I have been working on doing some elephant hunting lately in order to grow the business. I don't have a financial partner like a VC to outfit us with the latest sales hunting gear from their portfolio companies and cash to pay the smooth service companies that feed on fresh start-ups. I'm on the hunt for that elephant of a deal that can feed us for six to twelve months and provide the energy and capital to expand the business. It's going to have to be a six or seven figure deal so there is no point in calling on folks that can’t stomach that. Luckily, millions of years of evolution have contributed to making me a natural born killer and I’m ready to feed.
Picking the prey
The companies I am looking to sell to are ones that have cash to spend. So I focus on public companies and venture backed start-ups, since they appear to have the best promise for revenue. I look at a number of criteria to match them against things that analysts, customers, friends, and advisors had said that our technology would be good at solving. Since it takes a lot of energy to hunt each company, I like to pick the right ones. Companies that are having a problem or are in distress can be more attractive than others because they can be taken down the easiest. So I surf to Monster.com and peruse the job boards. My objective: to see if they are hiring in areas which indicate they need support with building desktop applications for organizing content. I find one elephant this way that looks like a good fit. They are hiring a Sr. Product Manager to lead a product team locally for a product that could use our technology and knowledge. So I mark them for a hunt. I also read the news about companies worth checking out. To do this, I subscribe to Google news. More recently, I have been using our own product to search RocketInfo to get the latest news feeds and blogs about companies. In general, change is good at a prospect site. A good change of management makes everyone unstable including existing vendors. The new management may not be ready to buy immediately but the first in is the most likely to win.
Tracking and studying the game
I have grown to love the Internet as a source of information to quietly approach the game. Plenty of clever start-ups have provided tools which leave most individuals exposed to a phone call or email. For my targets, I first want to look deeper at their organization. LinkedIn provides a host of information about individuals that is quite incredible. I generally don't care much about whether I am linked to each person. It's more that there is a person named John Smith who is the VP of Engineering at Elephantco, who used to work at Elephantcoacquiredsub. And Frank Black, who used to be the VP of Engineering at Elephantco is now working at Gazelleco. LinkedIn's business model means they are giving me tons of value and I don't pay for it (but that isn’t my problem!). Years ago I used to dream of having a resource like this to find people’s names, interests and roles. Sometimes I’ll even use the tracking tool in LinkedIn to see how I’m connected to a person. In one case recently, I knew someone who was a former employee at the target company that was a new colleague of one of my former colleagues. I didn’t actually use LinkedIn to contact the person. Instead I called my old buddy and asked for an introduction.
Testing approaches
But the social network rigmarole only goes so far. Most people aren’t directly connected to me and I don’t mind hunting alone. At some point it is just me and the game out there in cyberspace. When it comes down to that, I need to get some contact information and make an approach. The site zoominfo.com is a good companion to LinkedIn because it provides utilities to send an email to the contact. They have a form where you can forward an email to the person and propose something like a meeting or call. The email comes from you so they will reply to you. I don't use this tool often but you have to try something to get through. An alternative is to guess the email address. Companies have corporate standards for email addresses and they look like this flastname@company.com, fname.lname@company.com. You don't need to guess a seven digit number to put an inquiry into a person. I’ll try five or six people at the same company over the course of a few weeks to see if I can get anyone to bite. It only takes one to get started.
But email is a little indirect and the telephone is a very useful tool. While in hunting mode, I like to make a lot of phone calls to very important people. Some people find this intimidating but it is actually a fun contact sport and an essential part of the hunt. To make it a little less intimidating, think about it this way: if you are selling something worth $100,000 then it must have an ROI to the buyer of over $500,000. You aren't making a call to take $100,000, but instead to announce that the person you are looking to reach is the lucky winner of $400,000. You are the Publisher’s Clearing House, the lottery - the good guys! People should love to talk to you.
The telephone attack
But they don’t like being cold called. The avoidance strategies by the prey to block me from calling and reaching my targets are significant. They include hidden extensions, people who don't answer the telephone and rerouting of calls to irrelevant peons. To handle locating the extension of the person I am looking for, I just call the main number and ask for John Smith, the guy I found on LinkedIn. People's blogs also can work well, although it is sloppier to use them. Since I have the name and their title, I normally get through to the right extension. That worked for me the other day and I'm in the process of negotiating an elephant opportunity that came from it. But it is often more complex than that. If I don't have a name because the management team isn’t networking on LinkedIn to find their next gig, then I need to interrogate someone on the phone directly. The administrative people in companies are actually quite nice and want to be helpful, since they are in an outward facing customer service role. They can be reached using the "0" key on the telephone. Chatting with them can help build a map of people with names and titles that aren't available anywhere else. Then I can pull the same trick of calling and asking for a person whose name, title, and favorite sports teams I already know.
Often, when I get to the target person, their response is to fob me off to that guy from the Capital One commercials who says "NO" in twenty languages. This is a typical response: "Wow that's a great idea. You should talk to people in product management about that." I have come to learn that it is best to play along and use it as a hook to get back to the real buyer. So I'll talk to whoever they want and then call them back to explain how it went. Sometimes the referrals really are sending me through the whole political route to get the approvals, etc. to make a big sale and it isn't the end of the world if this means actually making progress.
The waiting game
The big game don't fall quickly. It is good to have a lot of time on your hands when hunting these big companies. Really good ideas take about six months to percolate through them before they can regurgitate the $100K meal. I like to use this to my advantage and spend less time working on them when they are making me wait. I prefer to gamble with them by telling them I am ready for meetings that I'm not ready for. So I'll say something like, "We've been working on the proposal and we are hoping to present it tomorrow." This roughly translates to in my mind to, "I think you are going to schedule a time in two weeks to go over the proposal. If you do schedule something then I'll put together a proposal." This strategy does carry some risk, but my time as a bootstrapper is very valuable and experience with these elephants tells me that they can't move as fast as me. In order to avoid spending lots of time making a proposal, I’m going to first get on the schedule with them and make sure the right folks will be there.
The kill…. To be continued.
