Recovering from disaster. We’ve bounced back.

Come meet me at the Aprimo Marketing Summit.

As some of you know, the B2B lead generation company, Find New Customers was hijacked by small Florida CRM software firm on August 3, 2010. On that date I got a terse email “We’re going to re-purpose your domains. We suggest you find alternatives.”

2 hours later, total shutdown. Email, website, blog - everything went dark. Find New Customers disappeared. For an online business, that is a death sentence.

I worked for this firm in early 2010 and the CEO convinced me to sell him my popular domains. As I thought it was a long-term gig, I gave him a great price. After just 30 days, with no reason given, he gave me my walking papers. Though I left, I still had access to the domains, as all of my content was stored elsewhere - till they ‘repurposed’ them.

When we parted after only a short time, I asked this man for my domains back. He refused, unless I paid him back in full. Although it was my fault by not writing an iron-clad contract (such as a payback calendar based on time - e.g a scale depending on how long I remained in their employ.), I was determined not pay him one cent.

That afternoon, I purchased two new domains, www.findnewcustomers.com and www.fearlesscompetitor.net. The first was quite expensive, but considerably less than buying back the original .net domain. And a .com was better anyway. Fortunately, all of our content was in our marketing automation software, so it was a simple as pointing to the new domain of www.findnewcustomers.com. Problem is - no one knew our new address. So we had a great website and blog no one could find.

One of the first things I did with the new domain was run it through Hubspot’s free http://www.websitegrader.com. While my old domain got a 99 (out of 100), the new domain only got a 49. Ouch!

Today is February 15th and here is how we score now.

• Findnewcustomers.com gets a 98.3 out of 100.
• @fearlesscomp gets a 100 out of 100 in twittergrader
• FearlessCompetior.net has been featured in books, the Eloqua blog tree and many other sites as one of the best b2b marketing blogs out there.

It’s clear that Find New Customers is back and stronger than ever.

While it took a ton of hard work, it is friends and supporters who kept me going. People like Jill Konrath, Jim Burns, Paul Gillin, Arthur Germain, Stephanie Tilton, Joe Pulizzi, Ann Holland and my wife, Kathy. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

We also invite you to visit our blog on B2B sales, the B2B Sales Lounge.

What do you think? We love comments and people who share.

Jeff Ogden is President of Find New Customers “Lead Generation Made Simple” Check out the online show every Friday at 11am ET, “Laugh and Learn with the Fearless Competitor.” Find New Customers is one of few lead generation companies in New York. Follow Jeff on Twitter or download the free white

paper on B2B lead generation.

Find New Customers helps companies like yours (with 150 to 5,000 employees and complex products) implement lead generation programs to improve the way you find and acquire high quality sales leads using best practices in online lead generation. Quality leads matter. In fact, a recent study found that sales teams with fewer, high quality sales leads closed more than sales teams with more leads of dubious quality.

If you wish to do sales lead generation online, contact the B2B lead generation experts at Find New Customers. Use the form below to send a personal note to me or Leave a Reply to post a permanent comment.