TotalPicture Radio Podcast
Donato Diorio, CEO Broadlook TechnologiesInterview Recorded at HR Technology Conference, Chicago
Published: October 11, 2010
Listen to the Recorded Interview
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Welcome to a special Inside Recruiting Channel podcast on TotalPicture Radio. We are at HR Technology Conference and Expo in Chicago, Illinois in the press room. I am really delighted to have back on the show, Donato Diorio, who is the brains behind Broadlook Technologies.
The last time I spoke with Donato, I think we were in San Diego at ERE.
Donato: Yes, that’s right.
Peter: Donato, why don’t you give us a broad overview of Broadlook. What do you guys do?
Donato: Can I give you a broad look at what we do?
Peter: Sure, yeah!
Donato: Presently we’re taking a big move towards the cloud. Our technology has historically been desktop software,, everybody always said “Donato, why don’t guys put it in the cloud, you’ll sell a hundred times more.”
Well, the thing that people don’t understand is that our technology is very processor and memory/bandwidth intense. So really until just recently, the economy of scale in terms of bandwidth and all those technical things; the laws of computing, etc. weren’t there to have us be able to do the real-time data mining of contact information from a centralized location and put it in the cloud. We are now there.
Basically, Broadlook is making the move towards the cloud. Profiler™ is our first application that’s out in the cloud. We’ve built it inside of Microsoft CRM Dynamics. What that means is, a Microsoft Dynamics user can click a button to get every name, title, email, phone number, bio, social network ID, SCC filing – everything that exists in terms of a company’s contact information on the Internet. And it’s not outdated like you may get with other sources. ZoomInfo has been around there for a long time, but that’s stored data. Everything that we do is real time. Information available the second that the user wants it. That’s our first thing that’s out in the cloud.
The second thing which we’re excited about, is a technology called CRM Shield. CRM Shield simply solves the problem of data cleanliness. Lets say, you’ve got a new company record to add to your CRM or ATS: “The Container Company.” But you’ve got “Container Company, The” in the database already. What’s more some yahoo in engineering put inContainer Company Inc, period, comma, space, The (“Container Company Inc., The”) as well.
Everybody puts the data in different and people can’t always find it. Thus, in a standard sales recruiting operation, you have to de-dupe every once in awhile. De-duping is actually treating a symptom of a disease that’s problematic.
So what we’ve done is CRM Shield allows a technical person to pick a schema… how do you want to treat ‘the’ – do you want to put the end of a company name or the beginning? A CFO title, is it Chief Financial Officer or is it CFO?
Hundreds of rules of what a technical person would call normalization; think of it as rules, are stored in one single place in the cloud. Then all data that ever passes into or through the ATS or CRM, goes through CRM Shield. CRM Shield normalizes it…adjusts it. Basically, no data ever gets put in that’s dirty. We’re curing the actual disease of dirty data, of bad data, of duplicates, instead of it ever getting into the system the first place.
We’re really excited about it and the CRM vendors that we’re starting to partner with are pretty much doing back flips about it. So we’re stoked.
Peter: Couple of things I keep hearing at the conference I’ve attended this year is (#1) SaaS is on everyone’s radar screens, software as a service seems to be the latest and greatest thing that everyone is talking about.
The second thing I keep hearing about is integration, especially from HR executives and the HR practitioners out there in large organizations where their content is on spreadsheets, in different silos, in different parts of the organization, and somebody has a database over here that is an Oracle database; somebody has a People Soft database… nothing talks to one another. How do you solve this integration problem, Donato?
Donato: As you’re talking, I’m thinking; boy! CRM Shield, CRM Shield! If you’ve got five different silos of data and each one has a different business unit with different rules; for example, one may be a mail order house in a company. A mail order house needs verboseness. Have you ever seen the mail order Publisher’s Clearinghouse? Everything is capitalized, right? The data is stored a certain way. Then another part might be a sales operation, brevity; they want to get the information in very simply. They don’t want to type a lot.
The different silos of information are going to continue to become disparate without a good solution. If you have a single point of truth out in the cloud dictating how all data in the corporation is to be handled; everything can point to that; be filtered through that. Those silos then, that are traditionally going towards entropy and becoming disparately named and structured, actually start to converge. If you have things that converge, integration becomes much simpler.
If there’s one way of putting a company name in, how hard is it to look up a company name in silo #1, match it with silo #2 and have an end solution that brings all the silos of data together. It’s simplistic, but you must instill absolute discipline in installing something that is the single… again, you keep hearing me saying the single point of truth – It’s a very important concept in source code and engineering. If you have five different copies, you don’t know which one to trust. The single point of truth tells you where to go for the definitive authority on some type of information. That’s why it’s so important and that can solve the data silo problem.
Peter: The other thing that has really taken off this year obviously is social networks and corporations are freaking out, they don’t know quite how to deal with the Twitters and the Facebooks of the world. Most corporations, especially the large ones now, at least have a Facebook Friend page out there; even if their blocking their employees from using Facebook, and they have a Twitter account that they’ve allowed… they’ve poked a hole somewhere in their firewall and they’ve allowed someone to tweet about something.
You were talking about this earlier, that people’s social network handles and things are becoming part of your database. How do you do that? How do you go out and find somebody’s Twitter handle or find out who’s on Linkedln or Facebook and integrate that with what you’re doing?
Donato: The first thing I’d say, if you’re fretting about social networking – don’t. Don’t worry about it. It’s important to make sure we have our definitions down.
I wrote a blog a little while ago, called The Future Death of Social Networking. It was all based on a theory which I think I confirmed with some polling. What I basically asked a thousand people over a couple of webinars is – how do you use Linkedln? Do you go out and get a connection to get to a connection, to get to a connection, which is the birth of Linkedln… what it was meant for.
The second option was or B; do you get as many contacts as possible as many people to get your network as big as possible, get a name and title and contact them directly? 85% of people said get their network as big as possible… go out and get as many people as possible.
What does that mean? Linkedln is not a social network. Linkedln is a social database and that’s an important distinction So, think before you leap on the social networking thing.
In terms of how we do it, we don’t store the social network data, we store the linkages to the social network profiles. So when we want data about somebody, we go out and ping it in-real time, instead of getting data that was stored six months ago or nine months ago, or in some cases two years ago in some of these networks out there.
Storing an anchor point to get information in real-time is more important than going and extracting data, dumping it into a CRM and letting it age.
Peter: Does that also replicate in Twitter and in Facebook?
Donato: Sure. I take a company centric approach to Twitter. I want to know all the people at a certain company that are tweeting… not a single individual, unless it’s the CEO.
If you’re going to look at Twitter, look at following it. Look at using for it for a sales process or recruiting process. Try if you can to use a company centric view in how you look at social data versus taking a persons centric view. If you take a person centric view, it’s like the seven blind men touching the elephant, you get the arm or a leg and you think it’s a stump; versus having those seven touch points and knowing; a social network, it’s an elephant.
Peter: Switching gears for a second, one of the conferences I attended earlier this year was a media conference in New York. This is a very different crowd from what I’m normally exposed to in these recruiting in HR conferences and leadership conferences. These are all people from CNN, from CBS, NBC, Disney… they are all media types. Everyone there was talking about location-based services. Everything had to do with Foursquare. These guys are all salivating over that somebody is the mayor of this bar down here, maybe we should offer him a coupon for Bud Light. Is this location-based service anything that’s in your radar screen? Is this stuff that you are looking at and incorporating?
Donato: You can’t ignore Foursquare. Again, I’m sort of a predictor and I think about this stuff. Three years ago, I was saying GPS based services are going to be huge in social networking and I’m glad that something like Foursquare and Gowalla have popped up.
Foursquare, let’s look at the concept that; yes, I’m the mayor of Broadlook. I’ve checked in the most. I am very active. It’s on my iPhone, it’s on my iPad, and my wife and I check in and keep track of each other. But the fact that I am also the mayor of a psychologist convention that I went to with my wife as a basically babysitter watching my kids, tells you that it has not hit the mainstream. These were psychologists around education. It was a huge conference in Washington DC and I was the mayor, because I was the only person to check in to the darn place.
You’ve got to put the buzz aside… that’s mental health. That’s a huge cross section of the economy in terms of total numbers, not in percentage. Let’s look at construction… let’s look at transportation, technology and media; yes, it’s ever present and you can’t ignore it, and big companies have to have dedicated resources to take advantage of it, but it’s not mainstream. Anybody who says anything different is reporting on a reporter, on a reporter and hasn’t actually thought through the process.
Peter: The other thing that I’m really seeing a tremendous adaptation towards this year is mobile. One of my Jobs in Pods clients, Sodexo, has built a whole mobile career site. Let’s face it, my show over the last couple of years with the iPhone and now the Android, it’s really taking off. TotalPicture Radio, kind of was doing okay, and then when the iPhone came out… because I’m radio TiVo, it just like if you’re on a train commuting wherever, you’ve got the stuff downloaded and you can listen to it wherever and whenever. It just seems to me so much now is moving toward a mobile application. I know that something that you’ve been developing a lot of, you have mobile app. Talk to me about mobile.
Donato: Going back to your last question and kind of fusing them together, if you’re worrying about social networking and you’re not thinking about mobile, you’re screwed. Can I say that?
Peter: Sure.
Donato: You should be thinking about mobile. As social networking does become mainstream, it’s going to be in the mobile. If you look at the number of mobile devices that are being sold… I’m not the only one that’s saying this, a lot of people are saying this.
Steve Jobs is saying that PC is dead. It’s the iPad now. I agree with him that the PC’s going to be there, it’s going to have its place, but mobile is not a cell phone. Mobile is mobile. Mobile is the iPad.
Don’t confuse a cell phone with a form factor of another mobile device. Mobile is hot, it’s here, it’s going to grow 5x faster than every other area of computing. And if social networking takes off and becomes ubiquitous, it’s going to be on your hip.
Peter: How are recruiters taking advantage of this?
Donato: I have no idea… They’re mostly spamming. There is your tweet in your jobs and tweeting where you are… yes, there is the isolated stories, but show me somebody who’s basing a strategy on it. C’mon.
Engineers are apathetic towards it. It’s the marketing and salespeople, and the socialites. My engineers would never use it. They don’t care. You’re not going to reach the engineering crowd using Twitter. It’s not going to happen.
Peter: What are some of the trends that you were seeing coming into next year?
Donato: Mobile is a huge one. A re-definition of social CRM, social networking. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this. People are starting to actually stop… they’re stopping to watch the hype and actually a re-definition of… Like they say, English has the one word for love. In Hindi, there is like 27 words for love, which mean different types. That’s the problem. Our words and our language are not adequate enough to describe the different pieces of social networking. So I think that we’ll have a better definition by the end of 2011 of what exactly is social CRM, what I would call social linkage which is you’re in a CRM and there’s a link to Linkedln, but you have to leave the CRM to get to that link. Social agents, which go out and bring the data back into system. True social CRM, things like SalesForce chatter, that’s a hot technology, so I expect to see people out duplicating and copying that because there is not really anything there that could be patented, I don’t think. And then things moving towards what I call “social intuition.”
Social intuition is the ultimate social networking. And yes, I did coin the phrase, by the way.
Peter: Donato, did you coin that phrase?
Donato: I did coin that phrase.
Peter: Really?
Donato: But basically here’s the concept. Where’d you go to school Peter?
Peter: I went to UCLA.
Donato: UCLA, the Bruins. If I called you cold for the first time and tried to start talking to you about my technology, you have a certain likelihood of talking to me. If I talk to you and I get you for a second and say, “hey, Peter, did you see how the Bruins did last night?” That’s social intuition.
Social intuition are the things that can be gathered in real-time based on the key points in your social network profile or in your web footprint. Going out and getting information about the weather of where you are in California, what the Bruins did last night something about BlogTalk Radio or something that you’re interested, that’s social intuition.
The biggest drop off in the entire recruitment cycle is the point of first contact, because the average recruiter is absolutely awful at building rapport. Agency recruiters tend to be a lot better, that’s why they get the bigger bucks. But going out and making that first contact is the biggest drop off of the recruiting process. I expect people to be leveraging social data a lot better than they have in the past, because of that drop off is so significant in that “hey, this is Donato and I want to talk to you about a potentially stronger career opportunity…” or whatever they’re saying now in recruitment.
Peter: You do a lot of webinars around how to go about doing cold calls basically.
Donato: Yes.
Peter: Talk to us about it.
Donato: We leverage something that is called sphere of influence selling.
Peter: Right.
Donato: Not my idea. It was coined by our Broadlook’s co-founder and chief sales officer, Dan Hughes. The basic concept is: In a sales process, let’s say you’re going to reach out to Peter, and there is Joe and Tom that’s also at the company. You say, “Hey, Peter, I’d like to you talk to you, this is what I do, here is my pitch…” versus, “Hey Peter, in the next few minutes, I’m going to be calling Tom and Joe and they’ll probably be asking you about this call.” What this does is to leverage aschool yard peer pressure, which we’ve all learned. The other kids are doing something in a certain way. These other two people in my company may be asking me of this call, maybe I should take note.
You can’t perform this type of process unless you have good data. You really step on your foot if you call and say “Hey, Peter, in the next few minutes I’m going to be calling Dave…” and Dave left the company a year ago because you got the data from ZoomInfo or something like that. You’ve got to have good data.
Peter: Exactly, and that’s what you guys do.
Donato: Yeah.
Peter: Are you integrating your data with things like salesforce.com? How does that whole thing… I mean there’s so much talk now about APIs and everything connecting to everything else, having your WordPress blog upon Linkedln and having your widgets on your WordPress blog with your Twitter account, tweeting things all over the place. How are you guys integrating all this great data that you’re doing within other networks?
Donato: The Microsoft Dynamics version of profiler is powered by our API. We chose Microsoft first as a partner. They’ve been very helpful for us in terms of getting in connection with the right people, getting out to the partner network. Also, we use Dynamics internally, so it was a natural step. Let’s put the best lead generation technology in the world in our own hands first and then sell it to others. We did it inside Dynamics first and it’s up in the air whether we’re going to do SalesForce or Oracle or something else first. We are also working with a couple of recruitment vendors that are going to link into our API. Basically, you will see profiler API data inside of everything. Even search engine optimization services that do link building and want the top five contacts of the company. It will be all over the place.
Peter: That’s fantastic. That will be huge, right?
Donato: Yeah.
Welcome to a special Inside Recruiting Channel podcast on TotalPicture Radio. We are at HR Technology Conference and Expo in Chicago, Illinois in the press room. I am really delighted to have back on the show, Donato Diorio, who is the brains behind Broadlook Technologies.
The last time I spoke with Donato, I think we were in San Diego at ERE.
Donato: Yes, that’s right.
Peter: Donato, why don’t you give us a broad overview of Broadlook. What do you guys do?
Donato: Can I give you a broad look at what we do?
Peter: Sure, yeah!
Donato: Presently we’re taking a big move towards the cloud. Our technology has historically been desktop software,, everybody always said “Donato, why don’t guys put it in the cloud, you’ll sell a hundred times more.”
Well, the thing that people don’t understand is that our technology is very processor and memory/bandwidth intense. So really until just recently, the economy of scale in terms of bandwidth and all those technical things; the laws of computing, etc. weren’t there to have us be able to do the real-time data mining of contact information from a centralized location and put it in the cloud. We are now there.
Basically, Broadlook is making the move towards the cloud. Profiler™ is our first application that’s out in the cloud. We’ve built it inside of Microsoft CRM Dynamics. What that means is, a Microsoft Dynamics user can click a button to get every name, title, email, phone number, bio, social network ID, SCC filing – everything that exists in terms of a company’s contact information on the Internet. And it’s not outdated like you may get with other sources. ZoomInfo has been around there for a long time, but that’s stored data. Everything that we do is real time. Information available the second that the user wants it. That’s our first thing that’s out in the cloud.
The second thing which we’re excited about, is a technology called CRM Shield. CRM Shield simply solves the problem of data cleanliness. Lets say, you’ve got a new company record to add to your CRM or ATS: “The Container Company.” But you’ve got “Container Company, The” in the database already. What’s more some yahoo in engineering put inContainer Company Inc, period, comma, space, The (“Container Company Inc., The”) as well.
Everybody puts the data in different and people can’t always find it. Thus, in a standard sales recruiting operation, you have to de-dupe every once in awhile. De-duping is actually treating a symptom of a disease that’s problematic.
So what we’ve done is CRM Shield allows a technical person to pick a schema… how do you want to treat ‘the’ – do you want to put the end of a company name or the beginning? A CFO title, is it Chief Financial Officer or is it CFO?
Hundreds of rules of what a technical person would call normalization; think of it as rules, are stored in one single place in the cloud. Then all data that ever passes into or through the ATS or CRM, goes through CRM Shield. CRM Shield normalizes it…adjusts it. Basically, no data ever gets put in that’s dirty. We’re curing the actual disease of dirty data, of bad data, of duplicates, instead of it ever getting into the system the first place.
We’re really excited about it and the CRM vendors that we’re starting to partner with are pretty much doing back flips about it. So we’re stoked.
Peter: Couple of things I keep hearing at the conference I’ve attended this year is (#1) SaaS is on everyone’s radar screens, software as a service seems to be the latest and greatest thing that everyone is talking about.
The second thing I keep hearing about is integration, especially from HR executives and the HR practitioners out there in large organizations where their content is on spreadsheets, in different silos, in different parts of the organization, and somebody has a database over here that is an Oracle database; somebody has a People Soft database… nothing talks to one another. How do you solve this integration problem, Donato?
Donato: As you’re talking, I’m thinking; boy! CRM Shield, CRM Shield! If you’ve got five different silos of data and each one has a different business unit with different rules; for example, one may be a mail order house in a company. A mail order house needs verboseness. Have you ever seen the mail order Publisher’s Clearinghouse? Everything is capitalized, right? The data is stored a certain way. Then another part might be a sales operation, brevity; they want to get the information in very simply. They don’t want to type a lot.
The different silos of information are going to continue to become disparate without a good solution. If you have a single point of truth out in the cloud dictating how all data in the corporation is to be handled; everything can point to that; be filtered through that. Those silos then, that are traditionally going towards entropy and becoming disparately named and structured, actually start to converge. If you have things that converge, integration becomes much simpler.
If there’s one way of putting a company name in, how hard is it to look up a company name in silo #1, match it with silo #2 and have an end solution that brings all the silos of data together. It’s simplistic, but you must instill absolute discipline in installing something that is the single… again, you keep hearing me saying the single point of truth – It’s a very important concept in source code and engineering. If you have five different copies, you don’t know which one to trust. The single point of truth tells you where to go for the definitive authority on some type of information. That’s why it’s so important and that can solve the data silo problem.
Peter: The other thing that has really taken off this year obviously is social networks and corporations are freaking out, they don’t know quite how to deal with the Twitters and the Facebooks of the world. Most corporations, especially the large ones now, at least have a Facebook Friend page out there; even if their blocking their employees from using Facebook, and they have a Twitter account that they’ve allowed… they’ve poked a hole somewhere in their firewall and they’ve allowed someone to tweet about something.
You were talking about this earlier, that people’s social network handles and things are becoming part of your database. How do you do that? How do you go out and find somebody’s Twitter handle or find out who’s on Linkedln or Facebook and integrate that with what you’re doing?
Donato: The first thing I’d say, if you’re fretting about social networking – don’t. Don’t worry about it. It’s important to make sure we have our definitions down.
I wrote a blog a little while ago, called The Future Death of Social Networking. It was all based on a theory which I think I confirmed with some polling. What I basically asked a thousand people over a couple of webinars is – how do you use Linkedln? Do you go out and get a connection to get to a connection, to get to a connection, which is the birth of Linkedln… what it was meant for.
The second option was or B; do you get as many contacts as possible as many people to get your network as big as possible, get a name and title and contact them directly? 85% of people said get their network as big as possible… go out and get as many people as possible.
What does that mean? Linkedln is not a social network. Linkedln is a social database and that’s an important distinction So, think before you leap on the social networking thing.
In terms of how we do it, we don’t store the social network data, we store the linkages to the social network profiles. So when we want data about somebody, we go out and ping it in-real time, instead of getting data that was stored six months ago or nine months ago, or in some cases two years ago in some of these networks out there.
Storing an anchor point to get information in real-time is more important than going and extracting data, dumping it into a CRM and letting it age.
Peter: Does that also replicate in Twitter and in Facebook?
Donato: Sure. I take a company centric approach to Twitter. I want to know all the people at a certain company that are tweeting… not a single individual, unless it’s the CEO.
If you’re going to look at Twitter, look at following it. Look at using for it for a sales process or recruiting process. Try if you can to use a company centric view in how you look at social data versus taking a persons centric view. If you take a person centric view, it’s like the seven blind men touching the elephant, you get the arm or a leg and you think it’s a stump; versus having those seven touch points and knowing; a social network, it’s an elephant.
Peter: Switching gears for a second, one of the conferences I attended earlier this year was a media conference in New York. This is a very different crowd from what I’m normally exposed to in these recruiting in HR conferences and leadership conferences. These are all people from CNN, from CBS, NBC, Disney… they are all media types. Everyone there was talking about location-based services. Everything had to do with Foursquare. These guys are all salivating over that somebody is the mayor of this bar down here, maybe we should offer him a coupon for Bud Light. Is this location-based service anything that’s in your radar screen? Is this stuff that you are looking at and incorporating?
Donato: You can’t ignore Foursquare. Again, I’m sort of a predictor and I think about this stuff. Three years ago, I was saying GPS based services are going to be huge in social networking and I’m glad that something like Foursquare and Gowalla have popped up.
Foursquare, let’s look at the concept that; yes, I’m the mayor of Broadlook. I’ve checked in the most. I am very active. It’s on my iPhone, it’s on my iPad, and my wife and I check in and keep track of each other. But the fact that I am also the mayor of a psychologist convention that I went to with my wife as a basically babysitter watching my kids, tells you that it has not hit the mainstream. These were psychologists around education. It was a huge conference in Washington DC and I was the mayor, because I was the only person to check in to the darn place.
You’ve got to put the buzz aside… that’s mental health. That’s a huge cross section of the economy in terms of total numbers, not in percentage. Let’s look at construction… let’s look at transportation, technology and media; yes, it’s ever present and you can’t ignore it, and big companies have to have dedicated resources to take advantage of it, but it’s not mainstream. Anybody who says anything different is reporting on a reporter, on a reporter and hasn’t actually thought through the process.
Peter: The other thing that I’m really seeing a tremendous adaptation towards this year is mobile. One of my Jobs in Pods clients, Sodexo, has built a whole mobile career site. Let’s face it, my show over the last couple of years with the iPhone and now the Android, it’s really taking off. TotalPicture Radio, kind of was doing okay, and then when the iPhone came out… because I’m radio TiVo, it just like if you’re on a train commuting wherever, you’ve got the stuff downloaded and you can listen to it wherever and whenever. It just seems to me so much now is moving toward a mobile application. I know that something that you’ve been developing a lot of, you have mobile app. Talk to me about mobile.
Donato: Going back to your last question and kind of fusing them together, if you’re worrying about social networking and you’re not thinking about mobile, you’re screwed. Can I say that?
Peter: Sure.
Donato: You should be thinking about mobile. As social networking does become mainstream, it’s going to be in the mobile. If you look at the number of mobile devices that are being sold… I’m not the only one that’s saying this, a lot of people are saying this.
Steve Jobs is saying that PC is dead. It’s the iPad now. I agree with him that the PC’s going to be there, it’s going to have its place, but mobile is not a cell phone. Mobile is mobile. Mobile is the iPad.
Don’t confuse a cell phone with a form factor of another mobile device. Mobile is hot, it’s here, it’s going to grow 5x faster than every other area of computing. And if social networking takes off and becomes ubiquitous, it’s going to be on your hip.
Peter: How are recruiters taking advantage of this?
Donato: I have no idea… They’re mostly spamming. There is your tweet in your jobs and tweeting where you are… yes, there is the isolated stories, but show me somebody who’s basing a strategy on it. C’mon.
Engineers are apathetic towards it. It’s the marketing and salespeople, and the socialites. My engineers would never use it. They don’t care. You’re not going to reach the engineering crowd using Twitter. It’s not going to happen.
Peter: What are some of the trends that you were seeing coming into next year?
Donato: Mobile is a huge one. A re-definition of social CRM, social networking. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this. People are starting to actually stop… they’re stopping to watch the hype and actually a re-definition of… Like they say, English has the one word for love. In Hindi, there is like 27 words for love, which mean different types. That’s the problem. Our words and our language are not adequate enough to describe the different pieces of social networking. So I think that we’ll have a better definition by the end of 2011 of what exactly is social CRM, what I would call social linkage which is you’re in a CRM and there’s a link to Linkedln, but you have to leave the CRM to get to that link. Social agents, which go out and bring the data back into system. True social CRM, things like SalesForce chatter, that’s a hot technology, so I expect to see people out duplicating and copying that because there is not really anything there that could be patented, I don’t think. And then things moving towards what I call “social intuition.”
Social intuition is the ultimate social networking. And yes, I did coin the phrase, by the way.
Peter: Donato, did you coin that phrase?
Donato: I did coin that phrase.
Peter: Really?
Donato: But basically here’s the concept. Where’d you go to school Peter?
Peter: I went to UCLA.
Donato: UCLA, the Bruins. If I called you cold for the first time and tried to start talking to you about my technology, you have a certain likelihood of talking to me. If I talk to you and I get you for a second and say, “hey, Peter, did you see how the Bruins did last night?” That’s social intuition.
Social intuition are the things that can be gathered in real-time based on the key points in your social network profile or in your web footprint. Going out and getting information about the weather of where you are in California, what the Bruins did last night something about BlogTalk Radio or something that you’re interested, that’s social intuition.
The biggest drop off in the entire recruitment cycle is the point of first contact, because the average recruiter is absolutely awful at building rapport. Agency recruiters tend to be a lot better, that’s why they get the bigger bucks. But going out and making that first contact is the biggest drop off of the recruiting process. I expect people to be leveraging social data a lot better than they have in the past, because of that drop off is so significant in that “hey, this is Donato and I want to talk to you about a potentially stronger career opportunity…” or whatever they’re saying now in recruitment.
Peter: You do a lot of webinars around how to go about doing cold calls basically.
Donato: Yes.
Peter: Talk to us about it.
Donato: We leverage something that is called sphere of influence selling.
Peter: Right.
Donato: Not my idea. It was coined by our Broadlook’s co-founder and chief sales officer, Dan Hughes. The basic concept is: In a sales process, let’s say you’re going to reach out to Peter, and there is Joe and Tom that’s also at the company. You say, “Hey, Peter, I’d like to you talk to you, this is what I do, here is my pitch…” versus, “Hey Peter, in the next few minutes, I’m going to be calling Tom and Joe and they’ll probably be asking you about this call.” What this does is to leverage aschool yard peer pressure, which we’ve all learned. The other kids are doing something in a certain way. These other two people in my company may be asking me of this call, maybe I should take note.
You can’t perform this type of process unless you have good data. You really step on your foot if you call and say “Hey, Peter, in the next few minutes I’m going to be calling Dave…” and Dave left the company a year ago because you got the data from ZoomInfo or something like that. You’ve got to have good data.
Peter: Exactly, and that’s what you guys do.
Donato: Yeah.
Peter: Are you integrating your data with things like salesforce.com? How does that whole thing… I mean there’s so much talk now about APIs and everything connecting to everything else, having your WordPress blog upon Linkedln and having your widgets on your WordPress blog with your Twitter account, tweeting things all over the place. How are you guys integrating all this great data that you’re doing within other networks?
Donato: The Microsoft Dynamics version of profiler is powered by our API. We chose Microsoft first as a partner. They’ve been very helpful for us in terms of getting in connection with the right people, getting out to the partner network. Also, we use Dynamics internally, so it was a natural step. Let’s put the best lead generation technology in the world in our own hands first and then sell it to others. We did it inside Dynamics first and it’s up in the air whether we’re going to do SalesForce or Oracle or something else first. We are also working with a couple of recruitment vendors that are going to link into our API. Basically, you will see profiler API data inside of everything. Even search engine optimization services that do link building and want the top five contacts of the company. It will be all over the place.
Peter: That’s fantastic. That will be huge, right?
Donato: Yeah.