Finding Sales Leads and Contacts goes Hi-Tech
Finding Sales Leads and Contacts goes Hi-Tech
Where sales people used to spend lots of time prospecting for
leads and cold calling, now they can simply log on to the
Internet and buy, sell or even trade leads and contacts at a new
website.
Run a quick search on Google and you will find over 400, 000
listings under the term "sales prospecting". Most of the
listings involve list brokers, marketing companies who supply
leads and lists or actual articles on how to effectively Finding
Sales Leads and Contacts goes Hi-Tech use your time to find and
generate new sales leads.
Traditional sales prospecting involves making cold calls. Either
by telephone or dropping in on the prospective client or
customer. These are time-tested means of acquiring contacts to
sell to. And they do work.
Many sales people would tell you though, that these methods
usually require a lot of time and effort. In fact, when I worked
as a professional sales person for a direct mail advertising
company, I was spending nearly 80% of my time cold calling and
qualifying leads. The majority of this time was spent trying to
determine who would actually be making the buying decision.
Although there are numerous low tech ways of dealing with this
issue such as using direct mailing and telemarketing, up until
now there has been few ways of networking with other sales
professionals to actually exchange leads and contacts. Some
networking events such as Chamber of Commerce meetings and
Professional Sales Organizations "meet and greets" do allow a
sales person to network with other sales persons to exchange
contacts information, however, the time invested in these sorts
of activities could be extensive for the results.
A new hi tech way for sales people to exchange, trade and even
buy and sell contact information has emerged on the Internet via
a website. This website is formatted as an online marketplace
for contacts. A sales professional can enter the contact
information they have for a certain company and then is credited
to their account with the right to then select 2 different
contacts for their one.
This membership website gives salespersons two different options
for getting contact information. They can enter whatever
contacts they have for trade, or for a minimum membership fee;
simply buy the contact information they desire. It is apparent
that the venture capital industry sees the benefit of such a
service as well.
Recently this website's principals secured two rounds of venture
capital to build and manage this site. The initial round
garnered $750,000 dollars to build the website itself. And then
in a second round of capitalization received over 5 Million
dollars to ensure the long-term operations of the site.
According to the website itself, there are already over 250,000
contacts at over 30,000 companies already available with over
2000 Vice Presidents of Marketing listed as well as over 60,000
IT Professionals.
Currently sales people who want to start using the system can do
so with a free 2-week trial. The two-week trial includes the
above-mentioned offer of 2 contacts for every contact entered.
All contacts include both telephone number and email address. To
find out more about this new hi tech service for getting
contacts and sales leads please visit,
http://recommended.bravehost.com/jigsaw.html