Editor’s note: Today’s post is from Erika Goldwater, a veteran in demand generation strategy for early stage companies. Leadspace has been getting buzz lately, I wanted a “how-to” on them and Erika delivered. Enjoy.
Imagine how great it would be to build a profile of your ideal customer, and then find plenty of prospects that match that profile, all in just four easy steps? And what if your sales and marketing teams could easily “vote” on those leads, ensuring only the best of the best make it into your virtual lead database?
That’s exactly what you can do with Leadspace, the leading B2B social demand gen solution. Leadspace uses semantic search technologies, so you can tap into social, internal and external data in real time to discover, enrich and enhance prospect data. What’s more, Leadspace incorporates subjective input as well, using a Pandora-like interface that allows your team to score and prioritize each lead.
The result: You maximize marketing effectiveness and sales conversion, by generating hyper-targeted, accurate, highly relevant lists.
This entire process takes a few minutes. For example, let’s put a quick hypothetical campaign together right now.
Our Campaign Objective: Invite 50 marketing buyers in the Boston area to an exclusive event with key thought-leaders. We’re targeting midsize to large enterprise organizations (based on revenue) in the biotechnology industry. This is an invitation-only event, and space is very limited – so there is no room for error in inviting the wrong person, it could cost a sales opportunity. The list needs to be impeccably targeted to support a comprehensive campaign including multi-touch email, direct mail and tele-prospecting.
Here we go:
Step 1 – Define our Ideal Buyer Profile
We can leverage Leadspace to automatically generate an Ideal Buyer Profile by incorporating explicit user input as well as analyzing existing customers and pulling relevant profiles or companies into the Leadspace virtual database using key titles, industries, verticals, products and technologies information–while simultaneously searching the social web for both structured and unstructured data.
Step 2 – Refine our Ideal Buyer Profile
We can add additional criteria or select more information to build a more detailed profile, one that will tighten the focus of our search. Our Profile can go far beyond title and basic keywords. Every job function, product and technology associated with the lead receives a ranking which can be easily tweaked on the fly to perfectly reflect our preferences. Leadspace will use our live “Pandora-like” feedback on prospects to suggest additional criteria to improve relevance, helping to build an optimal profile.
Leadspace provides a wealth of accurate data on every lead to aid our prospecting efforts. Notice the simple, Pandora-esque thumbs-up, thumbs-down rating capability.
Step 3 – Build our list
Now it’s time to set the parameters of the lead list. We can have Leadspace search for leads in our own list of companies, companies we already do business with, and/or find some new ones using unique “social” indicators such as which technology the company is using. We would then select the Ideal Buyer Profile for this list and add other qualifiers we’d like, such as company revenue, number of employees, and location. We can also suppress the list against our CRM or against a list of existing leads; a very important feature when it comes to the overall efficacy of our list.
Searching for new companies to target? Leadspace makes it easy through both firmographic and “social” indicators.
Done. Targeted list generated.
4 – Review our list and add it to our Marketing Automation or CRM system
And that’s it. Four easy steps, just a few minutes of time, and an instant real-time search of the entire web that generates targeted, accurate and segmented information on prospects that closely match our Ideal Buyer Profile.
If you want to learn more, check out Leadspace.
E
rika Goldwater is a 15 + year marketing veteran specializing in demand generation strategy for early stage companies. She focuses on maximizing marketing ROI and driving revenue for companies like Leadspace, ANNUITAS and Eloqua.