a complete list of NAICS codes please see 2007 NAICS Codes.

If you’re not already a subscriber, <click here> to receive Sales Vitamins™ by email or <click here> to subscribe to the RSS feed. © 2008 Scott R. Sheaffer

Neuro Linguistic Programming (also known as NLP) was created in the 1970’s. The idea behind it was to understand human communication beyond just the words being used, with obvious implications to sales. Over the last 30 years most researchers have come to the conclusion that it is a highly subjective semi-science that should be used with caution, if at all.

NLP was initially used in psychology and counseling. It wasn’t long until sales practitioners of one sort or another started applying NLP theories to sales training. Am I the only one that has noticed that every new type of pop-psychology is ultimately applied to sales? My most displeasurable example of this was the distortion of the data about the importance of body language in communication (The Myth of Body Language in Communication). I still hear sales trainers refer to that and it makes my skin crawl.

The meta-model of NLP says that when one human being communicates with another they go through the following steps: the speaker first has a thought, it’s coded into words, the words are spoken, the hearer receives those words, the hearer decodes those words and then interprets the thoughts. The concept is actually fairly interesting to consider because, after all of those steps, the potential for misinterpretation in human communication can be better understood. Clearly we can see how this could apply to interactions with our customers.

As appealing as the theory sounds, it is generally accepted that NLP has not withstood the test of time (especially in the area of sales training). It has not been adequately supported by legitimate research and smacks of “new age” thinking, which has more of a spiritual or philosophical appeal.

My feeling is that NLP sales training is unproven and if it were advertised on TV you’d find it at 3:00 in the morning on an infomercial.

Stick with the sales basics that are proven over time and represented in Sales Vitamins™. There are no magic pills in sales.

If you’re not already a subscriber, <click here> to receive Sales Vitamins™ by email or <click here> to subscribe to the RSS feed. © 2008 Scott R. Sheaffer

We have two big adversaries when it comes to sales proposals; the following tip can help with both of them.

1. Sameness. All proposals tend to look like every other sales proposal in the known universe to our customers and prospects. This is not a good thing.
2. LIT (Lack of Information Transmittal). Because of the way we format our proposals we often don’t communicate our added value. This can kill things right out of the gate.

What are the generally accepted rules of thumb from a salesperson’s perspective for sales proposal construction?

1. Bigger is better
2. Hide the pricing
3. Stuff it with as many brochures as we can find
4. Make it look really professional with pre-printed tabs, etc.
5. Find all the “boiler plate” text available and “find and replace” the customer’s name into it
6. Make lots of copies and send out more than the customer could possibly need

What are the general rules of thumb from a customer’s perspective when viewing a sales proposal?

1. Where’s the pricing page?

Our customers and prospects go right to the pricing page when initially viewing a proposal and could not care less about all the other filler we include.

Since we know this, we can use it to our advantage and overcome the Sameness and LIT (Lack of Information Transmittal) issues with the following proposal tip. Here’s how it works.

First, put the pricing page in a place that is easy for the customer to find. This will immediately make us look different. Next, comb through the entire proposal and find the absolutely most essential value added items that we would like them to see. Lastly, include these items on the pricing page.

Since we know they are going to immediately dive for the pricing page, we need to put the most important points where we know they are going to be looking. The pricing page. In fact, with this technique they can’t avoid seeing these important points.

This technique will hopefully get us invited to the “short list” party where we can do additional in-depth value selling.

If you’re not already a subscriber, <click here> to receive Sales Vitamins™ by email or <click here> to subscribe to the RSS feed. © 2008 Scott R. Sheaffer

The sales profession is increasingly moving toward a more scientific approach. Students of sales are demanding a more objective and scientific orientation to the science of sales. As evidence of that, there are a number of outstanding universities in the US that have top flight programs where you can major in sales.

I’ve noted in past posts (What Colleges Teach you About Sales Careers) that many university environments are not too sales friendly. Fortunately, that is changing, as evidenced by the top quality sales degree programs being offered by the universities listed below.

There are many different choices to consider when it comes to a sales career; no longer can we just say that we want to be in “sales.” Please see As a career salesperson where do you best fit? for more information. Sales degree programs can really help a young person (or even someone with years of sales experience) hone their skills in the type of sales career they want to pursue.

If you have a son or daughter that is interested in a formal sales education, one of the following universities might be a great place to steer them. Of course it’s also never too late to consider a formal sales degree program for yourself or someone in your organization.

The following list of universities offers some of the best sales education degree programs in the US. All of the following are accredited universities where students can major in sales.

Baylor University, Waco, Texas, Internship Required
Illinois State University, Normal, Illinois
Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, Georgia
University of Akron, Akron, Ohio
University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio, Internship Required
William Paterson University, Wayne, New Jersey

I am very pleased to see that the sales profession is becoming more academic. These university programs provide a career launching point for young people interested in a sales career. They also are an avenue for experienced sales professionals to sharpen their sales skills and earn a degree in the process.

If you’re not already a subscriber, <click here> to receive Sales Vitamins™ by email or <click here> to subscribe to the RSS feed. © 2008 Scott R. Sheaffer

I received an email from Courtney of Seattle, Washington asking the following questions, “Scott, can you share with everyone your feelings about using our faith in God to help us in our sales job? Is this a cop-out?”

Courtney,

Sales can be an extremely rewarding career for all kinds of reasons. At times it can also be incredibly stressful. I’ve directly managed literally hundreds of sales professionals over the years and I’ve found that many of them rely on their personal faith in their sales careers.

Some might think that relying on faith smacks of desperation instead of determination. Before we throw out faith as a possible legitimate aid to our sales career, let’s consider just some of the challenges that we have to contend with, many of which are out of our control.

1. Sales budgets to reach each month/quarter/year. Sales success is measured by one metric and one metric only, total sales. Nothing else matters to employers. Worse yet, at the end of each month/quarter/year we have to start all over again. A sales career is the poster child for, “What have you done for me lately?”
2. Rejection, rejection, rejection. I know we’re supposed to be thick-skinned sales professionals and all of that, but, at some level, we have to feel accepted by others. If we are in a heavy prospecting mode over an extended period, the avoidance behavior of prospects can take its toll.
3. Competition. Have you ever tried to explain to someone who works at the home office what it’s like to have people (i.e., competitors) trying to take your job on a daily basis? I don’t think I’ve ever found anyone outside of sales who understands the pressure this puts us under.
4. Work hours. We can’t even imagine a 40 hour workweek. A hard hitting sales professional knows that we must contact customers and prospects during the day and attack the colossus of administrative tasks at night or on the weekends.

We all like to come across as tough and capable people in our sales jobs, but most of us need help that extends beyond what our sales managers and employers can provide. Sales is a very demanding profession and, quite frankly, it scared me when I thought about the goals that were expected of me when I was a salesperson.

I have no problem in admitting to you that my faith has helped me to feel more complete and confident with many things in my life, including my sales career.

Courtney, use your faith; it’s a valuable tool. I think that if you shared these thoughts with your sales peers that you would find that you are far from being alone. Thanks for your question.

If you’re not already a subscriber, <click here> to receive Sales Vitamins™ by email or <click here> to subscribe to the RSS feed. © 2008 Scott R. Sheaffer

It’s been 20 years since Neil Rackham published his 1988 book, SPIN Selling. For those of you who are too young to remember when this book was a business best seller, I can tell you that it turned a lot of traditional sales training concepts upside down. To a great extent it set in motion some major changes in how we currently view the customer/salesperson interaction.

1950’s style sales training wasn’t very pretty, nor was it very effective. Neil started a trend with his book that made us challenge those outdated views of the sales process. He also made us look more objectively at how sales professionals are trained and how we interact with prospects and customers.

Let’s review what made this book so noteworthy in relation to sales skills and concepts.

1. The author took time to research his material. Prior to the writing of this book (and even today) much of what passed for sales training was just the writer’s personal experiences and biases. Neil used a scientifically crafted approach to prove his points. This is a trend that fortunately is becoming more prominent in sales training today.
2. Neil broke the sales process down into four basic steps which you’ll find in most current sales training. Prior to his book these steps were not so clearly defined and understood.
3. He introduced ideas that were probably thought to be sinful to even consider in sales training circles 20 years ago. Things like: first impressions are greatly overrated, using scripts is a great way to destroy the sales process, questions are everything when it comes to selling, etc.

While I certainly don’t agree with all of the content in SPIN Selling, I have to applaud the author for researching his subject so well and not being afraid to be a contrarian. We need more Neil Rackhams in sales training.

While we don’t talk as much about this book today, many of its concepts have been integrated into current sales training. We shouldn’t forget the powerful contributions that were made by this book.

Should you read this book? It would be most helpful to those that are involved in consultative sales versus transactional sales, but I would encourage it as a classic sales training must-read, regardless of what type of sales environment you work in.

If you’re not already a subscriber, <click here> to receive Sales Vitamins™ by email or <click here> to subscribe to the RSS feed. © 2008 Scott R. Sheaffer

As salespeople we have to manage a million emails and files. We constantly need to find information on customers, products, proposals, presentations, etc. that is found in emails and files scattered throughout our computer.

It’s there somewhere, but we have no idea where to find it or when we created it.

There is an answer and it’s called Google Desktop. It’s free and provides search capabilities that will save you hours of wasted time trying to find information.

I’ve been using it for years and it definitely falls into the, “How did I manage without this?” category. People think I have magical powers of recall, but Google Desktop is doing all the work.

Once you download the program from Google Desktop it will index your emails and files and will instantly retrieve your documents and emails based on search terms. It works exactly like Google’s search engine except it’s searching on your files and emails.

Recently I needed to find a customer presentation from an event that occurred in 2005. I had no idea where to look. Was it attached to an old email somewhere? Was it in an old Word document stored in some folder? I just typed in “presentation, Chicago, 2005″ and it brought up the email with the attached Word document I was looking for in about one second.

In addition to finding emails and documents it will also help you find web pages you’ve viewed and it will even help you retrieve deleted files that you accidentally deleted but now need.

Microsoft’s latest version of Windows (Vista) has this feature built in, but Google beat them to the punch and has a product that is better suited to sales professionals and their needs in my opinion.

Get it on your computer and let me know what you think.

If you’re not already a subscriber, <click here> to receive Sales Vitamins™ by email or <click here> to subscribe to the RSS feed. © 2008 Scott R. Sheaffer

Chris R. of Lincoln, Nebraska submitted the following question, “Scott, I’d be interested to hear your take on leveraging social networking to develop prospects and clients.”

What a great and timely question. I’ve noticed recently that many sales professionals are not aware of how much things are changing when it comes to networking for business opportunities. I’m going to provide just an introduction to this important topic.

We’re all familiar with what I call “Legacy Networking.” This consists of schmoozing at your local chambers of commerce, leads groups and professional organizations. These forums work well, but there are new and potentially more effective ways to prospect using, you guessed it, the Internet.

MySpace.com and Facebook.com are the two giants in social networking on the Internet. These sites allow users to store all kinds of information about themselves and share this with others with similar interests. The only problem is that these sites have a social focus and not a business focus. They are trying to have more appeal to business professionals but still need further development in this area.

LinkedIn.com, Plaxo.com and Ryze.com are three social networking sites that are oriented toward business professionals. These sites can be a source for finding information about prospects. However, none of them are specifically designed to aid sales professionals.

Jigsaw.com is a social networking website that is specifically made for sales professionals looking for leads. It works like a leads group but with a lot more horsepower. You build up credits by submitting information which in turn gives you access to information. Because it’s web based the only geographical limit is the planet.

This site is an outstanding tool for those of us in sales and I would encourage everyone to take a look. The larger your geographic sales territory the more you could benefit from a site like Jigsaw.com.

We are in the early stages of social networking sites that are geared toward businesspeople. We are in even earlier stages when it comes to social networking sites that are specific to sales professionals. This is a trend that will continue and is going to provide tools that will ultimately change how we share information about prospects.

Thanks for your question, Chris.

If you’re not already a subscriber, <click here> to receive Sales Vitamins™ by email or <click here> to subscribe to the RSS feed. © 2008 Scott R. Sheaffer