Need an early warning when a customer needs new products? Need to know when your customer is restructuring? Need to know who might be gaining buying power? Or a bigger budget? You can spend hours with your customer contact “probing” for answers — or you can spend a few minutes reading through the “positions open” section of your customer’s website.
Read their ads carefully (and between the lines) and you can find out:
- Where the customer is planning to expand.
- Where the customer lacks critical skills.
- Who reports to whom in the organizational structure.
- What vendors they’re currently using.
- Etc., etc., etc.
For example, suppose you’re selling software. You suddenly see jobs cropping up with “Linux experience required.” You now know that the customer is pursuing a new Linux strategy — a great opportunity to sell a Linux-based product, or to make defensive moves to ensure your non-Linux products don’t get thrown out.
Similarly, suppose a company suddenly starts advertising for engineering slots that require experience building products for a new product segment. That’s a clear signal that they’re expanding their market focus, and would likely be open to buying any service that might help with the transition.
Seriously, you’d be amazed at some of the information you can glean this way. When it comes to inside information, job listings are particularly “tasty” because they’re almost never run past the corporate PR group. And they’re typically written by lower level managers who have no idea that they’re revealing the internal workings of their company…
It’s almost like corporate espionage, except it’s entirely legal and ethical. Cool, eh?
