KinetiCast the sales tool for lead generation

Shout! Interview with Michael Grosso, President of KinetiCast

By Rob Lane Tuesday January 25, 2011

: Image via CrunchBase

Michael is the man behind the wildly successful app for online video presentation sales, Kineticast. If you have never seen it working, watch this video presentation showing step one of a sales funnel, prospecting.

What’s special about KinetiCast?

We focus on helping B2B sales people be more effective. Our software helps people to put their message in the hand of the right people – to look at it on demand using a web link, no downloads and no attachments.

You can track your presentation; find out if they forwarded it, what they looked at and how many times they looked at it.

What gave you the idea?

I am the founder – I sometimes think that I have a defective gene because I am a 4th generation entrepreneur! I spent time in software companies implementing ERP, then doing 6 Sigma and lean enterprise and also spent time in sales management too.

I was looking at the sales process and trying to work out how to make this more efficient. When you look at the sales funnel – identify, contacted, qualified, propose and closed. There are different yields of prospects at each stage – the thing that gives the biggest improvement impact is the least efficient step.

Sales people are discouraged from sending more information to prospects because the sales team loses control. But buyers sometimes just want the information to do an analysis.

Kineticast can provide information and show who is using it and who is not – so now I can focus my sales effort on those who are looking.

You have just started using social media, what are your impressions?

In the 4th quarter 2008 we had to market KinetiCast ourselves and I started to focus on inbound marketing so we got a HubSpot CMS account and a new website; did Twitter half heartedly. But I realised when I go to buy something, I don’t look at advertising and when I want something I go look for it. We are a new concept – most people don’t know what an online presentation is. Most, who do know, think it’s a marketing tool.

We are a sales person’s tool.

We started blogging – I had a false start with a ghost writer and it wasn’t good. So we pulled the plug and then I had the software folks build a blog aggregator – SalesAce KinetiCast and it builds lists of sales experts. I screen 30 blogs a day and I approve 3 or 4 to generate fresh content which we aren’t writing.

I started using LinkedIn – I had an account and never invited people to it, I just accepted. I had a FB to use personally which I got from FOWA conference from a user interface design seminar – I was the only one without it!

I hired a VP of sales December 2009 – he is a fantastic blogger and we have started again. This has helped with our traffic. We keep hearing that Twitter is a great source of traffic. We are up to 1100 followers now and growing at a pretty good clip.

Majority of our traffic was coming from LinkedIn, but they have changed how they do things now and we are losing it. Customer Think, Naviga, and larger sites re-post our stuff.

What’s great about Twitter?

Well you found us there didn’t you? It was the third person who has gotten in touch with us using that medium. I believe it works for business to business sales.