I have been working on doing some elephant hunting lately in order to grow the business. I don’t have a financial partner like a VC to outfit us with the latest sales hunting gear from their portfolio companies and cash to pay the smooth service companies that feed on fresh start-ups. So I’m on the hunt for that elephant of a deal that can feed us for six to twelve months provides the energy and capital to expand the business. It’s going to have to be a six or seven figure deal so there is no point in calling on folks that can’t stomach that. Luckily millions of years of evolution have contributed to making me a natural born killer and I’m ready to feed.

Picking the prey

The companies I am looking to sell to are ones that have cash to spend. So I focused on the ones that were public and the venture backed start-ups since they appeared to have the best promise for revenue. From them I looked at a number of criteria to match them against things that analysts, customers, friends, and advisors had said that our technology would be or is good at solving. Since it takes a lot of energy to hunt each company I like to pick the right ones. The ones that are having a problem or are in distress can be more attractive than the others because they can be taken down the easiest. So I went to Monster.com and looked at the job boards to see if they were doing hiring in areas that indicated that they needed support with building desktop applications for organizing content. I found one elephant this way that looked like a good fit. They were hiring a sr. product manager to lead a product team locally to build a product that could use our technology and knowledge to succeed. So I marked them for a hunt. I also read the news about companies worth checking out. To do this I subscribe to Google news but more recently I have been using our own product to search RocketInfo to get the latest news feeds and blogs about companies to see who might be a good fit. In general change is good at a prospect site. A good change of management makes everyone unstable including existing vendors. The new management may not be ready to buy immediately but the first in is the most likely to win.

Tracking and studying the game

I have grown to love the Internet as a source of information to find the broken branches and holes to help quietly approach the game. Plenty of clever start-ups have provided tools to use that in an aggregate form leave most individuals exposed to a phone call or email. For the contacts that I wanted to approach I first wanted to look deeper at their organization. LinkedIn provides a host of information about individuals that is frankly, incredible. I generally don’t care much about whether I am linked to each person so much that there is a person named John Smith who is the VP of Engineering at Elephantco who used to work at Elephantcoacquiredsub and Frank Black who used to be the VP of Engineering at Elephantco and is now working at Gazelleco. So their business model means they are giving me tons of value and I don’t pay for it but that isn’t my problem. Years ago I used to dream of having a resource like this to find people’s names and interests and roles. Sometimes I’ll even use the tracking tool in LinkedIn to see how I’m linked to a person. In one case recently I knew someone who was a former employee at the company I was interested in reaching that was a new colleague from one of my former colleagues. I didn’t actually use LinkedIn to contact the person. Instead I called my old buddy and asked for an introduction.

Testing approaches

But the social network garbage only goes so far. Most people aren’t directly connected to me and I don’t mind hunting alone. At some point it is just me and the game out there in cyberspace. When it comes down to that I need to get some contact information and make an approach. The site zoominfo.com is a good companion to LinkedIn because it provides utilities to send an email to the contact. They have a form where you can forward an email to the person and propose something like a meeting or call. The email comes from you so they will reply to you. I don’t use this tool often but you have to try something to get through. An alternative is to guess the email address. Companies have corporate standards for email addresses and they look like this flastname@company.com, fname.lname@company.com. So you don’t need to guess a seven digit number to put an inquiry into a person. I’ll try five or six people at the same company over the course of a few weeks to see if I can get anyone to bite. It only takes one to get started.

But email is a little indirect and the telephone is a very useful tool. So while in hunting mode I like to make a lot of phone calls to very important people. Some people find this intimidating but it is actually a fun, contact sport, part of the hunt. To make it a little less intimidating think about it this way. If you are selling something worth $100,000 then it must have an ROI to the buyer of over $500,000. So you aren’t making a call to take $100,000 but instead to announce that the person you are looking to reach is the lucky winner of $400,000. You are the publisher’s Clearing House, the lottery, the good guys. People should love to talk to you.

The telephone attack

But they don’t like being cold called. So the avoidance strategies by the prey to block me from calling and reaching my targets are significant. They include hidden extensions, people who don’t answer the telephone, and rerouting of calls to irrelevant peons. To handle locating the extension of the person you are looking for I just call the main number and ask for John Smith, the guy who I found on LinkedIn. People’s blogs also can work well although it is sloppier to use them. Since I have the name and their title I normally get through to the right extension. That worked for me the other day and I’m in the process of negotiating an elephant opportunity that came from it. But it is often more complex than that. If I don’t have a name because the management team isn’t networking on LinkedIn to find their next gig then I need to interrogate someone on the phone directly. The administrative people in companies are actually quite nice and want to be helpful since they are in an outward facing customer service role. They can be reached using the O key on the telephone. Chatting with them can help build a map of people that I can go back to later with names and titles that aren’t available anywhere else. Then I can pull the same trick of calling and asking for a person whose name, title, and favorite sports teams I already know.

If you have ever tried this then often when I get to the target person and their response is to fob me off to that guy from the Capital One commercials who says no in twenty languages. This is a typical response. “Wow that’s a great idea. You should talk to people in product management about that.” I have come to learn that the best way to play this with a real elephant is to play along but use it as a hook to get back to the real buyer. So I’ll talk to whoever you want and then I’ll call you back to tell you how it went and what they thought, etc. Sometimes the referrals really are sending me through the whole political route to get the approvals, etc. to make a big sale so it isn’t the end of the world if this means actually doing some work.

The waiting game

The big game don’t die quickly. In fact it is good to have a lot of time on your hands when hunting these big companies. Really good ideas take about six months to percolate through the big companies before they can regurgitate the $100K or more. I like to use this to my advantage to spend less time working on them when they are making me wait. In fact I prefer to gamble with them by telling them I am ready for meetings that I’m not ready for. So I’ll say something like. We’ve been working on the proposal and we are hoping to present it tomorrow. This roughly translates to in my mind. “I think you are going to schedule a time in two weeks to go over the proposal. If you do schedule something then I’ll put together a proposal.” This strategy does carry some risk to it but my time as a bootstrapper is very valuable and experience with these elephants tells me that they can’t move as fast as me so in order to avoid spending lots of time making a proposal, etc. I’m going to get on the schedule with them and make sure the right folks will be there.

The kill…. To be continued.