Back when I was a youngster, say 51 years old, and just learning how to use Eloqua, my VP of Marketing asked me to some research. “How do we buy leads?”
I had no idea how to do this. We were a fairly large technology catalog company, with an active email program.
I say active, but it wasn’t very sophisticated at all. I say active because we emailed frequently.
It was exclusively batch-and-blast, and almost always the batch was to our entire list.
That suited our marketing VP, who was an old-time sales guy. To him, a “lead” was anyone and everyone who clicked on our site.
His rationale was that it was the job of the salespeople to call and follow up with them.
I should say that “clicked” wasn’t our only criterion. We also had to know who they were. They had to be in our database.
That is, these were the only people whose identities we knew, because we had likely emailed them in the first place, and we had them in our database.
As for follow-up calling, we had two groups of salespeople. There were “product” sales – because we had a large number of product groupings back then – and “account sales”.
Based on those criteria, I set up notifications and reports for each person in each of these groups (and a roll-up for the sales managers).
If someone clicking on our website was from a known account, we sent notifications to the account person (who it was and what they clicked on).
If it was someone whose email address we had, but they were not part of an existing account, they went to the product sales group.
“Lead scoring” was not a thing for us in those days. It was too hard in the older version of Eloqua, and as I say, our VP viewed every click as a lead.
So we would batch-and-blast, several times a week, based on requests from a product manager, and over a period of time, hundreds if not thousands of people would click on whatever link we put into the email.
So if we were running a promotion on cables, the cables sales team would get hundreds of un-differentiated names and phone numbers. Or network equipment. Switches. Every click became a lead.
I tried to differentiate some of these, often simply by sorting the names based on the number of relevant clicks.
The problem was, the largest volume of “clicks” came from internal people who had been working on the product page for the website, or who were putting the emails together, either copy or design.
But the constant complaint from the salespeople was, “there’s no way that I can call all of these people, and most of these leads are just junk anyway”.
What we needed at the time was a more sophisticated way of targeting and scoring our leads. But we lacked the vision and the technological know-how to put such a system together.
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That was then. Now, my company, ABMarketing Leads has found a way to address those challenges. We can give you the means to deliver the best, most highly-qualified leads to your sales teams.
You can simply buy them.
That includes leads both account-based teams and product- or service-based teams, whether you’re giving them to BDR teams or field salespeople, appointment setters or closers.
We don’t rely on fancy creative work. We don’t do brand-building. We don’t get involved with planning or strategy.
What we DO, is called “content syndication”, and we do it via the kind of high-touch, highly focused targeting and messaging methods that generate real results.
Imagine if the MQLs you turned over to sales contained the following information:
- Their current, confirmed phone number and email (which we get by talking with them)
- Documented permission for you to follow up with them, after receiving your content
- The timeframe for their purchase or initiative
- Details about their current vendor or solution
- Their LinkedIn profile and skills, so your sales team doesn't have to start cold
- A lead score, based on their estimated time to purchase
- and of course: name, title, company, email, and phone number
We provide all of this and more.
These are the highest quality leads, and the most highly-qualified, produced in-house (in our house, specifically for you), with confirmed, time-tested forms of outreach and better engagement.
If you want to gain access to the best quality leads you can find (and yes, you can buy them), then we’ve got a solution for you.