Possibly The Best Sales Tool of The Year!

Possibly The Best Sales Tool of The Year! - Mechanical Turk

Written by Justyn Howard

Thursday, 05 February 2009 15:37

Mechanical Turk, a beta offering from Amazon was originally intended for web and development projects. Turns out it's also a priceless sales tool! As their tagline (Artifical Artificial Intelligence) suggests, they pair independant web workers, with users who need either intelligence or repeatable tasks done of the web.

I first discovered Mechanical Turk while working with a developer on a web project. We needed information that only humans could provide, and didn't have the time or bandwidth to do it ourselves. For a basic understanding of what MT can do, click the screen shot on the right to view the splash page. One of the best parts is you can have thousands of web workers completing very short tasks, simultaneously. Let me tell you why it is a brilliant tool for sales professionals.

Last week I needed to find two very specific contacts at 18 specific companies for a marketing effort I was tasked with. I had a lot on my plate and a looming vacation and wasn't too thrilled about the time this web research would take me. Remembering the utility of Mechanical Turk, I decided it was time to test its effectiveness as a sales tool. Here's what happened;

I spent about 10 minutes on the MT website telling it what information I was looking for, and how I wanted it provided. I inidicated that I was willing to pay $1.00 for the names and telephone numbers of both contacts at each business (I could have got the same information for $0.20 each, but I wanted the results fast).
I added $20 to my Amazon Payments account, hit "start" and went back to my other tasks.
10 Minutes later I check back in on the website. The information for 3 of my companies was already complete. Names, Titles and Phone Numbers (direct extensions in some cases) from three target companies. Within an hour, they were all complete. I had to reject two of the responses (you don't pay for rejections) because the information was not accurate. I quickly had replacement information for those.

So, I spent $18 and got two contacts from 18 large companies. I could have done this myself without too many problems. But how long would it have taken? Let's say 3 hours on the safe side. When you figure out what each hour of your time is worth, this is an absolute bargain. Now factor in the time you were able to spend on less tedious tasks. Finally, factor in the idea that you can spend the time saved actually reaching these contacts. I could have also used an account on one of my paid services (like Hoovers), but again it would have taken a lot of time and the contacts I need often arent listed.

I'm fairly skilled when it comes to web research, but the people on the other end of Mechanical Turk are experts. In one case the contact I was looking for was an open position, and my MT worker told me that they were hiring for that position. Great to know!

With the success of this experience, I have done two more sales focused "batches" with mechanical turk. I am also working on a project to find a specific contact and existing solutions for more than 1,000 target companies in the territory. I expect Mechanical Turk will return the results inside of a day - at a cost of about $150. Multiply the math we did previously with kind of scale and I don't know how I could come up with better ROI when it comes to territory demographics.

I'll be doing a video walkthrough of this tool shortly - stay tuned.

Reader Question - Are you outsourcing? Tell us about your experience.

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Comments (8) add comment

Deepak said:

	great Mechanical Turk provides people all over the world a very good oppurtunity to make money and also to make works easier.This article explains greatly the working of MT .
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March 02, 2009
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CathyFranklin said:

	Mechanical Turk Wonderful! I found MT a while back and have enjoyed using it every day. I think the ideas and "jobs" to do are easy and fun and you can actually make a little money with them. I plan to use this for a long time to come.
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February 27, 2009
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khushe said:

	spread the word Mechanical turk is great for the requestors as well as the workers. People can get any kind of job done by the workers working around the globe.And the workers get to do a variety of tasks without getting bored doing a single job all the time.
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February 24, 2009
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Chuck Russell said:

	The turk is awesome By the way...I love the turk too.Not sure how long you've been using it but initially it was a little lean. Now there are over 40K requests for work out there.
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February 08, 2009
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Chuck Russell said:

	Love the Turk One of the things that I love most about the Turk is that it has a complete web services API beneath it. That means of course that requests to MTURK can be automagically executed from an application. So let's say your application needs a list of movies. Go to the Turk... Nice blog layout too.
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February 08, 2009
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geekmom said:

	I love mturk I do both sides of mturk and I absolutely love it. It's almost like using one credit card to pay the other when you do tasks and pay others with the money you earned. Okay, that was probably a bad example, but you get the idea. Don't tell too many people though, it's a great secret to have around.
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February 05, 2009
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Justyn said:

	re: mturk Good point Parul. It should be noted that Mechanical Turk is currently only available in the US.
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February 05, 2009
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Parul Ghosh said:

	mturk I know how useful is mturk for people who do not have much time to do some work. I work on the worker side. And for some bucks I do the kinds of work for which requestors pay. As I am from India, the facility of getting my job done by others for some money is not possible. It is only for US members.
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