According to analyst firm, Outsell, the average sales person is now spending over 11 hours per week tediously researching the Internet and other online sources for information that can help them identify prospects to call.  By the time many prospects are qualified, they have already entered the sales cycle, leaving little room for vendors to influence the process.  Technology-enabled lead generation solutions are changing all that with a fast, innovative way to have highly qualified leads delivered to the sales reps desktop or CRM system.

 It could be argued that sales people are only as good as the leads they’re chasing.  As a result, smart sales executives are as interested in the quality of what’s in the sales pipeline as they are in the deals that their sales teams are closing. 

Traditionally, the most common approach to keeping the pipeline full has been to execute marketing campaigns against lists of companies that fit certain firmographic profiles. 

Although these lists provide basic information about a focused list of suspects, they can not be considered highly qualified, true leads. At best, they are targeted cold leads.

The competition has the exact same lists of companies and contacts, and none of the lists indicate which companies are actually in a position to make a purchase. The real question for a sales rep remains—which of these companies in my territory are in buy mode? According to analyst firm CSO Insights, buy cycles begin at the point when a buying entity (person or organization) first identifies a business pain that’s become too pervasive to ignore.  By contrast, a sales cycle starts when a selling organization becomes aware of a prospect’s interest or need. 

Engaging with a prospect early in the buy cycle and before the sales cycle begins puts a sales rep in the best position to establish value with the prospect, influence their buying criteria and command a higher selling price.  This is much more difficult to do after the sales cycle has begun, and almost impossible to do after the prospect has started the vendor evaluation process.  Knowing when a buy cycle commences is a strategic advantage that provides a sales rep with a first-mover advantage and the opportunity to significantly influence the buy.   

Without a telemarketing organization, identifying when a buy cycle has started can be difficult intelligence for a sales rep or marketing organization to gather.  However, certain business or trigger events have been shown to be good indicators of the start of a buy cycle.  For example, a company building a new facility is immediately in the market for a whole host of products and services, from general contactors to IT consulting services to security systems, to office supplies and staffing.  

Other examples of high-propensity-to-buy trigger events include management changes, funding and financing events, mergers & acquisitions, new customer or partner announcements, etc.  In most cases, these events and related company information are abundantly available either via the Internet or through online business information sources. The challenge is sifting through the “abundance” of information to find the highly targeted, true leads unique to a sales rep’s territory, industry focus and preferred prospect profile.  

According to analyst firm, Outsell, the average sales person is now spending over 11 hours per week tediously researching the Internet and other online sources for information that can help them identify prospects to call. And, according to Outsell, that number has doubled over the last three years, in spite of a shift from using the Internet for prospecting to using company-provided intranets. Reps need to focus on selling, not on finding leads. They need to close deals and keep their pipeline full.  However, they often struggle with where to focus their time and efforts—on research, lead generation or selling? In recent years, email alerts delivered by the world’s leading search engines and online databases have become a popular method for salespeople to use to save time gathering information in support of their lead generation efforts. 

Ask any salesperson what is the first thing they do when they start their work day and most will tell you, “check email.”  Those leveraging email alerts will also likely tell you that their email inbox is flooded with these alerts. As a result, the reps often don’t have the time to read all the alerts and so they just delete them. Setting up an alert on a public company generates what engineers call a low signal-to-noise ratio—too many duplicate stories, too many irrelevant stories and too much noise.

Valuable nuggets of information, those high-propensity-to-buy business events, are being thrown away, but it is too difficult and time consuming for a rep to weed through all the alerts to find the nuggets. Technology-enabled lead generation was developed to address these and other sales opportunity identification challenges.  This unique approach focuses on finding companies about to enter a buying cycle through crawling, categorizing, mining, structuring and filtering thousands of sources of business information and the Internet in real time, around the clock.  

The technology extracts high-propensity-to-buy events and links them to individual company records in an online database. The result is a real-time database of millions of actionable sales triggers that are filtered by a salesperson’s territory or account profile and delivered directly to the rep’s CRM system or email account only when the rep’s lead profile criteria are met. Reps receive only those valuable nuggets or true leads that indicate a likely prospect buy cycle.  

Acting on these true leads provides the sales rep with a first-mover advantage. Getting to an opportunity first gives the rep more time to develop a personal relationship with the prospect—before the competition gets involved. The rep also has the chance to influence the prospect’s purchase criteria in ways that favor the salesperson’s own product offerings.  Many times these early conversations can progress rapidly to a meeting of the minds and a closed deal, completely eliminating the traditional multi-participant RFP cycle. Even if an RFP process can't be avoided, the rep with a first-mover advantage gains influence over the process.  

When leveraing technology-enabled lead generation, a company’s sales pipeline is fed a steady stream of true leads, highly qualified leads with a high-propensity-to-buy. No longer do reps waste time making cold calls and spend too much time doing research. Instead, they are able to focus their sales efforts on prospects in buy mode. Their close rates increase, their sales cycles shorten, and their average selling price increases, all of which has a direct, positive impact on company profitability. As the old adage states, “it’s quality, not quantity,” and when it comes to sales leads, that assertion couldn’t be truer.

By Joe Petro, VP of Development and Operations, TrueAdvantage, Inc.