Leveraging Lead Data Services to Support Outbound Prospecting

A lead generation system can be the key to business growth strategies, but how do you build it most effectively?

Software companies at the expansion stage have to surmount a number of operational challenges — ranging from management teams development, product development strategy, to customer experience management and retention. If you have followed our blog posts, you would know that we have a laser focus on sales and marketing optimization. A key piece of this is the development of a winning lead generation program that help fuel the growth of a company, especially when it starts to break out of its “niche” of early adopters and devoted customers to take on established incumbents or develop new markets.
While most technology marketers grasp very well the use of both traditional and cutting edge media — and many are very well versed in seamlessly combining outbound marketing methods with inbound marketing methods such as social media marketing, search engine optimization and content marketing to create a potent marketing mix — their efforts are often undermined by the fact that these marketing efforts do not always correlate directly with the growth of “qualified” leads coming to the sales team.

This is where proactive outbound prospecting comes into the interplay between pure marketing and sales. In our viewpoint, outbound prospecting speeds up the qualification cycles, scales up the sales funnel and generates market waves at the same time.

In our experience of scaling outbound prospecting team with our portfolio companies, we often find that the most successful companies have a very solid back-end system that allows them to append key information fields on to any lead being generated by marketing or through list acquisition. With reliable, comprehensive lead data, outbound prospecting becomes much more predictable and scalable.

Building such a supporting process requires resources commitment and cooperation between marketing and sales. In the short term though, growing software companies can rely on a variety of lead data services to support their outbound prospecting programs, while they internalize the best practices and develop the people and system required to support it. We also find that the more targeted lead data services are often a better match for such purposes, as opposed to traditional lead providers such as Hoovers or Harte-Hanks.

The reason for this is that while Hoovers and Harte-Hanks provide a large pool of leads to source from, these leads are more generic and often require another round of verification and re-segmentation to turn them into truly qualified leads for outbound prospects. In contrast, a new breed of list building providers such as NetProspex, SmarteInc, Lead411 or ReachForce specialize in building these lists from the ground up and tailor the data fields and verification process according to the needs of the outbound prospecting program.

Here are some links to these programs:

SmarteInc: http://www.smarteinc.com/
NetProspex: http://www.netprospex.com/
Lead411: http://www.lead411.com/
ReachForce: http://www.reachforce.com/