Roger Boor had a problem. His corporate outsourcing operation, New Business Consultants, needed to be able to identify and reach new-born businesses in his Silicon Valley market at just the right moment: when they were growing.
What made the situation more ironic was that Boor’s job as president of New Business is partly to help others do exactly that: identify their ideal markets for new products and services, and then draw up the right marketing plan to get them there.
Actually, NBC does a lot more for infant companies than just marketing. “We work as a start-up solution for emerging companies,” Boor says. “We wear a lot of hats, but it all revolves around supplying corporate infrastructure until it makes sense for these companies to bring in the permanent head count. We’re involved with their business planning and analysis. We also get heavily involved with their financials, doing financial models. Basically, we do everything from documenting their procedures and create their HR departments to strategizing and implementing their marketing plans.” Got it? Essentially, New Business offers to supply all the high-level executive and managerial help a new company needs-- before they do well enough to put that kind of pricey talent on the permanent payroll.
To market that kind of service, Boor needed access to lists of all the business start-ups in an area that grows them the way Brazil grows coffee beans: the 30-mile radius around NBC’s Sunnyvale, CA, headquarters. That market stretches from San Francisco’s South Bay to San Jose. You might know it as Silicon Valley, the home of the entrepreneurial launch.
Boor knew what kind of prospects he needed to find: companies that had just incorporated and were gearing up to take an existing product or service to market. “Not just people with new business licenses, because everybody’s got one of those around here,” he says. “They don’t necessarily do anything with it. No, companies that have just files papers of incorporation are our primary target.”
But when it came to digging up those prospects, Boor’s own approach to compiling a prospect database was informal in the extreme, for the head of a company offering high-end market planning: the Internet and the telephone. He surfed to state and county Web sites for news of new businesses, and worked the phones calling local chambers of commerce around his company’s market area. It was very much a one-man operation, since NBC only has one other full-time employee; and it was hard, time-consuming work.
And a few months ago, Boor realized that the job of compiling those prospect lists had gotten much harder. “So many rules and regulations have changed,” he says. “I used to be able to just pick up a phone and they’d shoot me a list of whatever I wanted. These days that same info is not so easy to get.”
So Boor began looking into buying marketing lists for the prospects he wanted; but a cursory examination suggested that he’d be paying for a high percentage of bounced addresses, and he put the decision off. Then one day, at a local chamber of commerce function, he bumped into a spokesman for infoUSA and learned that the company was about to launch an online version of its Sales Genie sales lead tool. The new subscription service would include weekly updates of new-business information, along with a contact management function to let marketers keep track of their past contacts with prospects and schedule follow-ups.
Boor got his hands on a pre-launch version and quickly realized two things. First, the tool allowed him to drill down to precisely the target leads he needed to market his business. Secondly, he decided that the Sales Genie service would help him help his clients. “People come to me with a business plan, and unfortunately, part of my job is to pick it apart, find the weak spots,” he says. “Many times, they don’t know their market, or who their real competition is. With Sales Genie, I can tell them, Okay, you’ve got this population in your market region, here’s how much they make, here’s your competition, and here’s who your ideal customer is. It used to take days or weeks to get that information; now I can do it in hours, or at worst a day.”
When it comes to his own marketing, Boor likes to mix his media. He splits contacts into three lists, A, B and c, and each list is put on a staggered 45-day cycle. If A is getting an e-mail blast, B gets a direct marketing piece—a brochure or a postcard—and C gets a phone contact. Next round, the media change once again.
And the promotional copy is always timely. Since NBC offers a wide range of outsourcing services, Boor can key his message to whatever the hot topic is in Silicon Valley that month. If the talk of the region is the difficulty of finding qualified chief financial officers, NBC’s mailing might be a postcard with the teaser, “Hey, need to rent a CFO?” At other times, he says, the message might be more tailored to marketing: “You’re looking at this message. We can help you get customers to look at yours.”
The mixed media and the timely messages are part of getting heard in Silicon Valley. “A lot of our focus is spent on marketing to portfolio companies and venture capital firms,” Boor says. “They’re kind of like getting in to see rock stars; they have so many gatekeepers, it’s ridiculous. And we’re never certain that any one avenue is really grabbing their attention. So my objective is just to keep our name fresh in their minds.”
Besides, it’s the Valley, where change is a way of life and anyone that can’t adapt to the pace gets lapped. “The circular files here are huge, loaded with brochures and collateral material,” Boor says. “So we have to change our approach based on the immediate needs of the start-ups out here. We can’t be locked into a mindset where ‘This is our brochure, this is our face to the world and that’s all it ever will be.’ We need to make them sit up and take notice of us.”
