Using Google Alerts as a Sales Propecting Tool

As some of you know, I'm the highly introverted (INFP) who is also a Sales and Marketing director for a company that sells both nationally and internationally.

So, this tells us that I really, really, really dislike sales prospecting -- at least in the stereotypical 'pick up the phone and cold call' 'sales hunter' way. I'm always looking for ways to find prospects in unorthodox ways.

One of these is spelled out in my article Cold Calling for Introverts (http://halwarfield.com/articles/cold-calling-for-introverts/) where I detail a means of using the phone that won't cause an introvert to want to lie down and die.

I found another one yesterday -- it's called Google Alerts (http://www.google.com/alerts) and, as with most Google tools, it's simple to understand and use.
Tip! Do not use fake information when opening your Google AdSense account.

In a nutshell ("look, I'm in a nutshell!"), you add some relevant search terms, tell it how often you'd want to be alerted and enter your email address. Poof! A Google-formatted email appears in your inbox full of relevant goodness!

Now, you may be saying, "Thank God Almighty! I see the light!" and others may be saying "So?".

Let's give some examples. Let's say you work in state and local government sales in water purification. You depend on RFPs (Requests for Proposals) so in the Google Alert box enter government, RFP, water, purification_ -- from that moment you will receive everything Google finds that references those terms.
Tip! Sudden drop of the google PageRank of all pages of the website from any level to 0.

Or if you sell large equipment to transportation companies, create an alert with the words heavy, equipment, fortune 500 or whatever makes sense to you.

Be careful not to fill the alert with too many words or you may miss opportunities because you've been overly specific. Keep it general -- it may be better to create more than one alert that covers different aspects of your field and customers.

Now you may get immediate gratification and you may not -- but it's a lot quicker and easier than hunting for these manually. Let me know how this works for you by commenting or send me an email at hal@halwarfield.com.

Hal Warfield is a speaker, teacher and coach.

Hal Warfield is a speaker, teacher and coach. Contact him at hal@halwarfield.com. Or read other self-development articles at http://www.halwarfield.com under the "articles" tab.

Media Relations: When Google Got Googled

Before meeting my soon-to-be-wife for the first time, I "Googled" her. Google, with its amazing alacrity, turned up several documents in less than a second.

It turned up a paper she had written for a medical journal. It displayed her dissertation. Iteven showed me an article she had written for her college newspaper.

A lot of our personal information is on the web. It's a legitimate concern.

So it was understandable when a CEO became irate when a snarky website published all of his personal information it could find - including home address and financial worth - just by going to Google. Sure, it was publicly available information, the CEO acknowledged, but that story was just beyond the pale.

The CEO was so furious, in fact, he ordered his staff not to grant interviews to the news organization, CNet, for an entire year. His choice to "blackball" a website with more than 23 million visitors per month for a full year was a serious one, but one he believed was the right thing to do.

Only one problem. The CEO in question is Eric Schmidt. Mr. Schmidt is the CEO of Google.

In the days following Google's decision, dozens of news organizations - including National Public Radio, the International Herald Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, San Jose Mercury News, and the Associated Press - covered it. Many of those stories lambasted Google's decision. One story was simply called, "Google Goes Berserk."

Besides being a stunningly tone-deaf decision on Google's part (the kind people should lose their jobs over), there is at least one big lesson to be learned here.

Sometimes, it's better to just be quiet.

Had Google chosen to say nothing after the original CNet story came out, it wouldn't have become an internationally covered story. It wouldn't have made it to the coffee shops of California, the bistros of Buenos Aires, or the patisseries of Paris.

Google took a relatively small story and, through awful crisis management, turned it into a much larger one. Even worse, it gave endless ammunition to Google's critics who have long feared the implications of so much readily accessible information on the web.

Finally, they did at least two other things wrong. We left a message for Google asking for their side of the story. To its credit, one of its representatives, David Crane, did call back within a few hours but said that they have not or will not respond to such queries "on-the-record." That means its enemies continue to get all the ink as Google does nothing. Companies in crisis mode need to say something, even if that means a terse two sentence statement sent via e-mail.

The other thing Mr. Crane did wrong was offer to make comments to me in an "off-the-record" capacity. I'm not a reporter, and was careful about identifying myself honestly. I had no obligation to honor his terms, and could have been the first "reporter" to finally get Google on-the-record.

Brad Phillips is the founder and president of Phillips Media Relations. He was formerly a journalist for ABC News and CNN, and headed the media relations department for the second largest environmental group in the world.

For more information and to sign up for free monthly media relations and media training e-tips, visit http://www.PhillipsMediaRelations.com