Month: March 2019

Most people selling or marketing into the enterprise IT space see the value in having a regular newsletter with valuable content sent to their key contacts. However they know how hard it is to produce a quality newsletter that their contacts will value.

It’s a build or buy choice and I can make that an easy ‘buy’ choice!

I can provide an individual with a turnkey, managed Enterprise IT Newsletter service for about $33/week. For a team of five, I provide additional features, a custom website, and up to 1000 contacts per rep for about $22/week per team member.

Here’s the web version:
https://itnews.it-news-and-events.info

Those approximately 22 articles were the most clicked-on articles from the previous week’s newsletter that was sent to 50k+ subscribers of “IT News and Events“, which has been in production since 2011.

How to get started? Make a spreadsheet with up to 500 of your professional IT contacts who would find that newsletter useful.

Upload that spreadsheet into the service and use the system to send a welcome message (opt-in or opt-out) to your new subscribers.

Each week your subscribers will receive a tailored email from your email address with just the topics selected by that subscribers.

The newsletter will have a banner with your name, contact info, picture and logo.

There is great value in being the provider of useful information to your key contacts!

You can sign up as my subscriber and experience the newsletter as would one of your contacts. See this blog post.

Here’s what you need to get started:

• Your headshot picture (could be a link to your LinkedIn Profile picture)
• Company logo
• Name and email to be displayed in email (as sender) and in in newsletter banner
• Title
• Phone number that your contacts can call to reach you
• Your company name

Here’s how my information shows up in the email newsletter banner:

And the same information on the web site:

I believe that by having your name in front of your contacts every week, automatically:

• you will keep your professional contact list current
• you will have an additional value to any future employer (we can add your new employer’s logo to the masthead)
  
• you will be visible in the marketplace, you will be perceived as a trusted advisor and your ‘brand’ will improve
• potential employers will notice your activities
  

You will see that the content in the newsletter is

• for enterprise IT professionals
• is quite broad
  
  • sections include: CxO, Servers, Storage, Networking, Security, Cloud, Risk, Technology, Backup, Bitcoin, DevOps, PM, AI, BI, ERP, CRM, HR, Humor, Operations, IoT, etc.
• can be filtered by each subscriber (e.g. people not interested in IoT or AI can disable those sections and get a shorter newsletter)
  

Once you are set up with an account, you will be able to add your contacts:

1. one at a time through our web based SAT tool
2. a group at a time by uploading a spreadsheet
3. by giving your contacts a unique URL to a subscription form

Here is a sample spreadsheet CSV. First row has the names of fields, second row has record for John Smith of Acme where he is an IT Manager:

company,first,last,title,phone,email,comment
Acme,John,Smith,IT Manager,954 324 7867,john.smith@acme.com,This will not be seen by the subscriber. Could be a customer id

If you are like most IT sales professionals you will have:

• LinkedIn contacts
  
  • you can download a spreadsheet from LinkedIn that has some information, but not the email, for each of your contacts
    • in a spreadsheet tool, you can delete the rows for those LinkedIn contacts that don’t make sense to add as newsletter subscribers
      
    • for the ones you want to add, you will have to look them up in LinkedIn to get their email address
  • note that the trend in LinkedIn for the last few years is for people to use personal email addresses rather than business
    
• contacts (in your email client, CRM system or other tools) which can be exported into a spreadsheet
• stacks of business cards
  • every sales rep I know has boxes of card from customers, partners, prospects etc.
  • sort through the one that make sense to add to your list
  • there are scanning/ocr products that will scan business cards into a spreadsheet
    

Go through those, removed unneeded columns, and determinate the people you want as key contacts and add them as your subscribers!

This effort will not only improve your visibility in the market, but it will set you up well for whatever new position you take!