All sales start with finding leads and, apart from referrals, you generally have to hunt for new leads. The experts agree that the first step is usually profiling your current customers to find out what characteristics to look for in new leads. You generally want to find the new leads who have the highest probability of buying, who will buy the most, or who will be the most profitable.

Several online lead sources let you select and pay for only your best leads. Sometimes that is enough. But often, especially in complex, long-cycle sales, you will want more than the right contacts to get started. You may want help along the way to understand your leads better, to fit your sales message more exactly to the lead’s situation, and to stay abreast of developments at the lead until you finally close.

Here too, lead tools have gotten much more robust. They can quickly pull together the research that once took reps or the marketing department a massive amount of time to assemble. And it is all delivered on the rep’s laptop at the click of a mouse or even automatically once the rep has indicated his interest.

So often the challenge is no longer finding leads or learning about them. It is choosing the best tools for your company’s needs, at the best price.

For example, InfoUSA can support sales and lead generation for all kinds of businesses and reps, from small firms and independent reps all the way up to sales forces of major corporations. InfoUSA now has data on 14 million U.S. businesses and 1.5 million Canadian businesses, plus more than 210 million U.S. and Canadian consumers.

The firm’s Salesgenie.com is especially designed to provide quality leads economically for small companies and independent reps. Salesgenie.com offers leads and mailing lists online, including access to 12 of infoUSA’s databases. Sales Genie data also includes credit reports to help screen for prospects that are worth pursuing.
Reps simply select, download, print, and manage the leads they need.

To enhance the usefulness of Sales Genie, InfoUSA has added an online Sales lounge, intended for networking, education, inspiration, and motivation. The Lounge contains sales tips, how-to guides, white papers, and industry-specific forums as well as live Webinars.

Where much more depth is needed to qualify prospects over the sales cycle, InfoUSA’s OneSource division has an extraordinary set of business intelligence tools. OneSource integrates content from many sources and puts it all at your fingertips with its Business Browser family of online services.

OneSource can be used for major account prospecting, for analysis of each prospect’s close competitors, for tracking and monitoring a prospect through the sales cycle and for researching the industry conditions that will shape buying habits. The firm is named for its ability to put together in one easy-to-access place detailed data and news from famous business sources. These include Edgar; Reuters; Mailings Clearing House coverage of education, health care, and government; LexisNexis; Experian coverage of UK businesses; and the best sources on French, Italian, Belgian, Spanish, Dutch, and Asia-Pacific companies. In all, OneSource covers more than 18 million companies around the world and has 20 million executive profiles.

D&B offers a special set of tools for small businesses seeking to find and sell to new customers. Company profiles give you snapshots of leads you have already selected, and D&B’s industry research report helps you understand each potential customer’s business environment. For picking new leads, D&B’s marketing lists are the right option. These lists can be selected online by your own screening criteria, including industry type, location, company size, and, if appropriate, credit condition. You will be tapping into D&B’s massive database on more than 13 million businesses. Once you have selected the leads you want, you pay from 40 to 66 cents per lead, according to how much information you need. Download the leads and you are ready to go.

A D&B division, Hoover’s offers in-depth coverage of top global enterprises created
by its own staff of editors and researchers.

Hoover’s online subscriptions give you even more background in a much easier format than Hoover’s hardcopy materials. And Hoover’s offers subscriptions at several levels to match your needs and budgets. For example, Hoover’s Pro offers in-depth financial comparisons and analysis as well as the ability to input specific search criteria to generate customized, targeted lists of companies or people. You can select data based on keywords, locations, and industry; search for company news and IPOs from 3,000 sources; and even screen your prospects by their stock performance.

The need for information in depth to turn leads into solid sales prospects has prompted the growth of several firms that put the latest information at your fingertips. Umberto Milletti is CEO of one such firm, InsideView. “Our focus is looking at business events and aggregating multiple sources of information for business-to-business salespeople,” Milletti explains.

InsideView is first of all an aggregator. “When an announcement comes out, of all the events that happen and are written about, our technology finds the business events that are relevant to the client depending on what they sell and who they sell to,” Milletti says. “We call these ‘selling triggers,’ and we send out information that is relevant.”

InsideView gets its information from Hoover’s and Reuters, plus about a thousand trade publications and press releases. “It is very rich content,” Milletti says. The firm covers about 30,000 companies in North America and the large multinationals, most of the important businesses with more than a few hundred employees.

The goal is to provide a general view of each prospect so that reps who do not have time to do this kind of research can be more productive. “We can show if there have been any recent acquisitions, if the lead has launched a new product, or if they have opened new operations,” Milletti says. “We can show you generic events or user-selected events, for example, if there have been any mentions of a particular term in an article about a prospect.”

A second component of InsideView shows links for the lead based on previous business relationships. “You can integrate your own personal connections with your company’s connections to potential customers,” Milletti says. “Say you knew a person who worked at Motorola and now works for Apple. He could be a selling reference to get into Apple. We give users the ability to exploit both their personal connections and their company connections.”

InsideView serves business-to-business sales organizations across the board, from high-tech to services like outsourcing, but it focuses on technology companies. It is a subscription-based product with a list cost of $100 per seat, per month.

Several customers attest to the value of InsideView, including SuccessFactors, which has grown dramatically in the past three years from about 30 employees to 420, selling its Web-based performance and talent management solutions to businesses.
SuccessFactors helps companies by streamlining talent management processes, including recruiting management, goal alignment, performance management, compensation, succession planning, and workforce analysis,

Colleen Doane manages SuccessFactors’ lead development team for Named Accounts. Her team seeks to penetrate known larger prospects for strategic selling. Doane has been using InsideView and is quite impressed. “We do cold calling, and we use InsideView for research,” Doane explains. “For example, if we want to know about a company, their business needs, and human resource issues, we can use a word trigger, such as ‘talent management’ or ‘mergers and acquisitions,’ and the company name to search for any article or news about that subject and the company. I will get an email if they appear in any article.”

Doane’s staff can refer to the article when they make their calls, proving both knowledge and concern about the lead company’s needs. “It can help us get our foot in at a high level,” she says. In addition, Doane can easily look up specific contact information, for example the lead’s CIO, or links between the board of directors of the new lead and board members of current SuccessFactors clients, of which there are about a thousand.

Doane’s unit has been using InsideView for about seven months. Training by Webinar was rapid, the tool is easy to use, and she has found InsideView’s staff very service-oriented. “Training was not lengthy, but you do need an overview before you use it,” she notes.

Another user who is pleased with InsideView is Jack Cage, who is an executive search and middle management recruiter for information technology and software companies. His business is to “find people who can do the job,” Cage explains. But first, he must look for companies that need his services.

“I need to find companies that are on the cusp of doing something different, companies that are going through changes, perhaps have lost a key player, are growing at a very fast rate, maybe are not meeting their sales targets, or are expanding into new markets, either geographic or by industry,” Cage says. These trigger events can flag the firms that could need some new talent.

Cage found InsideView through his contacts in the software industry on the App Exchange Webpage offered by Salesforce.com. He used the free demo version for a month, and then chose InsideView from a collection of similar services for a couple of reasons. “Number one, it appeared InsideView did a nice job aggregating lots of data on one site. If I target California, one of the companies I screen for, InsideView brings up all articles and materials in one location, giving me everything I want to know.”

Cage uses the tool to get summaries of the latest buying triggers at companies he has already selected as prospects for his services. And InsideView also gives him “something smart to say” when he calls on a prospect, something showing knowledge of the prospect’s situation, not just small talk or chat about Cage’s capabilities.

Cage also gets emails from InsideView alerting him to selected changes at the companies on his prospect list. He was in an elevator going to see one prospect recently when his Blackberry received an emailed press release about the prospect and Microsoft. This is the kind of relevant and breaking news any sales rep loves to have when walking in the door for a major sales opportunity.

Cage found using Insideview easy to learn, and he calls the service “very fairly priced for what it provides. It is the real deal, and very useful to me.”