E-Leading the Pack

Just as the Web continues to evolve into Web 2.0, 3.0, and further, online lead tools are getting much more powerful. Sales leaders can select from a variety of services, some emphasizing economy and speed, others drilling down into extraordinary depth for high-value sales prospects.

For example, infoUSA continues to enhance its Sales Genie lead tool to give small companies and individual reps the same kind of support that has generally been available only in large sales organizations. In addition to capabilities, ease of use is a strong Sales Genie emphasis. Or, as John Copenhaver, senior vice president of subscription sales, puts it, “Lead tools are like exercise equipment – they are only good if you use them.”

Unlike traditional tools that loaded big batches of leads into CRM systems, Sales Genie lets reps extract and load just the leads they need each day. But like traditional systems, the Sales Genie integrates well with CRM, contact managers, and printing and mailing services. It will soon enable emailing and automated dialing at just the click of a button. “It is designed for individual reps who do not speak the technical lingo of marketers,” Copenhaver says. “Like popcorn, just slip it into the microwave and push the button.”

Sales Genie already provides templates for postcards, printing and mailing the cards at the click of a button. In late 2006, infoUSA beefed up its Website with Sales Genie Lounge, where reps and managers can exchange selling tips. In 2007, email will be integrated with the tool. The company will also provide tips on different ways to gather emails and use them, along with email templates that can be customized for each market segment.

This year will also see an automated telephone feature, where one click sends a call to the prospect. Long-distance calls can go over Sales Genie’s own VOIP network for a couple of cents per call. Local calls can be handled by the firm’s bridging service. Sales Genie will then automatically track call activity, volume, and results.

Copenhaver’s team is exploring more enhancements. For example, Sales Genie might offer a social-networking function, which reps can use to ask if others know someone they are trying to contact. But there are privacy issues here, and Copenhaver is not sure how far this approach will be pursued.

“We are trying to make it end-to-end, so you can do everything in five clicks of a button,” Copenhaver summarizes. “The small guys do not have a lot of time.” Sales Genie sells an unlimited number of selected leads for $300 per month, which includes most supporting services, except for printing and postage costs for direct mail.

Drilling Down
Tapping 10,000 news sources, Factiva’s Salesworks is a powerful tool for understanding developments at a major prospect over the whole sales cycle or keeping abreast of a current account to deepen the relationship. Factiva is now exploiting Salesworks’ extraordinary depth to make even initial prospecting more productive, according to Simon Bradstock, director of product management.

Like most lead tools, Salesworks can produce a list of companies by sector, by size, and by geographical boundary. Now companies can be further screened for characteristics that make them the best prospects for major sales efforts. For example, you can screen for companies that have recently changed owners or key executives, such as CEO or CFO, or have recently opened new facilities.

And you can screen for companies that have been associated with selected keywords in recent news stories, like VOIP technology, or any other business or technical term you choose. Salesworks will hunt, a bit like a Google search, looking for references to your chosen keyword in news stories of the last 90 days, then show you only the companies for which there is a match.

These nifty screening tools not only help reps identify best prospects but can customize contacts, mail, phone, or email, tailoring the message to an activity that is going on at the prospect firm.

The new Salesworks also plots locations of chosen leads on Microsoft’s mapping software. Marketing can thus look for concentrations of top prospects when considering opening a new branch, managers can assign prospects to territories, and reps can plan on-site visits efficiently.

Salesworks’ highly flexible family-tree feature allows reps or managers to “crawl” up, down, or across links of corporate affiliations. Penetration of one firm can thus aid selling to associated companies in a different territory, coast, or even country. Managers can tip off reps across the world that a successful sale has been made to a company that has a sister firm in their territories.

The Industry Trends section helps spot trends that are going on in each industry and the sectors that are most affected. For example, a rep selling employee benefits can learn which sectors are hardest hit by new regulations or more intense union pressure. Salesworks will even help locate suppliers of prospects or new accounts.

Factiva recently launched a new tool called MyCompanies. Busy reps can now follow all their accounts or prospects with a glance at a summary grid that flags which firms have recently experienced selected developments, such as management changes or new facility construction. A new release of Salesworks comes out every three months, and Bradstock promises there will be many more helpful enhancements in the future.

True Advantage is a subscription-based service that uses “smart trigger” technology to search 20,000 publicly available sources on the Internet (and some private sources) for events and then links these events to its business database. The database contains 11 million businesses, including 1.7 million firms above a million dollars in annual revenue, and more than 5 million contacts.

Reps indicate the companies, industries, and territories they are interested in, plus the trigger events, such as new business locations, mergers, financings, and management changes. Up to 150 categories of businesses and an increasing number of trigger events are available. True Advantage delivers – hourly, daily, or weekly – activities reported for these events and companies, by email or directly into CRM systems.

“It is meant to be a set-and-forget system,” says Joe Petro, VP of development and operations. True Advantage works like Google, mining data for information relevant to each salesperson. The firm has been developing its distinctive approach for three years and picked up five million trigger events in 2006. About 150,000 trigger events are found each day, of which 30,000 match profiles relevant to lead qualification.

“We tell them about events as soon as they happen, so reps can get started before the competition,” says Cindy Johnson, VP of marketing. About 90 percent of the time, information is delivered to users within 20 minutes of public availability.

True Advantage covers government as well as the private sector. It is now expanding coverage of businesses outside the U.S. The service has been found highly useful by high-tech firms, advertisers, consultants, security companies, and financial firms. It costs an average of $1,000 per rep, per year, for unlimited profiles and leads. It integrates with saleforce.com, and with Siebel, Oracle, and legacy CRM.

Experts work with new True Advantage clients to ensure reps get just the leads they want, usually three to five highly qualified business leads per day. Profiles can be adjusted periodically to keep them relevant and specific to each rep’s needs.

Experian is enhancing its Business Market Analyzer in 2007 to make it more dynamic, letting local reps pick the new leads that match their current best customers on the fly. The overall aim is to provide quality leads on-demand, that is, just the right number of new leads just when they are needed, rather than large chunks of data that must be segmented and worked
on over time.

The Business Market Analyzer taps data on business customers around the world, including more than 16 million North American businesses, from small sole proprietorships to Fortune 500 companies. Experian also has a massive database on U.S. consumers, which is linked to its business database when individual names match company contact names.

Experian wants to help marketers work more closely with the sales force by integrating centralized prospect databases with the local environments of far-flung salespeople. “Customers want to synthesize business intelligence from their own database and third-party data and push it down to sales teams and branch managers in the field,” says Denise Hopkins, senior director for business marketing solutions.

Focusing on best prospects as quickly as possible is the goal. “Customers want to identify and target the warmest leads,” Hopkins emphasizes. The key to doing that is what she calls “event detection.” Sales and marketing staff must work together to specify the events that will turn a cold lead into a warm one, for example, management changes, then be able to query the prospect database for these events.

A second key integration step is tapping sales reps’ knowledge of what a top customer looks like, using this profile to pick new leads from the centralized database and then pushing the right number of selected leads out to the field.

Another kind of lead integration that Experian is equipped to do very well is tying together business and consumer leads. Hopkins notes that many firms, especially financial ones, often sell to small businesses whose owners are also good prospects. Or, the link can work in reverse, with a consumer sale leading to a sale of the same service to a related small business. Experian can easily tie its related files on consumers and businesses together. – Henry Canaday