Have you seen these guys?

I get emails all the time from people asking that question. I just got one this morning from an advisor.  If you have a startup, I’m sure you get them too.  No matter how seasoned of an entrepreneur you are, your first reaction is always to cringe. They’re just not fun emails to get. Everyday at a startup, it feels like it might be the day the lights get turned off. Then you get an email seeing someone else doing what you do and think, “Fuck. Those guys are fucking smart.”

So how do you react?

1. Understand that the person sending you that email probably cares about you and just wants to help you.  And they are.  Make sure you know that.  If you’re getting emails like that, ask why they felt compelled to send that, where did they find it or see it and if they tried the product out.  If so, what did they think of the competition vs. your product.  If you ask this just one time, the next time you get an email from them, the chances are you’ve turned them into a great testimonial for comparison.

1. Realize how great this is for validation that you’re on to something big.  They’ve done you a favor in being a competitor.  It’s so much more difficult to educate than it is to compete.  I’ve recently switched from Dropbox to Box and both of these companies could have an IPO in the next year.  There’s plenty of customers still out there even if you have a really good competitor.

1. You should know about your industry more than anyone else.  I was reminded of this yesterday when I met with Nick Frost of Advisor.  I asked him how they were different from a competitor.  It was the most impressive, well-researched and credible answer I’ve ever received for that question.  Imagine if someone gave the same review of you about your product when you were asked about a competitor.  You cannot deliver that answer unless you intimately know your competition.  And if you can answer to that degree, it builds a trust with a potential customer that is more powerful than switching to another solution that’s only 10% better.  Nick also did a great job of answering how Advisor was different with what their strength was;  ”They use freelance CPAs and contractors.  We have 18 full time in house experts that we recruit only from the ‘Big 4′ accounting firms”.

1. Always promote the industry above saying why you’re better.  If someone asks you about competition, your first reaction should be to discuss them as it relates to the industry and their contribution to it. The book, “22 immutable laws of branding” is 30 years old and their principles still apply.  This was one of the ones that is often overlooked by most companies.  Even if you never read that book, your motivation to succeed should be bigger than beating a competitor.  It should be to create something that changes the World because there is a big problem.  If you truly hate that problem, then you will be genuinely happy that smart people are also sprinting to solve it.  We really hate the technical ghetto that is happening with workflows.  It contributes to an entire day each week of inefficiencies from context switching.  Here’s a list of “competitors” we’ve gotten emails about that are doing a great job of helping with this issue in making the world more productive.

• Cirrus Insights
• Yesware
• Contactually
• IFTTT

If we were lucky enough to have you as a customer at Ecquire, or you have checked out our site and we have not solved your needs in helping you become more productive and efficient, check these guys out.  They’re doing some cool stuff and if you end up going with them over us, that’s great.  We’re always in the mood for a good competition to win you back.  I’m sure they’d say the same thing.

Integrating your Gmail account with Salesforce is a huge step towards peace of mind about your database. But email (and LinkedIn) can be a wild west of contact details, identities, and information. People who you email on one address might respond on another, spell their names slightly differently, or even different company domain names.

Ecquire does its best to match existing Contacts, Leads, and Accounts in order to update them rather than duplicate them. Ecquire employs a fine-tuned technology which we never cease improving using customer feedback. It even can work in LinkedIn when there is no email address available.

However, even the smartest algorithm can trip over itself in the real world. And if Ecquire is creating any dirty data it completely defeats its own purpose!

That’s why we created several ways for you to help Ecquire fight dirty data – because it’s your workflow, and you’ll always be smarter than the software.

Preventing Duplicate Contacts, Leads, and Accounts

To pick the right Account, simply start typing its name of an Account and it will auto-suggest from what’s already in Salesforce.

To ensure you’re updating the right Contact, you can start typing in the email field and select the appropriate contact.

To update a particular field for a Contact or a Lead (like a status) you can edit the field right inside Ecquire. If you don’t see it, click ‘more fields’ at the bottom.

When Ecquire finds a match, it will let you know so you can correct it to point to the right person

You’ll also know because the submit button will instead use the word Update

becomes

Ecquire has a feature called Auto-Submit. Its purpose is to submit emails you send to existing Contacts. It should not be creating any new Contacts or Leads, but just updating the ones you already have.

That said, if you feel it’s causing any problems, you can turn it off from the Settings menu:

Our biggest priority as a company is clean data for our customers – so if you have any ideas, or see a way we can improve, we would love to hear about your workflow and see what we can do to help.

We release software updates on a daily basis, so do not hesitate to reach out for urgent matters.

Find us at support@ecquire.com – emailing us there gets forwarded to the most immediately available team member and allows us to all collaborate on helping you.

“If you don’t have a button for your customers to click that gets you the next customer, each customer is just as difficult to get as the last”- David Barrett, CEO of Expensify

There is no activity that is more valuable nor has a higher return on investment than creating evangelists for your product. Evangelists are perpetual beacons of positive referrals for your product or service. They also happen to hang out with other people like them – more customers.

You won’t need a big data scientist to analyze your CRM and you can get it done with only a few hours a day. The following is a proposed system that maximizes your results from your efforts in creating evangelists but minimizes the CRM input.  This methodology is based on two things:

1. Control over your inputs: volume of touch points and your own efforts.
2. Word of mouth, based on a popular HBR study, “How Valuable is Word of Mouth” by V. Kumar and Andrew Petersen.

Quantifying Evangelists

Quantifying how valuable an evangelist is has been difficult for some time for what I believe to be one specific anomaly. It can be a difficult concept to control for and improve because companies are looking at the wrong data. Your most profitable customers aren’t your evangelists.

One of the most misunderstood topics in improving word of mouth has to do with the fact that a customer who spends the most money on your product is not actually the most valuable customer you have. In the study by Kumar and Petersen, the research showed that customers who promoted the most were not those that bought the most. In other words, those that are most valuable to your company are not appropriately represented by how much they purchase. It should be represented by the value of potential purchases they can positively influence.

In the article, the authors segment the types of customers into 4 categories:

• Champions  (which is often referred to as evangelists)- excellent buyers and marketers
• Affluents – buy alot but do not market well
• Advocates – who don’t buy alot but are strong marketers
• Misers who do not buy more nor market well

So how do you optimize your CRM to capitalize on this knowledge?

The process for evangelizing customers must be simple, inexpensive and actionable. Most failed CRM implementations occur because a clear process was not defined or understood across the company before it was implemented.  When executed correctly, this process will yield new customers with less input.

In the HBR study, the authors reveal their calculation for lifetime value of a referral and group the types of customers into 4 categories based on their referral habits.  The most valuable customer is one who talks about your product to others. There are activities that be used in identifying who these customers are, how you can create more, and the steps you can take to evangelize them.

The following proposed system takes advantage of the most basic categories with the focus being on the quickest and most effective way to move each prospect to an evangelist as quickly and as efficiently as possible.

1. Prospects

These are not just limited to people who can use your product but includes people who can promote your product too.

A prospect must be a qualified audience. Not every person you talk to goes into your CRM. Determine what makes someone qualified. Start by asking yourself these 4 questions:

- Do they have a budget / Can they influence someone with a budget?
- Are they willing to spend?
- Do they have the pain point you are solving? / Are they aware of the pain point you are solving?
- Are they using any solutions similar to your product?

1. Trial

Once you have prospects in your CRM, you should reach out to offer them a trial of your product.

1. Customer

Keep note of the users who end up paying you. But also keep track of the reasons for which they don’t. Why are they paying you or why are they not paying you?

1. Evangelist

Your goal is to turn every customer into an ecstatic supporter of your product and company. If they are paying for your product, they should be a testimonial, refer you or introduce you to other businesses that they work with.  Why are they or why are they not?

Setting up your CRM

You can set up the following CRMs to optimize for the funnel:

Prospects > Trial > Customer > Evangelist

StrideApp

With Stride, set your stages to this:

Highrise

With Highrise, use tags to show which stage a deal is at.

Salesforce

With Salesforce, set up custom stages for this:

Google Docs

You can even do this with a Google Doc by creating these parts of the funnel in there.

Of course, all of these services work with Ecquire to make it easier.

“You suck, your product sucks, your market sucks but we like the team”-  Jason Bailey, Founder – East Side Games

At the time I heard this, I didn’t appreciate what this actually meant.  It was also tough to take seriously because Jason had just got done mooning someone four minutes after I met him.  When I asked Jason about why they chose us to be apart of Growlab, that was his response.  We changed our product, idea and direction but not the team.  The founders are the only constant in a place where there is no stability.  It’s why investors put so much weight on this and why it’s so critical, more than anything, to have the next guy on your team be the best guy on your team.

“Why don’t you guys focus on where messaging is happening?” –  Len Brody, Co-Founder – NowPublic

This may sound too esoteric for application to your own industry but what this meant to us was to channel our focus on a big problem with a huge market, currently not being solved, a problem we had ourselves and in a space we knew intimately.  This was on the first call we ever had with Len when we were explaining the feedback we were getting as to why our current product wasn’t selling fast enough.

“All we have is our looks” -Lane Becker, Co-Founder of GetSatisfaction and author of Get Lucky 

Lane just said this to me last week.  It was eye opening.  Among the many other things that Lane has helped with, this point resonated at the perfect time for us.  The point being was to take care of yourself.  Everyone else’s agenda is secondary to yourself, your health and own well-being.

“Just don’t fail” – Dan Martell, Founder, Clarity.FM

The context of this was when I was explaining to Dan that everyone was giving us shit for the way we wanted to run our business.  He confidently looked at me and said, “you can do whatever you want, just don’t fail”.  That was the perfect thing for me to hear.  It gave us confidence to be ourselves and the exact way we needed to evaluate criticism – listen to it and improve from it if you can but don’t think you ever have to compromise yourself.

“Release that Shit.” - Michael Tippett, NowPublic & Ayoudo

When Tal was in the first stages of releasing an MVP, he demoed what he had for Mike.  Mike, was expecting to see something not working or just a glorified keynote simulation of a product.  Ecquire had a very basic functionality that worked and while we thought it was too early for the light of day, Mike saw it, snapped his head up in almost disbelief and said, “release that shit”.  We say this more than anything when we’re talking about product.  It’s just too much to try to think of everything you missed.   Tal regularly cites the creators at Pixar who cringe when they watch their own films because all they see is the things they didn’t have a chance to do – or their famous saying, “Movies aren’t finished, they’re just released.”

“You haven’t done shit yet.” - Andrew Wilkinson, Founder, Metalab

The first time I met Andrew, he actually recognized me at the Grow conference and told me he checked out what we were doing and was impressed.  That sentence is not to infer that I’m anyone that’s recognizable but rather that Andrew is someone who’d show up to a place and know the background on everyone there.  He asked a question that I can’t remember but I went into how we were gonna raise money and how we would be a good acquisition target for an exit and literally the second thing he ever said to me was, “But you haven’t done shit yet”.   He was right. We hadn’t proven or built anything and my focus was on raising money or how we’d liquidate.  The funny thing is, I hate raising money and we’re not interested in an exit, I was just talking about what I thought people wanted to hear.  I was so caught up in the hype of raising money and I didn’t even want to be.  This gave us the confidence to bear down on the product and to focus on what mattered.

“The best companies seem to focus on one thing.  Focus on being the best in the World at one thing.” - Kevin Swan, Principal, iNovia Capital

Much like any founder, they can’t shut up about all the things they’re gonna do.  Much like any successful founder, they focus on one thing because in order to make it, you should be the best in the World at one thing and if you’re gonna be the best in the World at one thing, it will take all of your focus and energy.  We focused on getting the right data to the right places.  Two years after that comment we still have a ton of work to do and are still improving that one thing.  I was lucky enough to have a call with Kevin every Friday morning for an hour for 10 weeks and there was still plenty to talk about about even though the topic was how well we were doing at our one thing.

“How can I be sure that 40K gets me a return?” - Gabe Weinberg, DuckDuckGo

Gabe’s the founder of duckduckgo and a very underrated angel investor.  His advice is usually in the form of a question that takes him two seconds to conjure up but sets me back a month… in a good way.  When we had our first version of the product, it worked well but looked like hell.  I made plans to meet him to go over a potential investment in us for just $40k.  It’s what I guessed the cost to be for a great interface and experience over what we had built.  His question was how he could be sure that the 40k would get him a return on his investment.  In other words, if we got exactly what we wanted out of the 40k, was that all that was keeping us from significant returns?  If you’re planning on raising money, consider what a significant distraction it is and that your product’s improvements will come to a halt.  If you cannot show and answer with data on why an investment in your company will generate at least a 20x return, your time is best spent on the product until you can show that.  When you can show that, don’t leave the office until you have 3 meetings/day booked for a month solid with potential investors.

“Your best feature is that button that gets you your next customer otherwise each customer is just as hard to get as the last one.” – David Barrett, CEO, Expensify

Think about your product and how easy it is for a customer to sign up their friend or colleague.  If it’s not as easy as a button then your biz dev efforts should start here.  David’s one of the most creative mind’s in customer acquisition, cost and pricing and each time I speak with him, he regularly brings up how much more difficult it is to get customers than it is to built a product.  It’s very hard.  The least you can do is to allow the customers that love you to tell their friends or add their team with the least resistance possible.

“LTV (Life time value) to COCA (cost of customer acquisition) only needs to be $1.01 to $1.00″  – David Cancel, Performable (acquired by HubSpot).

David will give credit to Brian Halligan (CEO at HubSpot) for drilling this idea into the culture at HubSpot but David did a great job at articulating what it really meant if you could get to this state.  David explained that your focus on how you acquire customers should have in mind that you just need to make one more cent than you spend.  In concept, this seems easy to grasp but it’s difficult to execute.  Making this a focus creates a very cash conscious and efficient company.  If you are making just one cent more than you’re spending to acquire a customer, you’re essentially printing money.

“The most successful companies I see seem to have between 1 and 3 metrics they have pasted or constantly displayed at their offices so everyone can see “- Roy Rosin, Intuit’s first innovation leader

Roy was an investor and advisor at my previous company and he mentioned this in a board meeting.  It says two things:  You can’t track much more than 3 things and the best companies have a common characteristic of constantly measuring so they can improve.

“Double it.”- Matt Mickiewicz, 99Designs, Developer Auction, Flippa, SitePoint

When people ask me about Matt I tell them, I’m not interested in ever being at another company where Matt isn’t an advisor.  Matt is one of the most successful entrepreneurs you’ll ever meet and he’s one of the best, if not thee best at bringing liquidity to illiquid markets.  When Matt came to visit us in Tofino, we showed him everything that was going on with us and then told him what we charged.  His response was double it.  We didn’t want to double it but we did.  Then he told us again months later, “double it”.  We didn’t want to but we did.  If you like our software, thank Matt.  We would not be around if we did not double our price given our structure and what kind of company we wanted to have.

“Double check the routing number you gave me” - Mike Kane, Founder, Kestrel Investments

It’s true that picking the right mentors can make or break your company. We’re truly indebted to all of our mentors and advisors who seem to know the right thing to say right when we needed to hear it. The most we can hope to do is pay it forward on their behalf.

Online dating can be a great way to meet your soul mate.

If you’ve ever logged on to a site like Match.com you’ve probably noticed that the options are endless! The sheer amount of prospects can be quite overwhelming.

With so many leads and interactions it’s crucial to stay organized. How else can you properly manage your pipeline and monitor KPI’s?

But copying and pasting from online dating profiles into Salesforce, Highrise, and Stride can be a real pain.

We here at Ecquire found a sore lack of CRM integration with the online dating world, and decided to do something about it.

We’re proud to announce that this Valentine’s day, you can export dating profiles into CRM contacts with just one click.

With Ecquire installed, simply visit a dating profile – and click the Ecquire button. Voila! He or she are now yours (in your CRM that is).

Now you can track your pipeline, monitor dashboards, and make accurate forecasts about your love life.

You’re welcome – and happy Valentine’s day!

Our plan was to go after enterprise customers when we reached our target retention levels of 30%.  The team did a great job of getting us there and now it’s my turn to fulfill my end of the bargain with getting enterprise customers.  San Francisco has the largest concentration of our most qualified customers for Ecquire - Google Apps and Salesforce users.  On top of needing more customers, it looks like we need another engineer to keep up with demand which I didn’t plan for so I don’t want to take a paycheck if I can avoid it in case the right person comes along.

For the last four weeks, here’s how I ate the healthiest, been the healthiest, happiest and most productive I’ve ever been while being in one of the most beautiful cities in the World for $1,050.

The Perfect Storm
I knew that I was going to have to be in the Bay area at some point but I happened to watch Jack Reacher and read The Flinch within a couple days of each other.  I would not recommend doing this if you are a risk averse person.  During this time, my best friend had his 4th kid and his car broke down so I left him the keys to my car.  I made a decision to get rid of everything I owned except what could fit into two bags.

Contents of my bags

Killspencer Messenger bag:

Computer
Computer Charger
Passport Folio
Sunglasses
Pen
Survival manual
Water bottle (actually did the hydration challenge)

North Face Bag:

New Balance Minimus
Flip Flops
Three pairs of workout shorts
5 pair of Underwear
1 Nivea 3 in 1 Shampoo/Body Wash/Shaving Cream
4 Tshirts for workout or for wearing.
1 under armor shirt for running when cold
Lock, Goggles, Deodorant, Cologne, Mach 3, Floss
4 pair of Lululemon Socks (premium socks but worth it)
2 Pair of ifttt socks (Thanks, Nate)

On My Person
Boots
Jeans
Chrome Hoodie:
Contents of Chrome Hoodie: Clipper Card, Tooth Brush, Tooth Paste, Phone Charger (If I left my bags anywhere, this would be all I needed to stay over anywhere. Notice the strategic placement of the toothbrush.  This compartment also housed the Clipper card).

Not on my person:  Three really nice dress shirts (more on this later)

Still don’t believe that I actually just have two bags and did this? This happened the first night I was in SF (Thank you Alice for the reservations).

Where / How I slept:

Each night I’d either stay at the Adelaide Hostel, at a friend’s house or on someone’s couch in exchange for coffee as apart of the Couches 4 Coffee Program offered by one of the startups I help.  If I stay at the hostel, it’s $25/night and $27 on the weekends. It’s in the Tenderloin district which gave me all the entertainment I needed.

Where / How I worked: 

From being a mentor at the Thiel Foundation, I was able to use NextSpace offices on 1 Hadelaide when I needed to.  If I wasn’t there, I worked out of Ritual Coffee, The Hostel, RocketSpace (thanks Bangel for not blowin my cover), or Four Barrel Coffee.

Where / How I ate: 

San Francisco  has the best farmers markets every day and where I’d usually get a fresh apple and banana for breakfast totaling 91 cents.  Here’s a list of Farmer’s Markets in SF where you can get the freshest, cheapest and best food every single day.

I’d regularly go to Plant, Corazon, or Herbivore for a fresh juice ($4.75) as a meal once or twice a day.

Rincon Market has about 5 meals there for under $5.  I’d usually get quinoa salad with cranberries from there for $4.99.

The only thing I can do during the day is exercise or work on Ecquire. That’s it. I can’t really go anywhere else so finding the next meal I could get for under $5 or for free became fun and like a game.  So the free meal from twitter on their roof was magical (Thanks, Nim).

Here’s what my schedule looks like on a given day:

Meeting with potential customer took precedent over everything and was the sole reason to come to SF.  This was what a sample schedule looked like for me.

Credit Where Credit’s Due:

If I had to give credit to two places it’d be Plant for the ability to get a freshly made juice for $4.75 and the Embarcadero YMCA. Because I am on my brother’s YMCA membership, I can access the YMCA as a day pass for $5/day. Here’s what I got out of $5/day at the Y (Special thanks to Jolson, Lauren, Dan, Danny, TeeJay and Richard of the YMCA)

Shower (with soap and shampoo)
Hot Tub
Steam Room
Sauna
Yoga
Swimming Pool
Towel Service (clean and free towels to use)
Workout Facility
Blow Dryer – not for hair but for when I had to emergency wash clothes and then dry them.
Locker to store stuff for the day so I don’t show up at meetings looking like I live in San Francisco for $41/day
Plastic Bags for clothes (very functional)
The swimsuit dryer thing.
Computer lab.
The Most beautiful rooftop that’s open most of the day to go work quietly in the sun.

BTW the Embarcadero Y is in the Financial District of SF and a block from Salesforce where I creeped everyday looking for someone new to talk to coming out of that building like when I saw Jevon and he asked me to send him our latest deck.

Across the street from the Y is Patty’s Cleaners. I have a few dress shirts that I drop off here and purposely only pick one of these up at a time. It was very confusing to Patty why I only wanted one shirt at a time when both were ready but we worked it out. I’d shower at the Y after a morning workout, walk to Patty’s across the street with a t-shirt, put the nice shirt on right there and have the best looking shirt in the room when I showed up for a meeting.

Supplemental Income

All of these expenses are travel expenses while I’m here but I don’t need any money to pay myself for anything so I can sustainably stay. And I was able to supplement some of my income by doing clarity.fm calls.

If you ever want to talk urban survival or get some of the goods that I can’t post publicly, give me a call there. Atlee snapped this photo of me doing a clarity call from RocketSpace.

Lessons Learned:

Be impeccable with the timing of your clothes drop off and pick up schedule and just planning in general. I had a lapse and forgot I probably wanted a change of clothes and my hoodie at night. Luckily, I was walking on the street in a short sleeve shirt, freezing my bits off and I ran into Paul and Nik from Learndot. They looked perplexed at what I was wearing and invited me to dinner then to crash on their place. I told them I could pay for dinner because they saved money on the hostel but they refused. Damn Canadians are so nice. SO try their software if you sell b2b solutions.
Amazingly benevolent people are more pronounced in the startup world than I think anywhere else.  Like Lane Becker and his wife Courtney.  They demanded that I stay in their spare bedroom for a few days. I’m pretty sure Lane could befriend a wolverine. He and Courtney are great.  Thanks guys.

Having nothing for granted is a pretty great place to be.  Enjoying a place to sit comfortably in the sun was something I would have never got so much enjoyment out of before.

The less shit I have and the less money I have, the more fulfilling each day seemed for me. Like I used to do and like most of you do, we take for granted being able to use a bathroom. For me, discovering a good place was like each day’s small treasure.

The other thing I noticed is that every single person I talk to about what I’m trying to do finds it interesting, inspirational and then offers to help in any way. It’s always good to be reminded of the fact that people are inherently good. Another thing I noticed at the YMCA is that the guys who come in there who are constantly smiling, the most personable and look the healthiest, the ones you can hear laughing seem to be the ones without money and the people in dress clothes going to or coming from work for the most part seem like miserable pricks. Of course I’m no one to judge based on appearance but someone who’s smiling and laughing have to be doing something right. Right?

I immediately want to push myself further having done this and already started taking notes on how I could do this again for $10/day.

You’re a fresh new startup. You have 6 people on the team. Half of your team is the product development team. If you’re lucky, you’ve got another guy working with you in sales and marketing. If you’re not, it’s only you.

You’re competing with companies who have established sales teams, with leads coming through the door, and with partner distribution networks you only dream of. How do you compete?

It’s an uphill battle. A gruelling grind. You’re fighting for each and every opportunity to present your product to anyone who will care. Sometimes, only to have them not buy because of reasons like “we can’t do anything until next month”, “it doesn’t work with my favorite browser”, and “if only it had this one more feature…”

Selling to the wrong companies will kill your company.

You cannot afford to be selling to customers who are unqualified. They are less likely to see the value of your product, less likely to experience the problems that you’re solving, and less likely to take their credit cards out and pay you.

We learned this the hard way at Ecquire.

Getting Enterprise Users

If you believe in the consumerization of enterprise software (which you should), then you already have a way of getting new leads. Give your product away. Let users take your product for a spin. Let them see and understand why they should care about your product.

If you’re solving a big enough problem for someone working at an enterprise, that person will care. Just be clear who that person is. Make sure your marketing and messaging is catered towards that person. Speak only to them.

Make it Easier to Access your Product

Just by having your product available with the right messaging is not enough. Every additional step required to try your product is another barrier keeping your potential customer away.

Things like signup forms, tool authorizations, usernames, passwords, and downloads. This does not mean that you should get rid of all the things mentioned. A little bit of work qualifies your lead. It shows that they actually care enough to put in some work. Don’t waste time on tire kickers.

Make an Impact with the First Run of your Product

The worse type of new product experience is one where you’ve done all the work of signing up and downloading, just to be dropped off in a huge hot mess. Too many buttons, too many options, so you leave.

Go the extra step to show your user the one key experience that will make them think “oh! that solves my problem.”

Customize the Experience

Create a way for you to connect with your users. At Ecquire, our product is deeply integrated with Gmail, so we created a way for users to personally email me as part of their onboarding process.

This gives me a channel to personally reach out to our new users to introduce myself and welcome them without sounding too spammy.

Identifying the Right Leads

Here is where things all the pieces fall into place. Every single new user who emails me is a potential lead. A very qualified lead.

• They have self-filtered by actually going through with signing up and downloading our product.
• They’ve seen our tutorial and are familiar with how the product works.
• They have emailed me so that I have a way of personally reaching out to them.

All there is to do, is to choose which ones are the right leads. I use Rapportive to gain more contextual information about our new users.

If you’ve done your work, you know exactly the right type of person and company who would benefit from your product.

Rapportive helps me to learn more about the person on the other end of the email. I quickly get a snapshot of their title, company, and where I can find more information.

Tag and Organize Leads

Enterprise leads in your CRM are only valuable if they get acted upon. Leave them there for over a month and they become stale and your chances of closing will be drastically reduced.

Have a way of organizing leads and cycling through them so that they don’t become stale. With Highrise, we tag all new potential enterprise leads. All contacts tagged as “Enterprise Lead” are individually contacted to see if we can develop them into a sale. If not, they are re-tagged or closed.

–

Hitting the ground running when you’re in a startup is tough. You won’t beat your incumbents at what they’re already good at. Instead, rely on being agile, innovative, and the ability to make changes on the spot. Make changes to your product, totally revamp your branding, and build strong partnerships early on. You never know when you’ll catch your big fish.

It’s difficult to find a more likeable person than Robert Scoble.  If you don’t know who he is, he’s like the Oprah of Tech.

Robert had no reason to interview me. It’s unlikely that he would have found me if it weren’t for a recommendation to Robert from a great customer of ours.  Thanks, Jeff.

I told a friend I was meeting with him figuring he might have met Robert before. I asked him what Robert’s like.

“Really down to earth, really personable, you’d never know he’s the guy everyone wants to talk to”.

I had to take a cab to his house in Half Moon Bay for an interview he was conducting of me about our startup. Along the way, the cab driver asked some women that were walking together if they knew where we could find his address.  Their reaction to the address was, “is it someone with a lot of money?”

I have no idea how much money Robert makes or what “a lot of money” even means so I don’t know why I instinctually nodded yes.  I guess I was thinking that he had to find a way to make money from how much he’s sought out and how far reaching his network is.

Robert lives in a modest home in a beautiful gated community that contains a golf course.  He greeted me at the door with a big smile with his son, Ryan, whom proudly pointed to his sea of toys that covered the living room.  Ryan looked at me to make sure I was looking at them, and just said, “toys.”  After some brief empirical analysis, I agreed with his claim.  It was clear that I had just interrupted some quality time with Robert and Ryan and saw why Robert enjoys working from home so much.

Robert is 6’2”, looks like Philip Seymour Hoffman, and was dressed like he could have been a roadie for Phish.

When we walked up to his office, he asked me what we were gonna talk about today.

He checked out Ecquire and started using it right away.  He genuinely was impressed and gave us an amazing testimonial. I thought about what would be interesting to talk about but he was already rolling and asked me a series of questions before I could think.  We went over the company and the product in the interview which will go up on Robert’s blog this month.

When the camera stopped, I had some of the most enjoyable 30 minutes I’ve ever had talking with anyone. I couldn’t ask enough questions and we covered a wide range of things.  There’s certain people that you meet where you feel like you’ve been friends since grade school.  That’s Robert’s skill.

There are questions on Quora and wiki entries that try to pin down why and how Robert got to be in his position.  You can’t help but to talk to him like he’s a good friend.  That’s why.

I asked him what was the most common characteristic that he saw in successful entrepreneurs.  As he was maneuvering some cords around so he could charge my computer, he was half grinning and shaking his head like he is still in belief of the chemical makeup of entrepreneurs.

“They’re crazy.  Entrepreneurs are just crazy.  Or some use ‘passion’ as the code word for crazy.  It’s crazy to start a company.”

We started to delve into productivity and he asked me if I had any more productivity hacks myself. I told him I don’t have a Facebook account.  He called me a weirdo.  I showed him an article from Inc. where it references my productivity hack of not having a Facebook account.

I asked him what he thought about Quora.  He mentioned how much he liked it and offered a productivity hack for me with Quora.  Follow topics on Quora.  Not people. “People aren’t one dimensional so there’s a lot of noise in Quora feeds, but Topics are different.”

We went back and forth for awhile on the tradeoffs of Facebook.  I think I garnered a modicum of respect from him for why I don’t like it and won’t use it.  He didn’t need to make an argument for what it does for him, he swiveled in his chair to engage his “command center” which has a 50 inch LCD TV hanging over he reserves for CNBC mounted over three 30 inch monitors on his desk.

The left most monitor is split with Twitter and Quora.  The right most monitor is for Facebook and the middle is for Gmail.  There’s a constant stream of Facebook messages and emails from entrepreneurs to world leaders.  I was seeing first hand why it’s so difficult to get on his calendar.  He was talking with me and giving one line responses to Facebook messages to demonstrate that real business for him happens on Facebook.

While it’s tough to get on his calendar, it’s easy to find his contact info.  He’s known for regularly publishing his email and phone number everywhere.

Given how much he publicly promotes his contact info and how much he uses Facebook for business, I asked him if he posted pictures of his kids on Facebook.

“Fuck yeah.  I’m an open book.”

Robert has 29 people in his close friends group on Facebook and I’m sure that many texted him that day while I was there.  It happened to be his birthday.  I had no idea it was but tried to pass it off like I knew but just forgot to mention it.  It wasn’t the first time someone tried to snow him.

I asked him to put a price tag on his network.  For example, what would it be worth if someone could own your Facebook account?  $100M? I asked.  He looked perplexed at the question. I explained that it’s pretty clear to me that he could make or break any startup company, close any deal for any company with a simple Facebook message, and have the ear of anyone in the world.  He thought about it some more and while he didn’t answer, he made the connection I was trying to illustrate. He started talking about Rackspace and about a million dollar deal that came in from Rackspace on Saturday night. Through a simple question someone had for him on Facebook, he had turned it into a deal for RackSpace.

He went right into Facebook’s social graph and the new search functionality that allows you to get to anyone in the world through a simple Facebook message.  His latest topic of focus has been on contextual information.  We talked about what kind of data mattered and how data should be presented. I think that CRMs should be obsolete if contextual information is done correctly.

Robert is working on a book called “Age of Context”.  I asked him if I could help in any way or contribute in any way and he said there wouldn’t be any citing and that it’s going to be like a guide for helping entrepreneurs who are just getting started.  I think I’ll pick it up.

I reluctantly started packing my things a little after 11AM and he put a call he was getting on hold.  He looked over and said, “I wish I could spend more time with you. You’re like Tim Ferriss, you’re seeing shit no one else is seeing.”

That was a really cool thing to hear for me and a highlight from this startup rollercoaster.

On the train ride back to SF I was trying to figure out if Robert was the actually the most powerful person in tech.  I concluded that he was and that I’m happy that it’s not anybody else.

A few months ago I received this message from Andrew Dumont, the cofounder of Stride.

I checked out Stride and my only reaction was “Whoa!”. Stride is a deal-based simple CRM. Not people-based, not lead-based, not contact-based, nor a potpourri of all of them.

Just deals.

We started using Stride to get simple and high level updates to the team and we found ourselves relying on it to efficiently communicate sales progress throughout the company. Both we and the guys at Stride believe in the same fundamental principles about the CRM space: people should work where their customers are and not spend time where they’re not.

Because Ecquire and Stride compliment each other so well, we decided to build an integration.

Integrating Stride for Ecquire

Starting today, all new downloads of Ecquire will have an option to integrate with Stride as their main CRM.

If you are an existing user of Ecquire, you can also add Stride by clicking our “add multiple services” button.

Stride offers a free plan and some very reasonable prices for their paid plans.

Managing Your Sales Pipeline from Anywhere

There is only one thing that is important to Stride: the progression of a deal. Any activity should be directly connected to moving a deal forward.

These activities mostly happen in places like your Gmail inbox or LinkedIn; places outside of your CRM. So with our new integration, you’ll be able to update your deals as they happen, from where ever they happen.

Simply fill out the required information and click create.

A Complete Package

It isn’t enough to have a simple powerful tool. You need your users to actually enter the data in there first. And Stride recognizes that. So on top of our integration, Stride will be including Ecquire as an integral piece in their onboarding process. Going forward, when you sign up for Stride, they will recommend their users to get Ecquire to easily manage their deals.

–

We hope you enjoy two-click deal management from Stride and Ecquire.

Let us know what you think below.

If you’re a sales rep, you’re probably strapped for time. You’ve got a quarterly goal to hit, but you’ve got calls, demos, emails, lead generation, follow-ups, activity tracking, and invoices to tend to.

Every minute that you’re not selling is another minute that you’re not using to hit your sales goal.

So how do you appease your manager and get all the logging and activity tracking done without taking time away from selling?

Easy, automate it.

Instead of spending hours every week copying and pasting conversations into Salesforce, I spend a few minutes using Ecquire to make sure that my company knows exactly what I’m doing and are kept up-to-date with the latest progess with clients.

Saving received emails from Gmail to Salesforce

I use email as a way of following up with leads. The typical email will be about how a prospect is liking our product and what they think could be improved. A lot of valuable feedback that I can relay to the tech team and for understanding what problems our product can solve for them.

So the first thing I do when I receive an email is click to log the message into Salesforce.

Logging emails and tasks from Gmail to Salesforce

I’m a huge fan of monotasking – doing only one task at once. So when I write emails, I block time to only write emails. I try to only have one window open and focus all of my attention on writing the best email possible.

Want to learn how to write an email that works? Check here and here.

To aid with my focus on monotasking, Ecquire is there to log the email to my Salesforce so that I can stay focused on my emails and keep productivity.