Technology may be automating the business of lead generation, but the success of a sales campaign still depends on the following:

Having a clear idea up front about who you want to contact

Defining what information you need

Having a definite plan for what you are going to do with the leads you develop.

In other words, generating leads, whether electronically or by old-fashioned footwork, still depends on setting your sales strategy and then picking the right database and lead tools to fulfill it.

Just the Right Person

If your priority is getting to just the right customer executive right away, your best source may be idExec. This company compiles its own contact data for the true decision makers in up to 48 functions at those private and public companies, as well as government and nonprofit agencies around the world, that take in more than $30 million in annual revenues. “If you are selling a high-end product to a major firm and don’t want to waste time reaching exactly the right person, that is what we do best,” emphasizes idExec president Peter Malimus.

The idExec data is proprietary and real-time. “We own the data, and our researchers in New York, London and the Philippines are constantly updating it,” Malimus explains. “As soon as we find out a key exec has changed, it’s in the database and our customers know it, too.” IdExec data are accessed through online subscriptions that give you truly the latest, sharpest picture of your prospect’s organization.

Sales reps can search the database by standard categories: geography, industrial classification codes, annual revenues or corporate affiliations. Or they can simply look up a company or executive by name. The firm also offers special email alerts. “Say you sell to technical managers of financial companies in northern California,” Malimus offers. “We store that profile, and once a week you get an email of any changes in these positions.”

The database has the usual contact information, including each exec’s title for proper addressing. But Malimus’s staff goes much further, assigning its own functional codes so that you get exactly the person who could buy your product. “We have the C-level execs, like everybody else,” Malimus says. “But we also get very detailed; for example, who is in charge of internal audits, who runs corporate taxes, who heads up e-commerce or telecomm operations. This gets to the heart of who reps need to talk to.”

The database goes well beyond contact information. It includes executive biographies, recent financial data from 10K filings, and links to Nexus for the latest company news. And idExec is affiliated with InfoUSA, which offers content on the smaller firms that are not included in the core database. “Clients come to our Website, and we can patch them into InfoUSA,” says marketing VP Fred Tolchinsky. “Think of us as a total solution for marketing and sales.”

Still, it is that online, real-time access to the decision makers at top global firms that makes idExec distinctive. “Any company that sells higher-level products in business-to-business markets can use us,” Malimus argues. Most of idExec’s own 300-plus customers are in technology, professional services, finance and banking, and executive recruitment and education. “These are people who need to know the decision

maker; they have to get the right name and the right number without wasting time,” Malimus emphasizes. “If they have to call around, they are just replicating what we can do better and cheaper.”

Malimus illustrates the efficiency: “Say a marketing manager wants to do a targeted one-to-one campaign directed to financial executives of agricultural firms with more than $500 million of revenue in the southeastern U.S. It takes 45 seconds to run the query, and you get results in 30 seconds. So in less than five minutes you can download your mailing list.” Most important, you can be sure your message gets to just the right exec.

Making It Personal

Energetic lead-management companies are putting together so much useful data that sometimes the chief challenge is using it all efficiently. That can be especially important for dispersed field reps, who must often do their prospecting from laptops, in airport lounges or cars pulled into parking lots. So a company called iMarket has come up with the Personal Data Portal (PDP), to make it quick and easy to get just the leads you need, wherever you are.

IMarket had already integrated data on 13 million companies from the database of its famous parent, Dun & Bradstreet, with more than 300 data elements of 30 best-in-class data partners. The company hooks these outside data up with its clients’ internal data on customers and prospects. That’s a very rich database to prospect. But individual field reps do not need all the data and often do not have time to click through all the options to get what they really need.

So iMarket works with the selling company to select the data each rep needs and customizes the portal just for that rep. For example, who wants to enter 15 ZIP codes to get prospects in the right territory? With his own personal portal, each rep searches only in his own territory. And managers can decide what are the most important five or ten prospect characteristics each rep will need, depending on product line, to select the best leads.

“If they get only the relevant data, it becomes much easier and less intimidating for the reps to use,” explains Doug Borchard, iMarket’s VP of product planning and development. “You don’t improve sales productivity just by offering a slick tool to reps. They have to use it to download leads. If you are a manager implementing a new lead-management system, you must have confidence that they will adopt it.”

Managers can thus streamline the high-tech prospecting job for their reps. And the PDP approach has benefits on the back end as well. “If I have to manage 500 field reps, I want to be able to enable and disable users easily,” Borchard explains. “And I may want to set spending limits so that each rep can access only so many records, and I can track their spending. Or I may want to give some reps access to more prospect data than others, depending on what their needs are.” Selectively choosing the data available for each rep could come in especially handy if you sell through independent reps who sell for several clients.

Customizing Leads for Your Selling Partners

Bryan Archambault, director of business development at Datacore Marketing, is already using the iMarket PDP to help Butler Manufacturing sell better. Archambault sees further scope for PDPs in his business, which often involves selling through complicated supply chains.

Datacore is a 10-year-old marketing services firm that helps manufacturing companies consolidate all their customer data and use integrated customer data to sell better. Clients have included such giants as Michelin Tires, Sprint, American Express, Casio and Honeywell. Lead management can be especially challenging when there are complex supply chains involved. “For example, Michelin sells to such retailers as Walmart, but it also sells to distributors who resell to other customers,” Archambault explains. “The supply chain is dynamic and complex. You must be able to tie the lead to the end user and understand the whole chain.”

Butler Manufacturing sells preengineered structures, ultimately to end users, but more than 500 local builders spread across eight territories actually erect the structures for the end users. “It’s a B-to-B supply chain, with the builder operating as a sales agent,” Archambault explains.

Datacore had been working with iMarket to generate mailing lists for each prospect. “But we wanted to customize the mailing to look as if it was coming from their local builder, urging them to buy from Butler. So it was very manual, very labor-intensive. The whole process took up to a month to implement.”

Enter PDP, customized for each of hundreds of local builders. “The builder goes into his own portal, selects a target list for only his zone, plus his size and SIC-code criteria,” Archambault says. The local builder gets his own logo, address and automated signature on the Butler letters, sent out from a central facility. “It allows Butler to develop and control the campaign centrally, but we can still customize the look and feel of the letters regionally. As the reply cards come in, we funnel leads to the right builder for follow-up.”

Archambault will be offering the PDP approach to other Datacore clients. “It’s a good solution when you have regional versus national selling requirements,” he explains. “Regional managers say national does not know the local nuances. But national wants to develop a central strategy.” Because the PDPs are all hooked into a central database, corporate planners can easily track return on investment by territory, by SIC code, and by the supply chain partners or reps assigned their own PDPs. “The approach is scalable for independent reps, for resellers and for the sales force. This will be one of the options we offer other clients.”

Good Karma for the Biggest Game

Sometimes getting leads is not the problem. Especially in pursuing long lead-time, complex sales, managing the lead – and all the activities necessary to close the sale – are the toughest challenges. Techmar has helped high-end salespeople at such companies as Cisco, Compaq and Dell pursue the biggest game. The firm is now offering its own in-house tool, Karma, to help other firms manage development of their biggest leads.

“Karma reflects the complexity of many high-end sales opportunities,” explains Techmar VP Michael Moore. “First, it tracks the client sites along with the parent company sites, it tracks multiple contacts within each site, and it tracks multiple opportunities within each site. It tracks and maps all the people who participate in these opportunities.”

Moore emphasizes that Karma also manages the sales opportunity over time. “You will need to have numerous discussions with the customer to provide information and then schedule follow-ups,” he notes. “In Karma, all this takes place naturally. We built into the workflow automatic emails and call backs.”

Managers, reps and other staff involved in the opportunity need only a PC and browser to access Karma information. “The portals are defined so that each user gets the information he or she needs, not a lot of clutter.” Managers can query the system to learn whatever they need about progress and to summarize outstanding efforts in handy chart formats.

Karma is kicked off, of course, with lead data. The system can pull data in from the selling firm’s existing database, from third-party lead sources, or from such ongoing customer contacts as Websites and call centers. Techmar will assist clients in purchasing and cleaning up third-party lists. But the real point of Karma is its ability to manage the complicated efforts that go into a few, big-dollar sales.

Does that matter much? Sometimes it could matter a lot. “Look at the converse situation,” Moore urges. “Frequently, you contact some very large opportunities that will not be ready to buy for six months. So you need to manage the opportunity over time. And you may need to bring in other people, technical and support staff, while you prepare and maintain contacts. For a really complex opportunity, you must also have a map of the prospect’s decision making.”

Major firms sometimes develop in-house systems to handle all this complexity. Moore thinks this approach may work, “but more often it fails.” Techmar developed Karma for its own use in managing the pursuit of major sales opportunities for its clients. “We have done the job. That’s why it works.”