January 5th, 2010
Data mining for dollars
Wikipedia defines Data Mining as:
Data mining is the process of extracting patterns from data.
It’s what Amazon does with their “Amazon Recommends” and “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” features.
It’s what LinkedIn uses to show you “People you may know”
How do you apply that to your business?
By playing the “Who knows who” game, or “six degrees of separation”.
1. Go through your prospects list, look them up on LinkedIn, Facebook, etc, and see who they and you know in common.
2. Before you meet them, call or email some of these mutual contacts to learn more about your prospect. Likes, dislikes, buying styles, etc.
3. Use your assistant or virtual assistant to research them, summarize their bio, latest accomplishments, etc. and put that in your database.
- My admin researches selected contacts, and puts the summary details in my Cardscan Notes field. This starts a chain reaction.
- Cardscan syncs with Outlook
- Outlook updates our Microsoft Exchange Server, which notifies the Blackberry Server.
- The Blackberry server sends updates to my Blackberry in realtime.
- From research to my hand, within 5 minutes!
4. When you go meet them, and the conversation becomes stuck or grinds to a halt, name-drop some of your mutual contacts and jump start the discussion. Countless times, talking about mutual contacts, and mutual organizations (Thanks Gotham!) has led to meetings, introductions and closed business.
