The Most Insatiable Need in All of Business

(image from wix.com)

Leads — the engine for all growth and the most insatiable need in all of business. Whether you are a VC firm seeking greater deal flow or a B2B marketer trying to get more customers, it all starts with the quality and quantity of your leads. We are now in a golden age of sales and marketing where the ability to find your audience has never been easier. This is due to a confluence of factors— the rise of social media, the availability of data, the evolution of machine learning algorithms, and the sophistication of cloud-based software.

These factors have given rise to a new field called Predictive Analytics or the ability to better “predict” who is most likely to buy from you. We are proud to be part of this trend with our new product, LeadCrunch, which was just featured on Product Hunt (you can check it out here). Whether you use an external solution like ours or bake a solution in-house, the possibilities are incredibly exciting. Like many things, the big winners will be the early adopters who, as you probably know, are a relatively small percent of the masses. They will leverage this technology arbitrage before their competitors and accelerate their growth. By the time the laggards catch up, predictive analytics will be mere table stakes for the next big tech play.

As someone who has had a long career in sales, I will admit that our ilk is resistant to change and protective of our data. Because of this, only about 50% of us even use our CRMs consistently, so this will be the biggest challenge to getting our data to work for us. However, fighting this natural resistance has huge upside since we are seeing 30%-2400% increase in sales by incorporating predictive analytics into lead generation. So to maximize growth, we must all be thinking about how to mine our current data to find the patterns that will tell us where to find our next crop of customers.