(c)iStock.com/gmutlu
B2B lead generation software provider DueDil is launching DueDil Connect to further integrate company’s networks and ease the selling process – and it has LinkedIn in its sights.
With Connect, users can map their contact network across a pool of public profiles, giving teams visibility on who to contact in an organisation, by whom, and whether it will be a warm introduction or a cold call. “It’s been my dream,” DueDil CEO Damian Kimmelman tells MarketingTech. “The ability to connect relationship information with business information is really dramatic.”
This is in combination with DueDil’s comprehensive company database, which aims to give more information on target companies. Has this company got depreciating assets? Are they looking at their budget right now? Has there been a recent management change? This information is like gold dust to sales and marketing, and combining this with the ability to connect means the comparisons in targeting LinkedIn are clear.
“A lot of people use LinkedIn to do their prospecting [and] lead generation,” says Kimmelman. “LinkedIn is built off user generated content, and as such it’s really not comprehensive.
“On LinkedIn you have to know the businesses that you are prospecting – most businesses that you prospect you actually don’t know the name of, you only know their characteristics,” he adds. “To take that further, when you look at something like LinkedIn, you are utilising only one form of ability to get in contact with those businesses, which is InMail. Most marketers or salespeople want to either use social avenues, or they want to be able to cold call, they want to be able to direct mail, or they want to be able to utilise the biggest business network, which is email.”
Picture credit: DueDil
With LinkedIn, Kimmelman argues, their goal is, understandably, to try and get users on their platform. Yet email is used by practically every CEO, every sales manager, every marketing manager, every day. Kimmelman jokingly notes the possible hypocrisy in lecturing on spam, but adds: “The way I see it, I look at this as an opportunity to be really specific with the people and the companies that you target. I love a really targeted message, whereas I get furious at spam.” Yet he argues LinkedIn is “fabulous” for reviewing individual CVs; it is just the lack of visibility on businesses which makes it an issue.
DueDil Connect works by gathering all the matches in its database between the business and its URL – around five million URLs for one and a half million companies – so companies can search by specific attributes, find contacts connected to it, and allow organisations to connect to one another so they can pool the contacts. “Sales teams that pool contacts have much better results than those that hoard their contacts,” Kimmelman claims.
As social increasingly requires a return on investment, social selling, which DueDil clearly plays into, is becoming more ubiquitous. Kimmelman argues that while the opportunity is huge, it is still very early days. “I think a lot of social selling platforms promise the world – but it’s one tool in a very large tool chest of sales,” he says. “The reality is that some buyers are active on social, others aren’t.
“I think increasingly it will continue and will get more and more sophisticated, and I believe [it] is the way of the future, I just think that some people are selling some snake oil in the market,” Kimmelman adds. “But that always happens in nascent markets, and it’s not necessarily a problem with opportunity, it’s just a problem with people not understanding what exactly the opportunity is.”
DueDil Connect is available to enterprise customers immediately, with the service being rolled out to premium and free customers at a later date.
