The Funnelholic

CAVEAT: I know equating the most popular piece of news to your blog topic is pretty corny. Nonetheless, I think there is something we can learn from the Giants victory over the Patriots Sunday. (for those of you who don’t know, the New York “football” Giants beat the undefeated and seemingly unconquerable New England Patriots in the Super Bowl.

The point is that anybody can beat anybody on any given day. I am a big fan of unified lead definitions, but I am not a fan of ultra-tight lead definitions that leave no room for “upset”. Ill give you an example, I once did an lead generation implementation where the client wanted only Tier 1 manufacturers with X number of revenue, and x number of products, etc. One day, Yahoo came in. No one would take the call. Finally the Sales Development Rep got a Product Manager on the phone with them and came back with the realization this is a great target. 6 years later the company’s number one vertical is online media.

ESPECIALLY if you are an early company, don’t restrict yourself to too many “psychographic” traits. Your job is to bring in as many people who would be the Patriots (perfect targets) and could be the Giants (not entirely perfect on paper, but worth the Sales team’s time). Dont limit yourself to only Patriots, and find away to get the Giants in there because they may become your biggest customer yet. The one exception could be if the sales team’s pipelines are already and always full with near-term deals (dig deeper, this isn’t likely to be true but could happen at a mature company in a mature market).

The other caveat is that is you are still letting sales limit your lead definition to only deals that they can close tomorrow, you are screwed so I can’t help you. Sales has to be willing to sell and if not, you don’t have a true partnership.

If you can create leeway to find the next big “upset”, victory can be yours.

I just want anyone who has not done a blog to know that the kind of vile spam your email spam protector shields you from can be found in the comments section of your blogs. i am installed a widget today, but I have received so much spam into my comments field its amazing. Then there are some that I am not sure are spam like:

“I pooped in my pants” - thats either a friend or a nefarious spammer

The new ones though have alot of “I liked the site”, etc.

anyway, just a sideways post.

Im back and I am better than ever. The Funnelholic had not been updated in a year, but now as you can see we have a new look-and-feel.

Some of my issues have been:

1. How to market my re-launch?

2. What my avatar should be?

So, lets start with re-launch themes. As you can see, I have decided to be very 2.0-ish and call this Funnelholic 2.0…Anyone who knows me, knows I will change this slogan every 5 minutes. I’d like to hear some suggestions from the “readership” (all 20 of you).

Here is what I have gotten from friends and collegues so far:

• The Funnel has spoken
• Funnel me Bad
• Funnel-tastic
• etc

Its actually fun to put funnel into common slogans and statements.

I will blog about funnel pictures in a new post

Totally random of me, but as i work on lead generation and deal with people who are totally obsessed with organic rankings on Google…is it too much of me to want to be the number one organic listing for the search term: “Craig Rosenberg”. Its amazing, I used to like that there was a semi-famous me out there…Now things have changed, and I can’t market myself properly with him hogging the first page of Google. Which brings up a comment: clearly, everyone realizes the value of the first page of Google…I can confirm as a constant searcher, I do not even go past the first page. If you don’t make it to the first page you are done in my mind. That being said, I am not on the first page of google making me irrelevant.