2009 Source Book: Lead Winners

Leads – the lifeblood of sales, the essential ingredient for growth, the single biggest factor in forward projections. No sales manager can look into a future without leads. Lead suppliers continue to expand their offerings and perfect their gathering techniques.

 

As lead companies expand and deepen the data they bring to the market, they also make inroads in developing better tools to find and qualify leads. Many of the technology improvements involve exploiting the vast and constantly increasing resources of Web 2.0.   

 

The infoGroup’s SalesGenie unit continues to enhance its database and services so that small firms and individual reps can keep pace with hunters at major corporations. This genie has 700 staffers who make 25 million calls each year to make sure data is as fresh and accurate as possible. The data now covers 14 million US firms, including 5 million small firms and a quarter-million large businesses, and has contact information on 13 million execs and professionals. In addition to broad coverage, SalesGenie gives reps a built-in contact manager, a mapping feature to help plan efficient calls, and a customer analyzer to build lists of the best prospects.

 

Other infoGroup companies are also expanding capabilities. For example, Yesmail has enhanced its permission-based, online email solutions with a new tool, the Yesmail Prospector. Prospector taps infoGroup’s massive data resources to gather quality prospects and allows marketers to target prospects with the same technology used for retention email campaigns. Techniques commonly used in such retention marketing as dynamic or conditional content, microsegmenting, and multimessage streams and triggered messaging can now be applied to finding new customers. Prospector also lets marketers select audiences from prequalified lists and conduct highly customized campaigns.

 

InfoGroup’s OneSource division, which specializes in deep intelligence for complex sales, is making it even easier to find critical decision makers. OneSource now seamlessly integrates with LinkedIn’s network of business executives. Users simply point and click for access to their own LinkedIn networks, adding these to OneSource’s own extensive contact lists.

 

Overall, LinkedIn networks now include more than 20 million professionals in more than 150 countries. OneSource users can see all their connections at a prospect company within three degrees of separation. Each user’s contacts are completely secure, available only in his or her personal view.

 

Dow Jones’s Factiva adds dozens of important sources of business news and intelligence each month. Factiva already taps more than 14,000 sources in nearly 160 countries, including more than 400 continuously updated newswires. Factiva data collectors are so prolific, they collect information from 2,300 sources, including such newswires as Reuters, Associated Press, Asia Pulse, and Agence France Presse; such essential newspapers as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Financial Times, and South China Morning Post; and transcripts from network television and radio, including the BBC and CNN.

 

 Dow Jones has also launched the next generation of its business and relationship intelligence – Dow Jones g2 – to help reps exploit B2B social networking. The g2 tool lets reps identify, qualify, and connect to prospects and execs through technology that crawls the Web and maintains data in real time. It offers 9 million executives for relationship mapping and lets users import contacts from such applications as Outlook and LinkedIn.

 

When users download LinkedIn contacts, information is integrated within g2’s relationship mapping. Users can customize this application, ensuring that decision makers are found and hidden relationships are identified, and the user can connect with executives using his or her best relationship path. In another enhancement, Dow Jones recently acquired Generate’s extraction technology and relationship mapping to deepen insights on the connections among companies and executives.

 

Genius.com, which provides on-demand solutions for B2B salespeople and marketers, recently launched MarketingGenius, an email marketing tool that is expected to boost sales by up to 10 percent. The new tool gives marketers complete control of content, timing, and distribution of email campaigns while affording front-line reps instantaneous access to campaign results. The basic goal is to bridge the disconnection that often occurs between sales and marketing. With MarketingGenius, reps and marketers should be able to quickly identify the best leads, deliver personalized and rapid follow-up to qualified prospects, and convert prospects to closed deals.

 

D&B’s Hoover’s division offers subscribers more than 34 million contacts at 26 million companies around the world, and more are constantly added. Hoover’s Website for exploring these riches continues to be enhanced for ease and functionality. Customers can now find many more middle- and lower-level contacts at far-flung branches of major corporations – extremely useful for introductions or understanding prospect requirements. They can also filter contacts by exact job function to understand positions in the company and areas of expertise. Finally, Hoover’s has introduced a self-listing tool that lets subscribers add their profiles to their own companies.

 

InsideView has acquired True Advantage and is expanding the capabilities of its SalesView product. SalesView is an on-demand application for identifying and gathering intelligence on prospects from subscription and user-generated sources.

 

SalesView has become a “socialprise” tool that discovers and organizes information by harvesting the Web using specialized research providers and tapping social networks. It works within a CRM environment, combining its data with a company’s own CRM data. SalesView makes the collaboration between sales and marketing natural, easy, and repeatable by automating the prospecting process and compressing the sales cycle.

 

The first step is list building. SalesView aggregates all executive profiles from multiple data sources and identifies relationships that are critical to sales at all levels of a company. Then SalesView helps standardize identification of true prospects by connecting the dots through automatic discovery and mapping of relationships. Setting these functions up takes just minutes, and reps do not have to disclose their own contacts.

 

For current accounts, SalesView accurately finds and alerts reps on key events that affect account management. The tool screens events carefully for important information, cutting the clutter, and SalesView lets reps do all this without leaving their CRM desktops – a significant time-saver.

 

ZoomInfo’s PowerSell delivers the latest intelligence on managers at all levels of companies of any size, from small businesses to Fortune 500 global giants. ZoomInfo searches the Web all day, every day of the year, to keep this intelligence fresh.

 

PowerSell allows reps to search for prospects using a company’s name, location, rank, and size. Once this list is created, it can be refined by researching any one of  ZoomInfo’s 3.5 million company profiles. Reps can then find decision makers quickly by using PowerSell to search by name, title, or company. PowerSell goes deeply into all its companies to provide profiles and contact information. Contacts, research, and other search results can then be exported directly into your CRM application.

 

For companies that need more than data and the latest tools for going after leads, Good Leads offers a full suite of capabilities and services for boosting sales. The company can identify, contact, and qualify prospects; negotiate and close business; and attract prospects to your seminars, Webinars, and events, all with its own highly experienced and well-trained staff. Good Leads can also develop prospect lists and provide extensive consulting on branding, lead generation, sales models, and public relations. Essentially, you can either outsource any critical sales task to Good Leads or get expert help on how to most effectively get the job done in-house.