Yesware is Email for Salespeople, but today we’d also like to extend our mission to get more students working in startups after graduation. To do this, we are giving graduating students (undergraduates, MBA’s, etc) our Plus plan for free through August. We believe this is an awesome tool to help you get the perfect job right out of school. Avoid the job boards with boring corporate jobs where you upload your resume and pray for results. With Yesware you can reach out to companies and know if/when your email is opened, and if/when your resume is clicked on.

We know the job search can be tough. You never know if you are contacting the right person, if your email is getting opened, if your cover letter is effective, or if your resume is being read. Yesware is a Gmail extension that allows you to track which of your emails get opened and when as well as if those emails get forwarded. Along with tracking you get contact insights which is gives you a variety of information about the person you are emailing with from Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin. Lastly, you will be able to save email templates that have worked for you in the past for easy personalization and job prospecting.

Start-ups and Tech companies are the future of America. We hope we can encourage more students should be looking for jobs in tech where students come in and can immediately make an impact.

We don’t care if you are liberal arts or computer science, America’s tech companies have fantastic career opportunities. If you sign-up over the next week, we will give you 6 months free to use our product to track the success of your job search.

Help us declare war on boring entry level jobs and start applying to start-ups and high growth tech companies.

Sign up today!

Are you a tech company that also wants to give free service to our future workforce? Do you have any advice on getting hired at a great job out of school? Let us know in the comments!

 Yesware has had an incredible year in 2012. We’ve added 8 new team members, passed over 100,000 users, added well-received features and introduced new Team, Enterprise and Custom service levels for 2013. To show our appreciation and thank users who subscribe to a premium service level we’re glad to announce our  ‘Coffee is for Closers’ promotion.

Our customers are some of the best salespeople in the world. We know you’re all closers! So for the month of January, we want to celebrate the power of your deal-making with a cup of coffee, or several pots. From January 1 through January 31, we’ll send a complimentary Starbucks eGift Card to any users signing up for premium Yesware tiers. Now, when you close more deals faster using Yesware, you’ll be able to reward your team with coffee on us!

So go ahead and purchase Plus, Team or Enterprise for yourself and your team and we’ll send you the first monthly cost of that purchase as a complimentary gift. We encourage you to tweet about your order using #coffeeisforclosers and keep us updated on the deals you close in the new year.

Thanks for using Yesware, Email (and coffee) for Salespeople.

Rules and Guidelines:

1. The promotion will run from January 1- 31 2013 or until the total cost has exceeded $5,000.

2. Each payment account will be eligible for a maximum gift of $500 in Starbucks ecard credit.

3. New paid customers will be awarded Starbucks Gift Cards the following week of their initial purchase via email.

4. This promotion is redeemable once per payment account.

5. Current paid users or discounted new paid users are not eligible.

Some of our users have noticed they haven’t been as productive as they usually are on a typical Monday. That’s because we’ve been affected by the Amazon Web Services outage that’s taken down other sites such as Airbnb, Reddit and HubSpot to name a few.

As Mashable reports, currently Amazon Web Services’ status shows a “degraded” performance for one of its centers in Northern Virginia, the most common zone for U.S.-based customers. You can check the status here. We assure you that we’re monitoring the situation and will let you know as soon as we are back up.

We appreciate you bearing with up and apologize for any inconvenience this is causing you today.

Your Yesware Team

We already know you’re a rock star salesperson. But are you a rainmaker? Did you have a killer week, month and quarter using some of our features? Whether it’s an innovative template, a new way to leverage tracking, or a fresh method to analyze a report, we want to hear about it.

If your story sells us, like the follow-up techniques that led to us writing The Yesware Follow-Up, we might just feature you in our upcoming new column called ‘Rainmaker of the Month.’  

Click here for our inaugural post: How One Mighty Roar Used Yesware to Friend Facebook

Can’t wait to submit your winning formula to sales success? Tweet us, use the #FollowYes hashtag, and we’ll be in touch with some questions like:

• What was your company’s challenge and how did you use Yesware to overcome it?
• How did you stay on track and motivated?
• What were your key learnings?

We can’t wait to feature our very own customers and partners using our tools in innovative ways. If you need some inspiration, learn how to get the most out of your Yesware templates, how to be the best Yesware Team Manager as well as Email Secrets for Sales All-Stars.

Brad Feld loves the messy ground of entrepreneurship. In fact, he likes it so much that he wants to help build more startup communities around the world. “It’s Awesome,” he told those of us listening in to the Kauffman Foundation author series webinar featuring a chat about his new book Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City. “Get used to the idea that startups and entrepreneurship is one glorious mess that has plenty of complexity.”

Despite the intricacies of funding and sustaining a startup, Feld, managing director at Foundry Group (Yesware investor) and co-founder of TechStars, managed to boil his idea down into 4 simple points, outlined in what he called The Boulder Thesis. How come some startup communities thrive while others wither away? Here are the components of success:

1. They must be led by entrepreneurs in a network-like—not hierarcy-type—manner
2. These entrepreneurs must take a long-term view and commit to building out the community over a generation
3. They must be inclusive of anyone who wants to join—those would be the feeders and include government officials, suppliers, students, employees, businesses, etc
4. They must hold activities and events—other than cocktail parties—that engage the startup community as a whole (think incubators/accelerators; a TechStars or Startup Weekend-type initiative)

But there’s another magic ingredient in this startup soup that must be added, said Feld. He’s a big believer in “Give before you get.” Defining the difference between mentor and advisor as the 1% or 5% rule—a mentor doesn’t ask for an ROI—Feld said the world needs a lot more mentors who relish knowing that someone they mentored had a profound impact on another startup.

Mentoring and taking on a project such as starting and maintaining an incubator are no small tasks. We already knew that Feld thinks big, but I just had to ask him: How should entrepreneurs—already working like crazy to get their own companies off the ground—balance the challenge of high-growth enterprise and nurturing a community?

Feld deferred to Pareto. “It is not a requirement that all entrepreneurs be leaders in the startup community. There simply needs to be a critical mass of them. These leadership roles are not full-time jobs—they are volunteer positions! Think of Google 20% rule… 20% of your time should be dedicated to whatever you want… so spend 20% of your time leading the startup community.”

Brad Feld Startup Communities Sketchbook

Consider as well that by dedicating some of your time to building this network, you’re interacting with your peers, getting to know about hot new startups, and meeting the people who can feed your fresh talent pool. But perhaps the most important aspect is the professional development and venting that can only happen when you’re with like-minded people who understand the demands of the craziness you committed to when you decided to leave the “traditional” job behind and take the plunge into entrepreneurship. “The amount [of support] you get back—unexpectedly—is magical,” Feld said.

Salespeople rely on Yesware because it helps them close deals faster to make more money. Some take advantage of the templates and CRM syncing to save time. Some like the confidence boost they get as they see their messages being opened and forwarded. Others use a combination of all our features to improve their current sales process.

But everyone who uses our service understands the value of the Yesware follow-up.

Yesware Follow-Up #1: Call your prospects when they open your email

If you’ve sent an email using Yesware tracking, you’ll instantly be notified when someone opens your email or clicks on a link within the body of your message. Many salespeople use this real-time information to close deals faster by instantly following up via email or phone. The prospect doesn’t realize that you saw they opened your message. They just think you’re a salesperson with brilliant timing and finesse.

Yesware Follow-Up #2: Email prospects that read your email but didn’t respond

Many salespeople send out email blasts to dozens of people with the same subject line. They may even have a key target they believe may have lost interest or are curious who’s been avoiding their emails. By filtering your messages to stay on top of key prospects, you can sort messages and determine which people are best to follow up with. It’s likely that if someone read your email multiple times and/or clicked on the internal message links, they are interested but need that extra nudge to seal the deal.

Yesware Follow-Up #3: Call or Tweet a prospect that doesn’t read email

Prospects come in all shapes and sizes. Many also prefer different modes of communication. A key prospect may be more likely to respond on Twitter or LinkedIn than they would by email or phone. So why not try more than one touch point? You can filter the ones who haven’t opened your email and try calling or messaging them using a social channel via our Contact Insights.

The Call to Action

If you’ve ever successfully utilized one of our Yesware follow-ups to close a deal faster please let us know! Tweet #FollowYes with your story and we’ll send you Yesware swag that you can show off at the office.

Have you used Yesware differently to close deals faster? Do you have questions about Yesware email tracking? Let us know!

It feels like every week a new social media tool comes out to make us more collaborative, more connected, more efficient—just more. Two weeks ago it was Chatter from Salesforce, last week it was Conversations by HootSuite. And yesterday it was follow via LinkedIn.

B2B companies already use the platform. In fact, 47% of them are on LinkedIn with a corporate page, according to InsideView, and 61% of companies use social media to generate leads. LinkedIn already generates more leads for B2B salespeople than blogging, Facebook and Twitter.

So when LinkedIn introduced its new tool, we had to ask, how is this going to further business development and help us sell better? What’s different about LinkedIn’s follow feature is that it enables us to listen, a key trait in sales. A nuanced differentiation from Twitter’s offering, what LinkedIn has done is give any person the ability to get access to a curated list of thought leaders, influencers and taste makers. But implicit in this grouping is that the social platform has also provided salespeople and marketers insights into the minds of the niche customer they may not otherwise have been able to reach.

LinkedIn went through a rigorous vetting process, CEO Jeff Weiner told readers in his blog post announcing the new feature. Not just anyone can be a thought leader. After all, what would be the social currency in that? And in that move, Weiner and team delivered their network of 175 million plus connections deluxe access to a group of impresarios including entrepreneurs, politicians, successful business owners, VCs, media leaders, social mavens, legal eagles, tech gurus, and philosophers.

All salespeople have to do, initially, is listen. Read what these people are writing about. Then start asking questions—do your market research. What peaks their interest? Who else are they following? Who are they connected to? Where are they working? Are they seeking advice on LinkedIn Answers? What other platforms are they active on? What’s your in?

By giving salespeople this unique way to hear the musings of this incredible bunch of people—from President Barack Obama and his challenger Governor Mitt Romney, from Richard Bronson to Reid Hoffman, from Ryan Holmes to Caterina Fake—with a promise to expand the network, we’re encouraging you to join the listening party.  Learn everything you can about this niche crowd, share your insights, and apply to be a thought leader if you have something meaningful to add to the conversation.

You hardly need a reason to throw a good party. I’ve thrown plenty of them. From wanting to toast a new apartment to feting a friend’s birthday, from wanting an excuse to dress up, to gathering the group for Friday night dinner, everyone loves a celebration. It’s also good for business.

On Thursday night, Yesware, the startup I’ve recently started working for, and Terrible Labs, another new venture down the street from us in Boston, invited 300 partners, clients, prospects, press, and job candidates to our office warming party. We wanted them to see not only where we worked, but also how we worked, and why they should join the team.

We had the requisite open bar, complete with custom cocktails. The menu included the CRM Sync (think Long Island Iced Tea), the Custom Template (create your own, name it, and have the bartender track how many people order it), the Team Collaboration (a round of shots), and the Yestail (a green Midori sour).

But we had something I hadn’t seen before, a bungee run —an inflatable, two person bouncing race track where you’re attached to a bungee cord, which feels like a rubber band that snaps you back into place as you try to outrun your opponent. It was probably the best ice-breaker I’ve seen recently.

Throughout the night people kept coming up to me and other members of the team and asked “do you guys always have this thing in your office?” I can’t speak to what others said, but channeling the fun of the night, I responded in complete deadpan, “absolutely. Whenever we get blocked we just hit the run to clear our heads.”

What was amazing to see was just how intensely competitive the run got as the party went on. It was as if people were competing for a job. And that gets into the heart of why you’d throw a recruitment party. Besides generating buzz to show your investors and potential future backers (like Highland Capital Partners, who were in attendance) that people are loving your product, that you can pack a room with clients and press, you want to show prospective hires that this company is a good alternative to the other options out there.

Recruiting for startups is a tough task, especially when they reach a certain critical growth point. There are other complications too. First, companies need a range of people from junior to experienced professionals, but they seek fresh points of view and new approaches to problem solving that often come with younger (read Millennial) talent. Second, due to cash constraints and the need to pour just about every dollar into the business, compensation is often a challenge.

In my startup, we go to college career fairs. We’re lucky because in Boston, we have a strong talent pool to choose from. But even in schools like Tufts, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Boston Startup School, and others, finding the right fit for our needs is no easy feat. We need specific engineers at a relatively senior level who are willing to take the risk of working at a new company versus the perceived security of working somewhere like Microsoft.

Summing up one of his recruiting trips to a university a couple of weeks ago, our vice president of engineering said that while students were cued around the corner for the big players like United Technologies and Intel, they dribbled in around the startups, as if afraid to catch the entrepreneurial disease.

But a closer look at the employment numbers tells a very different story. While month-over-month, national hiring is down 0.2 percent and the average paycheck was flat, according to national data released today by SurePayroll’s Small Business Scorecard, startups are aggressively recruiting talent.

Yet candidates are still scared to make the leap. I know I was. But what’s surprising to me every day is just how normal it feels. I go to an office. I have co-workers. I don’t work in a vaccum. In many ways this is very much like working for a “real” company. Where it gets more challenging and more interesting is that over the course of three weeks I’ve managed to take on more responsibility and propose more initiatives than I ever would be able to pitch and work on at a traditional company.

So on those days when I ask myself if I made the right decision, all I have to do is look at where I am now versus where I was last month. And then I look at the post-it that greeted us this AM. It said “lost skirt last night. Please call me.” That’s how you know you’ve had a great startup party.

This post originally appeared on Upstart Business Journal.

So get out there. Take pictures, grow your network and win a new iPhone!