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Anonymous Still Means Anonymous – Sales Needs More Steve Niemiec

Chief Operating Officer & Chief Revenue Officer

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With something like 10,000 RevTech solutions out there, it’s become super hard to understand who really does what, and most importantly, whether or not what is being said really stands to help you deliver substantive value to your company at the end of the day. At TechTarget, we realize that while there’s very little real mystery in what we do, there’s absolutely magic in how it impacts our clients’ results. Toward helping you and ourselves navigate through the functionality fog that, at times, threatens to obscure what’s really necessary to make steady progress, we’ve put together a series of pieces that examine recent claims and present our case for a more transparent and pragmatic way to understand the issues involved.

Weak + Cold ≠ Great ROI

Every high-velocity GTM these days has both inbound and outbound components. For simplicity, I’ll focus on two that are really core for the vast majority of our enterprise tech clients. For inbound, there’s the company website. For outbound prospecting (on the Sales side), you’ve got your SDR teams. Despite many clear benefits, each of these core components also comes with a major challenge with respect to prospecting. On the inbound side, there’s the problem of significant volumes of anonymous visitors. On the outbound side, it’s how to optimize as you scale. When the two problems come together — as they do when we prescribe doing outbound to the accounts visiting our websites — these two challenges intersect. And, unless you make the most of available data sources, you stand to lose. The reason is that anonymous account visits really tell you very little that’s useful to sales. So by thinking that there’s added power there, you’re probably likely to simply add cost to what you’re already doing. Let’s drill into that:

When an account is said to be “visiting your website”, that insight is commonly coming from a reverse IP lookup-based approach. Reverse IP lookup is known to be very inaccurate, so vendors have a number of ways to ‘help’ make their efforts seem more valuable. But even if it were 100% accurate about the account (and obviously, with continued remote work further masking account IPs, that’s not happening any time soon), knowing that an account is visiting your website tells Sales essentially nothing that it hadn’t already factored in. We’re already targeting the accounts we want to target in our prospecting activities. We’ve ranked these accounts A-D or similarly. Let’s be frank, a few visits here or there is not going to affect our outreach patterns. For the seller, these accounts have already been qualified as prospects to go after; they don’t need an “MQA” input to alter how they should proceed. Anonymous visits add nothing actionable to the ICP scoring and call lists we’re already using.

Anonymous = Anonymous!

Anonymous still means anonymous, so if you can’t determine who’s actually conducting buying research, for me, you’re simply telling Sales to put the contacts they already have at that account into a cadence and then do a call blitz. Is that info worth the added cost of an additional solution in the stack? It’s certainly not enough additional information for me to have my teams reprioritize their activities.

Here’s my rationale: Since many of those anonymous visitors are customer accounts already, I’m already paying attention to them via my plan. If, within my customer accounts, they’re anonymous activity suggests they’re high priority cross-sell prospects, my reps on those accounts will want to know about new news; but at the same time, those reps better already be trying hard to cross sell there, because they’re already fully incentivized to do so. I just can’t understand how, If I can’t tell my reps who they should specifically go after, what assistance am I actually giving?

So what if we’re talking about white space acquisition accounts? I’ve got a dedicated team already working them per our learnings, plans, rankings and methods. A new, out of target MQA that doesn’t match all our planned targeting simply comes in out of left field. It makes very little sense to add this into our process. It’s an exception to our well-constructed SOP. So again, I don’t see how this kind of MQA information is helping me be much smarter than I’m already trying hard to be. Speaking as an investor in my business, I wouldn’t want much of my potential profit reinvested in a long shot like that.

When we sit down with Marketing to collaborate on ABM programs, we start with target account lists built around shared characteristics. We then devise programs specifically designed to open up these accounts because we strongly believe they warrant extra attention from us. Our ABM programs involve a lot of work designed for two specific purposes: First is to make sure we clearly see as many of the real opportunities that arise in accounts organically. We absolutely don’t want miss any of them. Second is so that we can improve the conditions necessary for our sellers to actually create new opportunities where none would otherwise exist. Marketing’s help is needed in both scenarios, but I don’t think either one is something an automation-focused martech system can help with very much, because this isn’t about volume. Rather than being about the volume gains that systems automation helps you with, these approaches depend instead on improvements in precision. What you really need is a capability that provides better clarity around people, topics and timing.

Advertising scale vs. Sales precision How we deliver for ABM

TechTarget shows you the real people whose individual and collective activity together suggest both a real need and an active effort at the account to solve it. You know there’s a project taking shape and you know who’s in the buying team – because you can actually see this in the data.

And since TechTarget’s Priority Engine™ does the initial multi-threading for you – we show you multiple active people in the buyer’s journey – you can activate Sales earlier with much greater confidence. Thus your ABM sales motion can evolve, from one of simply trying to get a meeting using brute-force cold calling, to one that’s about creating meetings that are better for the buyer. Meetings that either accelerate opportunities for sellers or help them create new opportunities where none previously existed.

Dark pools? Dark social? Dark funnel? Dark iceberg? Why not just step into the light to begin with? Is dark funnel thinking relevant at all for collaborative sales and marketing actions?

Simply put, does ‘dark funnel’ have any relevance for sales? Well, I think there might be something there, but only if you turn it completely around and think harder about what you can see rather than where there’s nothing actually there. Instead of thinking about the internet as a version of the universe, a mostly empty wide-open space that’s largely dark (did you see the amazing pictures from the new Webb telescope?), you should instead be thinking about concentrating your attention on the points of light – the places where you know there’s relevant activity!

For my purposes, a sales guy’s purposes, that’s how the internet really works. I want my teams to spend an absolute minimum amount of time guessing where appropriate people might be and what they might be looking for. Instead, I want my teams focused solidly on where the largest aggregations of buyers actually regularly congregate. As I’ve said before, if I were in retail, I’d be selling in the mall. If I were in enterprise tech (and my clients are), I’d want to be selling hard on the websites that covered my category, the venues where I could be sure that in-market buyers would be doing the bulk of their pre-purchase research. If you’ve studied the internet at all, you already know that these places aren’t in the dark at all. They couldn’t be any more obvious. On the internet, it’s basically the same general principle in play that’s been used for decades by essentially every publisher in the world. If you provide the content that people want, people will come to you. If you provide consistent quality at scale, more folks will come to you repeatedly. If you do it objectively, because you’ve earned their trust, more will come to you than to any particular vendor in the space regardless of their predominance. It’s a simple concept. It’s obvious. There’s really no darkness involved at all. So that’s what we provide here at TechTarget. And because we have opt-ins from the people our websites serve, we can make it simple super simple for you to connect into our giant funnel, to connect all the work we’re doing directly into what you need to accomplish on your side.

Then why all the brouhaha? It’s still –”buyer beware”. It’s ‘marketing’!!

Creating FOMO by branding a concept is a tried-and-true messaging approach that still seems to work with every new crop of marketers on the way up. The approach is designed to make you feel there’s a miraculous solution to your complex needs or a way to solve a problem you didn’t even know you had. But there’s real risk for you in this environment. You should pay close attention. When you’re being told that B2B buying research spans thousands and thousands of web properties randomly distributed around the universe, but a data provider can’t show you the actual properties that are generating the data – the real context of the user activity – you should know something’s wrong.

This blog is one small part of my ongoing effort to both provide useful information and clearly explain why we’re so confident that Priority Engine will deliver fewer false positives, fewer false negatives, and many more opportunities into your pipeline, faster and more reliably at scale. As always, my team and I are here to help and to discuss this material at your convenience. I can be reached here. I hope very much to talk to you soon – Steve.

ABM, actionable purchase intent, B2B marketing, b2b sales, Priority Engine, real purchase intent data

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Ipad For Sales: How Ipad Apps Help Sales People On The Field

In mid-2010, Joshua Hays (Marketing Director at Car People Marketing) wrote a post about how iPad helps salespeople through a variety of apps. Interestingly, the iPad was new, and the apps for it were limited back then.

Today, the whole demographics have changed, and there are currently more than 1,000,000 (March 2023) apps specifically designed for the iPad and a lot of improvements from the battery to the processor.

The iPad is an ever more powerful gadget for the traveling salesman. No wonder many people believe that the iPad Pro 2023 is an able replacement to a laptop thanks largely to several highly functional features like Drag and Drop, Split View and more. And given all the recent changes, we’re going to take a stroll through how the iPad actually makes things better and easier for salespeople across the globe.

How iPad Apps Help Sales People on The Field

Snapshot of What We’ve Covered in this Post:

iPad for Sales People and Presentations

Salespeople and presentations go hand-in-hand. From HD photos to live demos of software (as a service, for example), salespeople always need to “show” things to people to convince them, to entice them and to seal the deal.

The iPad comes with a bucket-load of apps both built-in and from the App Store that helps salespeople demo their products. Apps like iPhoto, chúng tôi and other cloud-based albums and slideshow apps are readily available for salespeople to display the images in ultra high-quality.

Custom 3D apps and CAD software, built specifically for the iPad can also help people involved in real-estate, product development or mechanical development showcase the renders in real-time right from their iPad. Add to this the facility of cloud-based storage and Internet access; things become even easier.

Not only this, but when we talk about presentations, we’ve got Keynote which helps you create amazing presentations right on your iPad. With a plethora of the best iPad presentation apps, creating sensational presentation has become quite an easy affair.

With scores of ready-made templates that are designed with an eye for detail and class, you get the desired freedom to create appealing presentations.

Point of Sales

One of the coolest things that the iPad has been able to integrate into the fold is Point of Sales. With the larger display, better integration of payment systems and galleries to showcase things, POS becomes very easy with the iPad.

Using the best POS apps for iPad, you can accept payment both in cash and credit. You will be able to sell out your products with ease. Additionally, you also get the option to issue refund instantly and set up sales taxes as per your location.

On Accepting Payments On-the-Go

To top this, we have apps like Square, PayPal and Intuit GoPayment which take care of accepting payments.

Apps like Square and Intuit GoPayment come with the credit-card reader that can be attached to the iPad. With secure handling built right into the system, salespeople can accept payments through credit cards and bill the client easily and securely.

Sales Management

This is where the iPad gets most useful. Salespeople have to routinely manage a variety of information like:

There are a number of enormously user-friendly apps to let you manage your sales right from your fingertips. Depending on your need, you can easily find the best iPad apps to let you mange your sales with optimum convenience even on the go.

The stock Contacts app is decent for managing contacts. But if you want to have more control, you can pick out the best contact managers for iOS to let you deal with tons of contacts in a more organized way. Besides, you will also choose the best CRM apps for iPad to manage your customers with complete peace of mind.

With the use of the virtual assistant “Siri,” you can carry out a number of tasks more comfortably. For instance, you will be able to quickly send the message, create reminders and have most other tasks performed by natural commands.

Task and project management on the iPad is yet another feature that adds feather to its cap. With dozens of the best project management apps specifically designed for iPad, dealing with your routine work is much easier.

Meetings and Conferencing

Easily the Best in the Business

The iPad had never been so powerful before. While the sales of the tablet have been on a decline for quite some time, Apple’s tablet has been steady and easily the best in the business.

It has proved to be a great tool for salespeople. In the days to come, I think the iPad will become even more popular gadget for salespeople as more and more companies readily adopt the gadget into their ecosystem.

Let me know what you think of iPad and what are the things you like about it. Also, tell us about the areas where you think Apple’s tablet has still some work to do to get even more helpful for salespeople.

Author Profile

Dhvanesh

The founder of iGeeksBlog, Dhvanesh, is an Apple aficionado, who cannot stand even a slight innuendo about Apple products. He dons the cap of editor-in-chief to make sure that articles match the quality standard before they are published.

Ibm Advances Atomic Storage: What It Means For You

Specifically, it means the ability to have a single atom read as a “1” or “0” within a traditional magnetic hard-drive. In previous years it took several hundred thousand atoms to store the same amount of information, and chances are that’s how your current hard drive works.

According to the researchers themselves, it’s also quite unlikely that we’ll see to-the-atom storage in consumer products anytime soon, thanks to the very extreme conditions required to pull off this amazing feat.

What this means for you?

Every time the limits of technology are stretched, more possibilities are exposed in the consumer market. Right now large consumer hard drives top off at 10TB. On the lower-end, 3TB HDDs are now at the same price that 1TB drives were less than five years ago. With this new-found theoretical limit of single-atom hard drive storage, where will we be in the coming years?

Christopher Harper

I’m a longtime gamer, computer nerd, and general tech enthusiast.

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Vodafone & Three Merge: What It Means For You

If approved by regulators, it would make the new company the largest operator in the UK, surpassing both EE and O2. With an estimated 27 million customers combined, the merger could affect a lot of people.

So, what should you do if you’re a Vodafone or Three customer? What about if you’re with one of the many piggyback operators such as Adsa, Lebara and Talkmobile which use those networks? Here’s everything you need to know for now.

Will Vodafone and Three definitely merge?

No. While Vodafone and Three UK officially announced an agreement to merge on 14 June 2023, that doesn’t mean it’s certain to happen.

The deal must first be approved by regulators, which usually takes a fair amount of time. In 2023, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and the European Commission blocked Three UK’s proposed takeover of O2.

UK communications regulator Ofcom was also opposed to the deal, but said in 2023 that its future stance would be decided by “specific circumstances” and not “just the number of competitors”. Moving to three main networks would mirror the situation in the US, where T-Mobile and Sprint merged in 2023.

Then there’s the UK government, which may scrutinise the deal under the National Security and Investment Act 2023. It can block the deal if it believes national security will be harmed as a result.

So the merger is anything but a forgone conclusion. But if approved by all parties, the deal is expected to be completed by the end of 2024.

Why do Vodafone and Three want to merge?

On the official website announcing the agreement, Vodafone and Three highlight three key ambitions of the merger: “build one of Europe’s leading 5G networks, transform the customer experience, and give better choice and value for mobile and broadband customers across the UK”.

For customers, the companies have six main goals.

A ‘better’ home broadband network for the same price

Home broadband at many different price points

A wider range of home broadband plans

Average 5G speeds up to 6x faster over the next 10 years

5G coverage in more than 95% of places where people live and work over the next 10 years

2.5x 5G network capacity over the next 10 years

Combining forces should allow Vodafone and Three to progress with these aims more quickly. The move will also supposedly be “great for the country” and “great for competition”, despite there being one fewer mobile operator to choose from.

What will happen if I’m a Vodafone or Three customer?

For the moment, nothing. Until the merger is approved and finalised, there will be no changes to the experience for any Vodafone or Three customers. And as we’ve said, there’s no guarantee that it’ll go through.

It’s impossible to predict what will happen if the merger is completed, but Vodafone and Three are clearly suggesting that there’ll be some benefits.

What will happen if I’m with a virtual network which uses Vodafone or Three?

Of course, it’s not just Vodafone and Three customers that will be affected if this merger is approved.

There are plenty of Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs) in the UK, which pay to use the infrastructure from one of the main operators rather than owning it themselves. As a result, their contracts and SIM-only plans are often very competitively priced.

MVNOs using Vodafone are:

Voxi

Asda Mobile

Lebara Mobile

Talkmobile

The following use Three:

iD Mobile

Smarty

FreedomPop

Honest Mobile

Superdrug

But as with Vodafone and Three, there’ll be no changes if you’re with any of those providers until after the proposed merger goes through. There’s no cause to worry, either as “providing greater choice in the MVNO market” is specifically mentioned as a goal of the merger.

Analysts Still Bullish On Rim

Research In Motion disappointed investors with solid — but not spectacular — numbers for its first-quarter earnings yesterday, but analysts are still bullish on the BlackBerry maker.

RIM’s (NASDAQ: RIMM) adjusted earnings of $0.98 per share topped Wall Street expectations by four cents, the company reported a 53 percent jump in sales to $3.42 billion, in line with analyst estimates. But RIM’s 3.8 million new subscribers came in just below expectations.

“We are starting fiscal 2010 with strong financial performance and impressive market share gains, including a 55 percent share of the U.S. smartphone market according to IDC’s latest estimate,” Jim Balsillie, RIM’s co-CEO, said during the company’s earnings call. “The industry-leading BlackBerry product portfolio is driving strong customer demand around the world and our penetration of new market segments continues to expand.”

Peter Misek, analyst at Canaccord Adams, came away from the results with a mixed outlook.

“On one hand, device sales were weak, gross margins could again see the low 40s and enterprise net [subscription] adds were soft,” Misek wrote today in a report. “On the other hand, operating margins were solid and inventory levels remain very low, which could fuel unit upside when carriers start to replenish stock.”

Though he cited some concern, Misek remains optimistic about RIM’s future performance in the fiercely competitive smartphone market.

“In the end, we saw nothing that changes our very bullish long-term outlook on RIM, especially with a series of impressive new product launches on the horizon,” he wrote. “However, we are becoming increasingly concerned by the broader consumer electronics spending outlook. Our checks continue to suggest that the bounce we saw in early spring has begun to fade and, without the consumer tailwind at RIM’s back, we believe it prudent to remain on the sidelines.”

RIM’s earnings report comes amid ever-increasing competition in the smartphone segment, with the new iPhone 3G S going on sale today and the Palm Pre entering its second week of availability.

When asked during yesterday’s earnings call how RIM will fare given the competition — including Apple’s move to cut the price of the previous-generation iPhone 3G to $99 — Balsillie said RIM and the BlackBerry were ready for a fight, though he refused to mention his rivals by name.

“We’ve had very aggressive promotions through carriers, BlackBerries for $49 and so on, and I’m not one to follow these other things too closely, but that one $99 model, that’s a year-old product, so I don’t think that’s a big structural thing happening,” he said. “The other product [the Palm Pre] is brand new, so it’s too early to tell what will happen, but we’ve always focused on our own value proposition.”

“We’ve demonstrated a huge surge of strength recently and we’re not taking our foot off the gas, so extrapolate from that as you wish,” he added.

Balsillie also pointed to the fact that a record 80 percent of RIM’s new subscriptions came from the consumer side. That’s an area the company’s business — which has long centered purely on the enterprise space — that it’s been aiming to expand.

“We’ve made dramatic progress in penetration of new market segments,” he said. “Non-enterprise customers … now represent more than half of BlackBerry accounts.”

Will Stofega, analyst at IDC, said the boost in non-enterprise signals RIM’s success in diversifying its customer base.

“There are some issues related to the enterprise — budgets are being cut, there’s seasonal issues with the buying cycle — but they’re picking up the slack on the consumer side,” he said. “Overall, they’re doing everything they need to be doing.”

And though Apple will be grabbing headlines today with sales of the iPhone 3G S, for its part, RIM just unveiled the BlackBerry Tour, which analysts say will help strengthen its position in the market.

Meanwhile, industry watchers expect RIM this summer to release an update to the Storm, its answer to the iPhone’s touchscreen interface.

Article courtesy of chúng tôi

Cobol Is Still A High

Is COBOL programming good for a long-term career, making for a high-paying job for developers?

A job in programming language COBOL conjures up images of thin ties, white shirts, spinning tape drives, and all of the glory and pain of the mainframe era. COBOL stands for Common Business-Oriented Language. It is a high-level programming language for business applications. It was the first popular language designed to be operating system-agnostic. It was similar to English, which is widely used to develop business-oriented applications in the commercial data processing.

COBOL was merely eclipsed by the explosive growth of the other languages and technologies. This only makes sense because the language first appeared in 1959 and it was one of the dominant ways to code in the 1960s. COBOL didn’t fade away, though. Recently, the program COBOL helped the state deal with a 1,600-percent increase in unemployment. Specializing in COBOL could translate into solid compensation, even before the COVID-19 crisis. Other languages for other roles grabbed the spotlight, riding the technology boom as computers proliferated.

Why COBOL is a good option for developers:

Cobol Programmers mainly work for corporate businesses, since about 80% of business apps run on COBOL. There is a growing corporate need for skilled programmers to support and maintain critical COBOL systems. These programmers in the US commonly hold degrees in Computer Science, Computer Systems Security, and Management Information Systems. COBOL-related jobs don’t demand a lot of specialized education, with 83.8 percent of the jobs asking for a bachelor’s degree.

There is more than meets the eye when it comes to being a Cobol Programmer. There are certain skills that many Cobol Programmers have to accomplish their responsibilities. No COBOL-related job wants applicants to only know COBOL. Here are some of the top skills that crop up alongside COBOL in these job postings. These are COBOL, JCL, SQL, CICS, Java, Software Development, VSAM, Oracle, and Project Management.

Micro Focus, a company that writes plenty of COBOL code, sponsored a survey run by Vanson Bourne. To meet the need for more modern COBOL developers, Micro Focus created a free academic program to help educators teach this valuable skill and equip students to learn the ins and outs of COBOL within the familiar surroundings of a modern IDE such as Visual Studio or Eclipse.

Micro Focus has more than 40 years of COBOL experience, servicing more than 15,000 customers and over a million licensed users with its technology. The Micro Focus COBOL Academic program currently supports over 400 global academic partners with a focus on creating greater engagement between educators, students, and the business community.

The COBOL language running today is very different from the one programmers encoded in punch cards. Many popular platforms don’t do a good job of ensuring that code continues to run longer than a few years. The COBOL community is devoted to avoiding this kind of problem. Right now, there are more active lines of application code written in COBOL than in any other programming language. The average Cobol Programmer in the United States earns a yearly salary of $85,000. In India, it’s ₹49,761 per month.