If you're targeting a vertical, using one example customer, lookup who bids against them for the same keywords in Adwords on SEMRush. Adgooroo and Spyfu also support this.
If you're selling a horizontal product targeting customers where their existing technology they use could tip you off (e.g. companies that use Marketo and Mailchimp), LeadLander and BuiltWith are useful.
Once you get a list of target companies, the next trick is finding the right person to sell into. If you know their title, search Google like this:
site:linkedin.com "Company Name" "Title"
That works well since it lets you plow past Linkedin's limitations on searches outside your personal network.
Once you figure out your customer's company, name, and title, head over to email-format.com or data.com to look up the email format for the Company. With Rapportive for Gmail, you can take a few guesses and usually find the right person. Or read this post: http://www.distilled.net/blog/miscellaneous/find-almost-anyb...
You could have a law that disallows the entire civil federal budget being held to ransom, such as declaring that the final date for a funding vote for an established government service must come at least 3 months ahead or else the service is automatically assigned funds. That way, all the sections of the budget that are not under contention would have been assigned funding 3 months ago and the worst that could be done would be a delay on sections of government business, not the shutting down of random stuff like parks.
There are currently laws that require the executive branch to submit a budget every year (the Budget Control Act of 1921), which the president violated for a few years consecutively, forcing the past few years' continuing resolutions (and in part, the sequester).
There are additional Budget Acts (passed in the mid-70s, 90s, etc.) that require those budgets to be acted upon by Congress or reconsidered, which have all been routinely violated for the past few years as well.
The issue with these bills is that they are only enforced by those with the power to break them, which means that they are de facto never enforced.
Here is a portion of the summary of the President's 2013 budget proposal. [1]
I don't know where you get the idea that the President is violating the Budget Control Act. The issue is that the Senate and the House refuse to conference, due to the remote possibility of an actual revised budget being passed. Therefore CRs are used to maintain funding without dealing with the seemingly intractable partisan disputes in the current split Congress.
(and the Budget Control Act of 2011 was attempt to move this debate from the full floor to the Supercommittee, which promptly failed and resulted in the sequester) I'm not sure how that's relevant. [2]
When I spoke of the president's violations of the Budget Act, I wasn't referring to them in the present tense. Regardless, his violations have been numerous, though you are correct that he is not currently in violation of the budget act.
It's more than teaching... it's a test of your passion for the customers.
The worst thing is to get into a market and realize you really can't get excited about your customers' issues. Better to discover that about yourself earlier.
It is a story about Groupon. How can they let their staff get into this situation where they are so desperate as to make threats?
How did they not know about and fix the poor experience with Groupon previously?
How are the staff paid - is the commission component so high that they have to make sales no matter what?
Is the training and are the SOPs so poor that the staff are free to operate on the edges of legality?
Is the culture such that anything goes?
Are the systems that review performance of sales reps not catching up with this sort of behaviour?
Groupon allowed this to happen, and it's for Groupon to fix.
Firing the guy would be a knee jerk reaction that would not to me be the right one. Not firing him and doing nothing would be worse. The best answer is a blame-free full review of how this occurred, and how they can design their organisation and process to make it never occur again.
I don't correct it's correct to blame practices like these on the employer's business model. That's like blaming road rage killings on the government for having congested roads.
Sounds to me like it's a kid barely out of college who can't control his emotions and is having a pouty hissy fit. His emotional age obviously is not advanced enough to prepare him for sales.
If you want to blame anything, blame the culture (Web 2.0? SF? VC funded world?) that believes that younger is always better.
I chose the term "emotional age" carefully for that reason.
That said, if we were talking about hiring a node.js dev, and comparing a 22 year old vs. a 57 year old, would "I fail to see how this has anything to do with his age. There are great developers at all stages of life." be applicable as well? Or would it reasonable to make some generalizations while appreciating exceptions?
True. Isn't anyone from Groupon reading HN? I thought they'd pull a Nathan Bedford Forrest and get in here the fastest with the mostest mea culpa, but so far, I don't even think they know what's going on.
"woefully uneducated" indeed. why didn't he tell the affiliate network "no coupon sites, no trademark bidding, and approval required for all new affiliates."
Those are three of the most utterly basic things any new affiliate program would do.
His real complaints should be that he lacks knowledge in this area, didn't hire people who have it, and got poor customer service from his affiliate program.
He could've easily shut down all of that activity or even experimented with it in a controlled fashion with select affiliates, getting near-immediate feedback and optimizing (or then deciding against it).
I suspect that people don't trust a merchant-supplied coupon.
A also suspect this is why when you Google "landsend coupons" the #1 site is a UGC coupon-sharing site and #2 is the merchant's own site. By every traditional measure, the merchant's page should outrank the coupon site.
Why would you trust a coupon sharing site more? The merchant has an incentive to only give you some token discount, whereas the "crowd" has no such incentive. So you're more likely to trust the crowd in this scenario.
When a startup grants stock options to its key people...83(b) has no bearing on any of them except for one special case. If options are granted to key people who are given the right to exercise them early...
http://www.fark.com/topic/florida
"Have you ever been to Florida? It's basically a criminal population. It's America's Australia." - Jack Donaghy, 30 Rock