Real Life Story #01: Preparation with LinkedIn

Whatever the size of your company – and at that time, I was working for a pretty big one – it’s still an event when one of the top 5 valuable brands in the world selects you in a shortlist to update the technology platform for their marketing activities. So we had assembled an ace team to manage the whole process.

As we were preparing for the first face to face meeting with the selection panel, I was making sure we were putting enough knowledge of the client in our proposal: doing background research, reading the latest annual reports, collecting recent press clippings, etc. Most of what I found confirmed and enhanced the information disclosed as part of the selection process.

Thanks to LinkedIn, I was also able to extend that thorough analysis to the members of the unusually large selection team. Even before we could meet them in person, I knew who was sales, who was marketing, purchase, IT, what their background was, where they had worked before, their geographical location, their seniority, and to some extent, their interests. And that analysis shed a very different light on the whole deal.

For example, the analysis of one LinkedIn profile was particularly interesting. The person presented as responsible for the contact centre was based in Eastern Europe while the full marketing team was in London. He had no local colleagues but a string of job openings attached to his office… The company had obviously preferred not to officially disclose their plans to shift jobs from London to Eastern Europe, but not only did that realization help us understand some of the requested features, but it also prepared us to – discretely – bring up the technical, operational and legal aspects of such a distributed environment in order to show how our solution was a good fit.

A second profile caught my eye. He had just joined our prospect after having spent a long career at another company; one we were precisely considering to use as a reference. So I inquired to make sure we were 100% sure that reference was rock solid and we secured the presence of one of the consultants who had worked at that client. He ended up modifying quite substantially the “official” account of the initial project; still a good story but… less salesy.

The third and most important discovery of the LinkedIn analysis was that no member of the selection panel had used our excellent software before. Not one on more than 20 people, which, considering our market penetration was a statistical anomaly. As a matter of fact, most of them had been users of the equally excellent product of our competitor. Somehow a consequence of the previous fact, after making a few calls in our various offices, it turned out that no one on our side could remember having had one direct contact with any member of the panel.

The decision was simple enough albeit not an easy one. We could not really compete on features; the competition already had an established relationship; we were nowhere on the power map. Our chances of winning this deal were so low that considering the expected investment, we decided not to pursue and politely declined. No go!

Lesson number one: never engage unprepared with a prospect or a client. It will save time and money and unearth very important elements that are not necessarily disclosed in the opportunity documentation or the discovery meetings. But be careful to handle differently information that has been disclosed and information that has been discovered.

Lesson number two: research the company and the people. You will learn a lot. One word of caution though: do not go too far in that individual fact checking. One day, I was the client and a sales person wanted to prove he had made some good research about me: he mentioned he had discovered who my wife was and that they had some common interests… that was creepy.

Lesson number three: LinkedIn has become a powerful research tool for sales and marketing people… and probably for purchasing departments too.

As Lemony Snicket said: “Even though there are no ways of knowing for sure, there are ways of knowing for pretty sure”.