Panning for Gold
Posted on | May 3, 2011 | No Comments
мека мебелI am working on an article with Paul Leonardi, a former professor of mine at Northwestern University. We have been discussing ways to articulate a people, process and technology system that I have adopted into a business I have Co-Founded called Get Me The Right Job! (GMTRJ). At GMTRJ we have developed a way to rapidly collect data, make some assumptions about it and execute a process against it with the help of technology, to learn, find insights and ultimately VALUE (Money, Key Learning, Insight).
Through this discussion Paul suggested that I was a “Panning for Gold”. That is when the light bulb went off. That is exactly what we do. We do not build a town, set-up a giant mine and call in the big Caterpillar mining equipment. We pound some wood handles together, get some wire mesh, grab a tin pan and start testing the creek!
We do this in our sales and marketing process for example. As a company with less than $5m in revenue we enter new markets, test marketing messages and ACTUALLY ADD NEW CUSTOMERS by using this approach.
What we do…
1. Define our data – Who is the customer profile? Where can we get it? How fast can we load it…
2. Create our content – What do we want to communicate? How will we support that communication? e-mail, website, video, etc…
3. EXECUTE – send an e-mail campaign and measure the response
4. Manage – Clean the data, add new data that comes from the process, address exceptions, elevate required response, etc…
5. Learn – Decide if we have found a place to build a mine! Is this market segment responding well? Did we convert customers? Is there an opportunity here?
This is a process that many companies struggle with due to size, culture, broken sales and marketing process, poor leadership, lack of the right people, process or technology, etc, etc…
It looks like we may be “prospecting” for real. Miner 49′er!
Comments
Leave a Reply
About Coley
Coley Perry is a 15 year veteran of the sales and marketing grind. Most of his experience is in and around the intersection of sales, marketing, change management, technology and business process helping clients solve business problems through innovative solutions and consulting. He has built sales teams, go-to-market strategies, demand generation engines and sustainable revenue streams. Currently his passion is focused on the convergence of sales, marketing and technology. He wrote a lot of checks to Columbia College and Northwestern University but learned the most from The “Second City” Training Center in Chicago where he studied the Art of Improv.
