From paper and phone to email and social media, business conversation has evolved and moved onto new platforms in a single decade. At times, the future seems murky on this new frontier. One thing is clear, however, demonstrated by my daily use of Tweetdeck, which allows me to monitor conversations on Twitter. Access to valuable conversations, our business landscape, thought leadership in our space, and feedback on our company and competitors is streaming live every day, and it’s hard to imagine running a business without this level of access and transparency.
Add sales & marketing automation into the new media business communication mix, and see what Marc Benioff of SalesForce describes as “the most exciting revolution in computing, ever”.
Last week, I posted “Five Ways Users are Changing the Publishing World” on iMedia, demonstrating how users are playing a major role in enhancing content across all types of media. User-contribution of business contacts (plus verification) is the idea behind NetProspex. We see crowd-sourcing as the best way to build the largest, most accurate electronic Who’s Who of business people. Aggregating timely, accurate, relevant business contact information is integral to the revolution going on in business communication, but it’s only the first step. Pushing the business communication revolution further requires activating the power of conversation.Electronic conversation returns us to our business roots
Conversation on the docks and in 18th century counting houses used to move markets. Newspapers and telegraph allowed wider dissemination to millions of citizens in towns, countries and across empires. (Bear with me, I’ll bring us back to this century in a moment.) Opinion and analysis arrived next to help people make sense of information when they lacked the context or direct experience of far-off happenings. With opinion comes bias, which walks hand-in-hand with poor decision-making. In fact, there is an inverse relationship between stupid business decisions and the distance from market information which is brought into focus in Subprime Primer a video explaining the housing crash. It would be subversive if it only wasn’t true!
The beauty of any form of conversation is that it provides the capacity for more authentic sharing of information and ultimately better decision-making. Imagine if the pension funds at one end of the housing market chain where aware of the conversation of loan officers and house buyers at the other end of the chain, not to mention the discussion of everyone else buying and selling those mortgages in between. Better business communication creates better business decision-making and a stronger economy.
Conversation is scalable for the first time in the history of mankind
It’s easy to get involved in the scalable conversation thanks to a combination of email, mobile and social media. Previously restricted by traditional media’s physical boundaries, we can now actively participate in the global conversation. As a result, business decision making will be enhanced and accelerated in incredible ways, and with it, the global economy.
Conversation demands authenticity, relevance, transparency, honesty.
Conversation allows users to find authenticity quickly. It’s easy to figure out if someone knows what they’re claiming to be a ‘guru’ or ‘expert’ at. Read an individual or organization’s blog, reach out and ask them a couple of questions on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or research their responses on other threads online. Their expertise lies in the content and cadence of their conversation.
When faced with a critical decision, users are relying less on published collateral, preferring to refer to online chatter or reach out directly to a perceived thought leader with experience. This mixed media landscape of influence affect decision making processes, and demonstrates the truly untapped repository of information is much larger than the Internet – it resides in the minds of the people who know, so move over information and make some space for conversation.
Breathing Life Into a Business Directory
Greater visibility on who works for what company, in what position and their contact details is a simple concept that has been waiting to burst out of its box and go beyond yesterday’s fragmented vertical business directories and brokered marketing lists. Gathering basic directory information on every business decision-maker out there has become a reality by crowd-sourcing (users generating data) with tools like NetProspex’s contact exchange, allowing users to share business contacts into an accurate and actively maintained directory.
In effect, our mission is to help propel the old information economy into the new mixed information/conversation economy. To achieve this, we recognize that business contact information changes daily and is as fluid and shifting as the community of business people it represents.
For example, job turnover leads to out of date contact details. It’s a simple truth: people change jobs! Our most recent tests of the business people contacts in our database shows that overall job turnover in the North American business population was around 27% in 2009. So gathering a massive business contact directory is only one part of the puzzle - keeping it clean is another. To maintain accuracy, NetProspex relies on proprietary CleneStepTM technology to maintain high predictable quality, trashing contacts that have become out of date, and only publishing contacts that have passed quality checks.
Business buyers demand relevant dialog
Conversation and authentic dialogue with potential customers begins with connection. To engage other business people that you don’t already know, we need a directory or electronic Who’s Who, like NetProspex. Not being able to find the right person within a company or industry is a point of friction that costs business money in terms of lost sales opportunities, and lost value delivered to the top or bottom lines of customers at millions of businesses around the world.
In the past year or two, skilled B2B marketers have figured out how to break through the clutter and truly engage their audiences with electronic conversation intended to educate the business buyer with webinars, podcasts and other learning materials. Business people have given a big thumbs-up to these learning opportunities which help them to keep up to date on the fast-moving world of business software, services and tools critical to building efficiency in their businesses. Social media and email is a two way conversation and when we have a conversation, we’re not only exchanging data, we’re building a relationship and trust, which brings us back to ensuring our conversations are relevant to buyers and the creativity of our marketing teams.
Targeting for untapped potential
Knowing the size of the company a prospect works for, their role in the company, the industry sector and perhaps how socially connected they are paints an accurate, complete portrait. This meta-data allows greater targeting accuracy, and this is the key to a directory where sellers can identify the right targets for their business service of software.
Conversation by email and social media with potential customers is a present reality, not tomorrow’s dream, which is why we recently announced the addition of social media information to our business contacts through NetProspex’s partnership with Rapleaf.Sales is about getting something done, as every good business person knows. Our goal is to activate untapped potential in the market by lifting the veil on who works where, provide relevant targeting demographics on prospects and information on how they can be reached, no matter the media or communication channel.
What does the future look like?
We see the future of business to business communication revolving around a company’s CRM and integrated sales & marketing automation systems. With over 10 million business contacts in our directory and thousands of active traders, we know companies are comfortable trading and buying business prospects in a directory hub like NetProspex. Our CleneStep technologies are key to keeping the directory clean and like a true electronic market (think financial electronic markets) we envision massive liquidity in the underlying accuracy and deliverability information, so that both the directory hub and the client’s own CRM data is kept clean.
This new landscape maybe appear a Brave New World to some, but marketers will keep their jobs and their companies competitive by figuring out how to make this communication work, creating and nurturing interested potential buyers, and spotting electronic buying signals, so that sales people can better coordinate to the clients buying cycle and needs. That clearly needs creativity and marketers and sales people who are comfortable in live dialog rather than the set piece marketing of the past.With email, and even phone integrated into the desktop and now social media conversation in the public domain, there is clearly a fusion of live and virtual worlds. It’s a new marketing landscape being created. There are certainly challenges to making this work, but I am optimistic about the future and the latest generation of young executives who drive the sales and marketing engines at the innovative companies leading this charge.
The bridge between these virtual technologies and live conversation is creativity. Frontiers are a new, exciting place where creativity can create value in ways that we cannot even imagine… yet.
About the author: Gary Halliwell has an intrinsic interest in information and how new technologies provide greater opportunity to deliver value to customers. Gary is a business publisher who has built successful companies around media technology transitions over the past fifteen years. Gary began his career providing electronic information to the financial markets and today runs NetProspex, a social media site for business people that allows sales and marketing people in B2B industries to share business contacts and find the most productive targets for conversations with the right business decision-makers.
