Garth's World

Jigsaw’s "Wikid" Cool New Feature

Believe it or not, this blog has a purpose beyond providing a place for Garth to tell stories and rant about vaguely sales-themed topics (it came as a surprise to me, too). As such, I am going to put on my product marketing hat -probably a fedora with a feather in the band- and do my best to describe a new feature that we released on Jigsaw called Company Wiki.

In a nutshell, Company Wiki lets you post and update information about your company to   share with Jigsaw's community of 550,000 registered members and all the randoms that come to take a look- which is up to a million uniques a month . It works just like the company info on Wikipedia, except Jigsaw doesn’t draw the snobby line where your company has to be “notable” and you can post ads if you want. The results are greater visibility, accurate company profiles and heightened search engine credibility. For the users of Jigsaw, you can now see a subjective description (think blurb on Hoovers) of your target companies in addition to basic HQ address info, family tree and a ton of contacts.

We realize that this might not be the ejaculatory event of the year for the standard sales guy member of Jigsaw, but we think that your marketing department will breathe a little harder when they see this opportunity to control the company description that goes out to everyone that uses Jigsaw.

Why would you contribute?

-Promote your company or brand to one of the Web's largest business communities.

-Leverage Jigsaw’s traffic to boost your site's search engine rank

-Ensure the accuracy of your Company's public profile 

Join the Web 2.0 wave- all the hip kids are doing it.

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Penny Wise, Pound Foolish

I’m on a business trip this week with my cheap ass co-founder Fowler and it reminded me of a topic that used to come up all the time when I travelled a lot for sales. The basic idea is contained in the ancient proverb (or whatever it is) in the title above, but more specifically: when travelling for business, always factor in your time as money spent for the company.

Image via Wikipedia

As tempting as it is to point out examples from this specific trip, I’ll go to a more glaring example from a sales trip I took with an old sales manager of mine in the ‘90s. Against my better judgment (I’ll talk about what a nightmare he was on sales calls some other time), I allowed him to tag along on a couple meetings in San Diego. Actually, I had one meeting scheduled, but he threw in a last minute “meet and greet” Barney (I love you, you love me) special with a VP at a company that was too small to buy our software to “cost justify” the trip. The whole way down on the plane he was jawing at me about how he was the P&L manager for the west coast, I had to tighten my belt for travel expenses, blah, blah, blah. I was busy doing my presentation for the REAL MEETING and trying to figure out how logistically we were going to fit in his waste- of- time meeting and still get me back to airport in time to catch a plane to Arizona for my next meeting (which was way too important for Wink Martindale to attend).

Anyway, I suffer through the day with the Platitude King; trying to cover up his lack of knowledge about our product and marveling at his complete ignorance as to what is actually taking place both meetings. We are racing back to the airport to catch our flights and he says “hey wait- we need to fill up the gas so we don’t get charged.” We then spend the next 30 agonizing minutes driving around the residential neighborhoods that are mysteriously intermingled under the freeway down there looking for some gas station that “he knows is right around here.”  I end up missing my flight to Phoenix, having to re-schedule my dinner with the CIO of a large company (who I never end up meeting with), and we both make a late flight back to San Francisco.

While we are eating dinner that night at the airport, I explained to him some simple math. At the time my quota was $2 MM, or about $40,000 a week. Another quick calculation gets you to $1,000 per hour. (I don’t get paid $1K per hour, but I need to generate $1K per hour.) His number was $5MM, so his time is worth another $2500. The change fee and difference for my flight was $200. The dinner cost $100. So in order to attend his cost justification meeting (of course no revenue resulted) and avoid a gas charge of probably $5 (remember it was not today’s gas prices), we put the company out over $10 grand in lost time and expense. And that doesn’t even factor in that I never got the upsell to the AZ client.

I’m not saying you should go fight your boss or your accounting policy to stay at the Ritz and fly first class (unless they might actually agree to it). Just when you find yourself wasting hours of your time chasing penny savings on connecting flights, distant cheap hotels, no rental cars in favor of “public transportation” and the like- remember that your time is money, too. Big money.

We have a Winner!

After a month of wearing different forms of utterly ridiculous facial hair, I am happy to report that the mustache contest is over. While I got all the satisfaction that I was planning to out of the event, including:

1- Entertaining (and horrifying) my co-workers

2- Amusing myself looking at pictures of funny member mustaches

3- Annoying my wife in front of our friends and neighbors

4- Watching as people that didn’t know me tried to reconcile my nose handle bars with other aspects of their impression of me- particularly in business meetings

I am very happy to no longer have to scratch at the dead muskrat that was  my mustache through some of the hottest weather of the year. And I have to admit, looking like a total cheese dick in front of every person you come in contact with gets draining- even for a cocky guy like me.

So that is why it was so easy to choose the winner of this month’s  contest: Aaron Armstrong from Responsys. Not only did he send in multiple looks that were fantastic (check out Pablo Escobar in the shades), but HIS  WIFE HAD A CHILD LAST MONTH. Anybody that is married and/or has kids (or has parents) knows what kind of a commitment to the ‘stache this shows. He has a ri-DONK-ulous sideburns suspension bridge at the hospital! Aaron’s participation in the Garth’s World mustache contest will forever be immortalized, allowing him basically all of the 4 satisfaction points listed above every time someone digs out the baby album. Bravo Aaron- you got balls big as church bells, brother.

Aaron received 1500 Jigsaw points into his account- and I sent his wife a nice gift certificate.