Salesconx Weblog

NEW YORK– Salesconx, the online marketplace and expert network for selling and business referrals, today announced it has received $1.5 million in Series A financing from a consortium of individual New York investors with broad experience in building successful companies. The investment marks the first outside funding for Salesconx, a company that provides a pioneering solution for the buying and selling of introductions to key business decision makers.

Salesconx intends to use its new funds to expand its presence in the U.S. among its key audiences of sales, marketing professionals and corporate executives. It will also continue building its technology platform and expand its offerings to support the needs of larger enterprises, an important growth segment for the company.

“Salesconx has achieved strong results in the four months since it moved out of beta,” said Evan Sohn, founder and chief executive officer of Salesconx. “We’ve grown consistently at an average rate of 30% per month across all metrics—not only transaction volume, but also numbers of buyers and sellers. In July alone we added over 500 Selling Experts to Salesconx.”

Over 700 companies of all sizes have come to Salesconx to leverage the strength of its online marketplace. Salesconx connects Selling Experts—those individuals possessing relationships with some of America’s top business decision makers, especially in the sales arena—with companies seeking introductions. The company’s network currently represents over 40 industries across the U.S. and Canada including accounting, computer services, marketing, manufacturing, retail and business services.

“Social networks, like LinkedIn, Facebook and Xing, remind us that the path of least resistance between two people is through a third-party introduction,” noted Sohn. “We have created a marketplace that allows buyers to specify their desired target decision maker using specifics such as location or industry, while also enabling sales professionals to capitalize on their hard-won business networks by introducing other sellers to their customers.”

Salesconx has received favorable coverage from numerous sales and marketing industry publications. Stacy Straczynski of ManageSmarter, the online newsletter of Sales and Marketing Management magazine, calls Salesconx “the new social-networking-based service that may have you thinking differently about connecting online.” Karl Goldfield of the Startup Sales Mentor weblog said, “In the few months since its inception, Salesconx has already proven to be a successful solution for both the buyers and sellers of sales leads,” while Zack Miller, blogger of New Rules of Investing, described Salesconx as one of the new ideas that represent “a sea-change in Sales 2.0 technologies and their implementations.”

Until its Series A investment round, Salesconx had been entirely angel-funded.

About Salesconx, Inc.:

Salesconx, Inc. provides technology and services to support an online marketplace and expert network for selling and business referrals. Launched in January of 2008, Salesconx’ platform for qualified introductions and pay-for-performance deal generation has helped businesses and selling professional across the country drive more business, adding more clients and customers in a broad range of industries and disciplines. The Salesconx Selling Experts represent industries from business services, computer services, financial services and over 40 industry segments across all 50 States and Canada. Salesconx is fueled by an extensive partner program consisting of over 50 companies and organizations from sales portals, small business portals, networking organizations, LinkedIn Lions and business web sites. For more information about Salesconx, please visit http://www.salesconx.com.

Not too long ago (say 1990) if we wanted to drive leads for our business we would send out postcards. Really great looking postcards. We would send out thousands of them, hoping for a 1% response rate. Online postcard companies that would send the postcards out for you automated this process. These companies would even provide the mailing list. Over the years, these organizations morphed into email houses and other eMarketing shops.

Prospecting 1.0 moved us onto the “internet superhighway” with online seminars (webinars). No longer limited to an in-person seminar in multiple local cities (can anyone else say 10 city seminars in 4 weeks?) the Internet allowed us to produce an online version of our in-person seminar. These of course became so dry that we supplemented the rather poor attendance with recordings that became available ‘on demand’. Prospective 1.0 eventually led to Podcasts and who (other than me) doesn’t want to listen to selling training materials on their iPod?

Web 2.0 has created a more open approach to the Internet, in particular user-generated content, blogs, podcasts, social media, review sites, Wikipedia, etc. Prospecting 1.0 has clearly benefitting from Web 2.0 trends as companies are using the social networks to drive business (certainly the recruiting industry and consultants are benefitting from social networks). Sales 2.0 brought together discrete marketing and sales tools into a single framework (think Salesforce.com, WebEx and Genius) and thus the Sales 2.0 sales force leverages the activity from Web 2.0 venues (such as Blogs) to deliver leads to the sales team. Web 2.0 was a real paradigm shift as consumer-oriented venues (Facebook for instance) are being leveraged for businesses. Companies started thinking about their social media coverage the same way they measure their public relations (print) coverage. But there has not been a shift in the way that prospecting occurs – it is very much the same formula; response to lead to qualified lead to warm lead to hot lead to opportunity to hot opportunity to deal. Many people have written about these steps (from Miller Heimen to Siebel) but let’s assume these are pretty much the steps. Web 2.0 has given more ways for responses to occur – from clicks, to blog posts, to downloads and web responses. These build on the direct mail response leads from the early 90s but in the end are still just responses. Shouldn’t the Internet be able to shift the way that people prospect for business the same way the recruiters now fish for candidates across LinkedIn?

Prospecting 2.0 is the new trend in allowing buyers to reach decision makers without the need for the first 3 steps of the marketing equation (response – lead – qualified lead). This is actually the most costly area of the marketing process. Think of how much you spent on your last Google PPC campaign and how many qualified leads were generated from that campaign. Think of how much you spent to exhibit at your most recent tradeshow and the number of qualified leads that were generated from that event. Web 2.0 has created an environment where one could easily leverage what we will call human capital. This started with eBay (albeit Web 1.0) where your ‘stuff’ is valuable because there is someone willing to purchase it. Prosper.com created a marketplace where your liquid cash can be ‘sold’ for higher interest rates because there is someone willing to pay a premium for a loan. More recently expert networks have become a common place where professionals could earn extra money (often referred to as an honorarium) by speaking to companies looking to leverage their knowledge (check out glgroup.com). Prior to an expert network a company would have no alternative but to hire a consulting firm whose analysts would serve as the industry experts on the desired subject. The analysts would do their research gathering information on their own and sifting through the bits and pieces to come up with their own conclusions that they would share with their clients for a very hefty fee. Online expert networks (the Web 2.0 flavor) bypass the analysts and consulting firms connecting the company directly with the industry expert.

Prospecting 2.0 works in a similar vein. Rather than a company using Google or other traditional marketing tools to drive responses, leads, etc. they bypass them by going directly to the source of the opportunity. They do this by creating a marketplace for referrals driven either by the buyer (of the qualified leads) or the seller. Companies like Myndnet, LeadVine and ThePerfectNetworker allow buyers to literally publish their lead request and the fee they are willing to pay for the referral. Companies like Inquisix and Passitto take the sellers approach by allowing a seller to list their referral or contact opportunity and allowing buyers access to their connections. Companies like Salesconx do both buy and sell introductions to decision makers. Are they working? It is probably too early to tell as a sector, but $10 billion will be spent in 2008 by businesses in the US on lead and opportunity generation. Checking out these companies sites, it isn’t just small businesses using these services. Myndnet has a few listings from Netscout, Passitto has a law firm, and Salesconx has Administaff, MessageLabs and Berlin Pacific. Companies of all sizes are faced with the constant struggle and desire to grow. In a day and age when every dollar counts, isn’t it time for Prospecting 2.0?