About 50 miles north of PointClear’s Atlanta home is the site of the first major US gold rush that began in 1828. Legend has it that it was on the steps of the county courthouse there in 1849 that Dahlonega Mint assayer, Dr. M.F. Stephenson, tried to dissuade miners from moving on to the California Gold Rush by saying, "Why go to California? In that ridge lies more gold than man ever dreamt of. There's millions in it." Another story tells of Mark Twain hearing this second-hand and coming up with the more famous version for his fictional character, Mulberry Sellers: “There’s gold in them thar hills.”

Legend aside, a parallel exists in the form of unrefined “gold” that resides in sales lead databases. As companies generate sales prospect names from marketing initiatives like webinars, tradeshows, landing pages, website downloads and social media, a symptom of success is that marketing databases grow by hundreds and thousands of names.

The downside is that there is no intelligence about whether the names meet lead qualifying criteria like company size, target industry, decision maker title, business pain, budget and purchasing timeframe. There are far too many leads in the database for marketing to effectively contact and qualify the names, and sales’ focus on driving revenue rightly rules out culling through lists of hand-raisers.

The solution: an efficient and cost-effective contact strategy that systematically moves through the database and separates “gold” from “rock” by converting marketing responses into qualified leads. This activity is grounded in a precise market segmentation methodology to assure that all marketing and sales efforts are directed toward the highest performing targets via the most productive marketing initiatives.

Properly executed, a lead development program of this nature acts quickly to identify the real sales opportunities, keep sales focused on generating revenue and increase ROI on marketing investments.

If you’d like more information on this lead qualification and lead development approach, I invite you to download a recent case study from our website that illustrates our Lead2Value offering. The case study describes how we partnered with a publicly traded Southeast-based software company to convert 22% of its 20,754 raw lead database into qualified leads. As a result of PointClear’s lead development services, more than $2.2 million in new business has closed, and the client has added more than $23.4 million to the pipeline.

In the spirit of earlier comments from our assayer friend, Dr. Stephenson, I might add, “In that sales lead database lies more gold than man ever dreamt of. There's millions in it."

By Dan McDade