Hiring Yellowpage Account Managers And Social Network Trust

Here at Missouri.me and Localtek we have been focused on hiring sales people that come from the Yellowpages, Radio, and Newspaper industry. We are having success with that and even though it may not seem to relate to any industry other than someone selling advertising and to domain investors it would seem only related to specifically geo domain development. I would disagree. Let me lay it out.

Today we hired a person who worked for many years as a regional sales manager for the Yellowpages and who also worked in positions such as quality control as well for them. For us as a company this is a great hire and we look forward to getting this person trained up and selling our services (not just advertising). It was nice laying out the story of the company launch (Domaining leading to the launch), our product value proposition, and other things we find important for hires to be aware of (earning potential....). But one thing I think that should stick out to anyone launching a new business is that one really good hire that understands the inside story of a potential competitor can be one of the best investments you can make as a company early on. No matter how successful you are understanding the failures and successes of other companies even partially in your space is important.

If you are developing your domain business, whether it is sales, marketing, product development, etc it is important to have people around that have the contacts and knowledge of how potential or actual competitors do business. It is even more important to use their network, hiring people is much easier when their is a trusted friend on the other side.

Now about using the network, we all talk about social networking all the time and I am a big fan of Twitter and Facebook. But sometimes you have to use offline methods of getting into decision makers at larger companies, although I have had major success using Linkedin in the past (4 million dollar deal done after one message through a trusted contact). Sometimes you have to use those relationships that you only have offline.

When you are selling it is one thing to have someone walking business to business looking for prospects but at times it is more productive to use trusted friends/family/colleagues to make a contact for you to get the trust factor out of the way with the potential customer. Today, by using this model we were able to secure multiple meetings with some large potential advertising customers next week. All out of one phone call that had a solid business relationship with the customers we wanted access too. The access was based on trust between two businesses. Long story short, use your relationships.

OK, now what does that also mean for domain investment, do not be afraid to use contacts you may already have to get you in the door to sell your online real estate to end users. You would be surprised the network that you have, if you can have someone "grease the skids" for you then someone is much more likely to take your product (domain name) seriously than if you are someone just walking in as a stranger. Domain names are still magic to most people, do not make the mistake of thinking you understand the value so they should too. But you can overcome some of the hurdle if you can go in with a certain level of comfort based on your network of contacts smoothing the way.