We recently attended a session where a marketing executive from Cisco quoted that 25 of their customers provide 50% of their $50Billion in revenue. Our jaw dropped as he mentioned they have 130 million contacts that they pursue globally as potential prospects. He was willing to share how he made some adjustments to tackle this impossible task of narrowing the list due to the concept of spending money on people who can’t buy versus those who can across the globe. We can’t say that we haven’t seen this numerous times before, especially on a much smaller company scale. Most customers come to us with high level parameters. We want to pursue companies in this arena and this revenue sphere, with these types of employee numbers.
With this scenario, we like to make an analogy to dating. Because the city you live in has 50,000 available singles that are between the ages of 25-35 who are actually working and paying taxes, you can now rest easy that Mr. or Mrs. Right is out there. We’re not advocating that you spend two weeks adding algorithms and layers to it, but it could pay off to actually pursue 20 people that meet some of the ideas that you have from a partner perspective and see what happens. This has really made online dating somewhat successful. That wouldn’t fly as a strategy to simply blast out to 50,000 – – or maybe it would but the results would take you an eternity to get through and cost a fortune and more than likely disappoint. Instead we have recently moved to the concept of predictive analytical based marketing databases. Where are the people that have the money, the background, the infrastructure the staff and the reason to purchase? Funny how even one of the largest most admired US firms has 25 other companies that they really focus on. So if you are headquartered in Kansas City could you find those 5-7 companies out of maybe your short list of 200 to double your revenue within 2 years versus marketing across multiple states to thousands of prospects? We think so.
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