When mining for gold, you can "pan," or sift through a shallow layer in a stream bed, taking the chance that you'll find a small nugget or two. But if you know where the rich vein is, you can focus your drill and achieve the best payload for the least effort and cost.

When you have a sales organization composed of high value sales professionals, you want those sales reps laser focused on closing deals, not casting around for the odd nugget of opportunity. But challenges with email marketing and the high cost of advertising may mean your market has a lack of awareness about your company that hampers your ability to generate high quality leads.

A leading Canadian IT solutions provider faced this situation in western Canada. They wanted to ensure their sales representatives were focused on closing business, not qualifying leads. They had an existing database that they felt identified their best targets, but knew the database was out of date. While they had some internal resources that could potentially perform the work, they didn’t want to divert them from core competencies; nor did they want to incur time and expense to train staff members to perform these calls.

At the same time, Dell EMC indicated they would provide funds to Compugen to support marketing activities and generate leads for Dell EMC opportunities.

Based on SMA’s considerable expertise and experience in lead qualification and database building in the Canadian marketplace, our client decided to use Dell EMC’s funding to have SMA create an accurate target database for lead nurturing, as well as generate some short-term high-quality leads for the sales organization. SMA worked with a list of approximately 60 targets from our client, building a quality database of key contact information. We would also complete extensive profiles on up to 15 of the companies, identifying key decision makers, current challenges, and purchasing plans for solutions such as those supplied by Dell EMC.

Bob Becker, Principal of SMA says:

“Performing this type of database building activity gives you the ability to generate highly-accurate contact information in a short period of time. It means that any direct marketing campaigns you execute will be reaching the people who are interested in what you have to offer.

“When completing the comprehensive account profiles, we ask probing questions to determine the types of IT issues these companies are having, what their environment is like, who the decision makers are, and what their purchase plans are. We worked with our client to develop the calling script to ensure we could extract the most relevant information on these accounts, providing a gold mine of information that would be valuable to the sales organization, and help them in further qualifying the opportunities, or even closing sales.

“Our team members all have years of experience in the technology sector, and the experience to call in at senior levels in the organization. This ensures that the profile we provide to the customer is accurate and insightful, giving them the type of information that’s useful to sales professionals.

“Based on our substantial experience in this area in Canada, we predict that of the account profiles we pre-qualify, approximately 15% will be a top quality lead, and of those, about half will go to the proposal stage. In the case of the program we did for our client, 50% of the profiles required follow up, which was higher than normal.”

According to our client’s key marketing contact, “What’s most valuable about this service for us is that it concentrates our budget on generating solid leads, without diluting the focus of our sales reps, or waiting for marketing campaigns to generate results. The resulting leads we obtained from SMA were high-quality, actionable leads with buying intentions clearly established. They had an extremely positive impact on our sales funnel.”

Bob Becker adds, “This service isn’t for everyone. But if you’re looking for high-quality, actionable leads for system sales – with short-term buying intentions – our lead generation can help you uncover the golden opportunities. In most cases, it takes less than one sale to establish a return on investment.”