Episode 14 - Sales Leads

Transcript

Sales partners expect more from their providers these days but as we all know there many complexities to building a successful channel strategy. Providers that are winning the channel game have adopted agile and innovative solutions to control their message, push their sales strategy, and provide the right tools, all while responding to constant change in their business and in the marketplace.

The concept of providing partners with sales leads is not a new one, but automating the way you collect them, distribute them to partners and a process to ensure those leads are not wasted requires new thinking and automation.  In this microcast we are going to share some ideas about how to generate leads for very little money, the business rules you should consider before you decide to give those leads out, and the automation to deliver, manage and track the way leads move through the funnel using Convey’s partner portal technology.

Finding sales leads doesn’t have to be time-consuming and expensive.  

When it comes to finding leads, you have technology-driven options that improve the quantity and quality of leads that you can provide to partners.  Your channel organization can engage in content marketing, social media outreach or drip marketing campaigns to drive inbound demand.  But for this microcast, I want to focus on a strategy called data scraping to produce larger lead lists.  Although you can try data scraping yourself, it’s much easier and cheaper to use freelancers who have technology that scour the web to generate leads.  Freelancers use your criteria to create a custom lead list at a fraction of the cost and of much higher quality than any lead lists you might purchase.

So how do you gain access to these valuable resources?  Freelancers exist all over the world and the hourly rate for someone in India or in the Philippines as an example that can generate a lead list is embarrassingly low for the high-quality output they produce.  The best way to engage a high-quality freelancer is to use a service like UpWork or FIVRR, spelled F-I-V-R-R where freelancers are profiled on their portal.  You can put in your project requirements, find freelancers who have done projects like this before, and get reviews on their work from other customers.  You pay the platform provider and they pay the worker.  

Freelancers can create a customized lead list using a process called data scraping.  In simple terms, they use software to access multiple websites to find information on companies or individuals including names, titles, contact information, email addresses, company size, or locations.  That information is delivered to you in a spreadsheet so you can import it into the technology you will use to manage and distribute those leads.  You can even take this further and pay a freelancer to do some investigation or calling to qualify that lead.

To give you an idea of how effective freelancers and data scraping is as a strategy, Convey employed a freelancer in the Philippines at $3.50 an hour and for less than $600 they delivered a 6,000 person lead list of individuals inside companies in the Southeast that were candidates to use technology in their buildings to reduce energy cost.

Set business rules so partners understand your expectations and those leads are not wasted.

The worst thing you can do is give leads to someone without any expectation of getting something in return. My suggestion is to have partners opt in to receive leads from you versus just sending them out.  Leads are valuable and they should be reserved for partners that have achieved a certain status in your channel, that are willing to act on the leads, and that will allow you to follow up on their progress. Insight from the partner gives you what you need to assess the lead quality, how they marketed to the prosp