Account-based lead sourcing — treat every lead like treasure

We all can agree that lead sourcing is not a walk in the park for sales and marketing teams. Relevant and targeted leads are sourced with the deep understanding of buyer persona and potential client’s needs. In addition to that, sales guys and marketers pay close attention to the lead enrichment — the information that brings additional value to lead, and make it easier to interact with it and close the deal. All these details made lead sourcing evolve from an ordinary contact extraction to account-based lead sourcing.

What is the difference between these two? Well, contact (lead) extraction is the very basic process used by specialists probably since the very first business catalog or directory appeared. All it took was extracting contact information of approximately relevant companies, to cold-call them and offer products or services. Later lead extraction became even more popular, because such sources as YellowPages, Craigslist, and thousand of other platforms allowed to crawl and extract emails easily. The main problem of lead extraction is that it leads to mass email campaigns, low-quality processes and actual spam.

Account-based lead sourcing is the evolved version of contact extraction. Proper account-based lead sourcing needs lead enrichment, thus making a lead 3x stronger and more effective — more targeted, more personalized, more relevant.

Account-based lead is more than just a contact, it’s closer to a full profile that provides sales or marketing specialist with all the necessary information for creating a relevant campaign or closing the deal. Account-based leads can be enriched (and should be) with the following data:

• Name and Surname — for personalization needs
• Phone number — as an additional contact method
• Address — for geo-targeting
• Position — for targeting certain decision-makers only
• Company — to understand the type of the business lead
• Company size — to understand the level of a company and lead expertise
• Social profile — to learn more about the lead

This is not a full list of parameters, but some basic ones that are most common for modern sales processes. Every sales/marketing specialist determines the parameters needed for a successful account-based lead sourcing, and also create his campaigns and funnels based on them.

Account-based lead sourcing is way more effective than just basic contact extraction. To understand why and how, let me describe 3 main results-drivers of an account-based lead sourcing:

1. You need less leads to get better results. As you have many additional information for every lead, you can create highly-targeted campaigns, build better sales funnels and close decent amount of deals even from the small list of enriched leads.
2. You can personalize, deep-target and more. All the data you have allows you to create highly-personalized campaigns, and split-&-adjust them by various parameters, such as geo data, positions, age, and more.
3. It’s less spammy. That’s an important aspect for every marketer and sales specialist. No one wants to ruin his sender reputation and end up in a spam folder. Account-based leads allow to create targeted, personalized and person-oriented campaigns that look very natural.

Account-based lead sourcing doesn’t mean you should do it manually. There are few outstanding tools, and Snov.io is definitely one of them! It is a lead sourcing service, that allows users to automate account-based lead sourcing and collect, verify and enrich leads on the go.

High quality of leads that are available in Snov.io is determined not only by various lead sources (such as websites, social networks and built-in database), but also by a growing community. Snov.io launches an ICO in the beginning of October this year, thus creating a first decentralized lead generation platform. Contributors will mine new leads, enrich existing leads and keep the database always-updated.

Snov.io’s token sale is the big step to a smart- and crowd- lead generation of a new age. According to Snovio’s plans to implement tools for cold campaigns, it has all chances to become the ultimate service for sales, marketing and HR professionals.