Lead Gen and Sales Tools — Not Only Luck

I received two sales approach related questions from a reader of this blog today. Tonight’s post answers those questions.

First Question

* What is your best lead gen source? Do you run any paid media, or is it all through inbound marketing?

There is no single strongest source of lead gen for our business. This makes paid media especially challenging. We have used paid media in the past with mixed results. We find it best to spend little amounts of money in a lot of places to get coverage, such as Adwords, Adroll, partner campaigns, tradeshows, whitepaper campaigns,Vertical Response*, and well-positioned banner ads. Inbound marketing is especially helpful for our market, and we spend a lot of energy developing thought leadership, publicizing case studies, and joining online conversations about GPU computing when possible.

Second Question

* Does your team use a sales intelligence tool like InsideView, ZoomInfo, etc.?

We have not used paid sales intelligence tools. We do use Rapportive (free) and Cirrus Insight (paid) for Gmail/Salesforce integration. We are also reasonably aggressive in collecting user’s data before allowing them to download our software.

Bonus Unasked Question

* Does your team use marketing automation?

Given today’s big follow-on news of the Salesforce acquisition of ExactTarget (and Pardot), marketing automation is again on my mind today. When we first implemented marketing automation 2 years ago, we were not in a position to purchase Pardot or other solutions aimed at mid-sized companies. However, we were able to implement our own marketing automation using BizConnector (a low-end solution run by one guy in the UK) along with dedicating one of our developers to integrating the Salesforce API into our website. BizConnector has worked well for us and we have not felt the need to change since we put it in place.

What are your answers to the questions posed above? What suggestions do you have to help us improve our approach?

* Note that Mailchimp was slow with the Salesforce integration a few years ago or else we would be on Mailchimp; at some point soon we’ll invest in switching over to Mailchimp, because their product is awesome and because we’re grateful for their sponsorship of Atlanta startup ecosystem.

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