Utah Tech Companies

Fight Club is back.

What's Fight Club?

Fight Club is a networking event (usually dinner) for entrepreneurs and startup CEOs who are interested in building their network. Yeah, there are a number of other events around but Fight club is for startups to network with each other.

Why Fight Club?

Geek Dinners already taken. Besides, it's cooler to tell your wife/staff/buddies that you're going to Fight Club than have to ask strangers directions to the Geek Dinner. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

Fight Club is about connecting, not selling.

Fight Club Members are entrepreneurs and business owners who understand that people are not the sum of what they can do for you. We're organized to build introductions and relationships between entrepreneurs outside the regular business environment and without the need to immediately sell to everyone.

Read this post on Horizontal Networking for Entrepreneurs.

If you're smart, and Fight Club Members are, you build relationships that give you access to another network and have other members actively looking out for you.

How you fit in.

Fight Club is small on purpose. We want to offer an environment where people can get to know the 'person' they're talking to, before the business. Anyone can come, you just have to attend with and be invited by an existing Fight Club Member the first time.

Fight Club is not an Old Boys Network.

We're just a bunch of similarly situated guys who value semi-inteligent conversation and understand that expanding your network and being of service is also good business.

Fight Club is also about deal flow.

From time to time I expect Angels from the local community to be involved. Certainly I've found it beneficial.

 

Most effective lead generation

From Ken Krogue's Blog comes this, '17 Most Effective Lead Generation Methods' which is great.

I believe that the best methods are those that are most Effective, but least Popular.  So look for a low number on Effective, and a high number on Variance:

Lead Generation Method Effective Popular Variance
Executive Seminars 1 8 7
Inside Sales 2 9 7
Search Marketing 3 6 3
Webinars 4 10 6
Tradeshows 5 3 -2
TV Advertising 6 17 11
Email 7 1 -6
Radio 8 15 7
PR 9 2 -7
Online video / podcasts/ rich media 10 12 2
Direct Mail 11 4 -7
Blogs 12 13 1
Sponsorships 13 7 -6
Online Ads 14 11 -3
Other Web 2.0 15 14 -1
Outdoor 16 16 0
Print 17 5 -12

 

Popular isn’t necessarily good, it just means everyone else is doing it (email for example is ranked 1st as most popular, but ranked 7th in actual effectiveness.)  Take especial note of the degree of variance and whether it is positive or negative.  High positive variance shows extreme effectiveness that is relatively unused or unknown by your competition.

Jazz Bet on Sendside Sales Acceleration

The Utah Jazz is the first NBA team to begin using Sendside for sales acceleration. Of course, they're not the only ones. We have a growing number of clients who are using Sendside of sales automation, strategic marketing and customer retention.

In addition to being an NBA franchise, the Jazz sales team have a lot of sales to make... an NBA team, a stadium, a race track, movie theaters, concerts and events... that's a lot of inventory to move and speeding up the sales cycle is the way to do it.

Sendside gives the sales reps, sales management and marketing, the ability to craft their messages and be notified when they're opened. For high-value sales prospects that gives you an amazing ability to follow up while your content is fresh in a prospects mind and they're thinking about you.

For my part I love having the Jazz on Sendside. In fact, I have a personal side bet with the Jazz management. If the Jazz sales team is able to meet a revenue goal that's directly attributable to Sendside (completely at the discretion of the Jazz managment), we'll get four corporate season tickets.

We're pretty sure that using Sendside the Jazz can beat that goal pretty easily so I'm looking forward to watching a lot of Jazz games from court-side next season.

HireVue: Video interviewing SaaS that rocks!

HireVue's been on a roll lately. Every time I have dinner with Mark it seems that HireVue's rolling in additional customers, and it's no wonder. HireVue's offering real value to HR departments looking for efficiencies in their hiring process.

It's great to see another technology startup here in UT making the grade and building value.

I've used HireVue to interview. HireVue made the preliminary interviewing incredibly easy, and I was able to review and share the interviews I liked best. I ended up with a perfect fit for the position which would have been very hard to do just over the phone.

If you're looking to hire anyone, HireVue's the place to do it.

And, of course, HireVue uses Sendside.

 

HireVue is the worlds leading video interviewing service doing business in more than 70 countries. HireVue came to Sendside looking for way to accelerate their sales cycles and provide mind-blowing relationship marketing to their existing clients that include Google, Oracle, and Africa World Bank. Within months, Sendside increased helped increase their sales by more than 35% while cutting their sales cycle in half.
Read the HireVue success story