Every portfolio company I work with is struggling with gaps in their lead management process, whether it be within the lead generation process or the following systems of managing these leads. These gaps could be either a quantity, quality, or targeting problem, and the key of how to generate high-quality leads is ensuring that all these bases are covered.
A lead generation process deficiency creates several challenges. Without visibility and access to prospects, companies are unable to grow at the top of the marketing funnel. Without a measure of lead quality, salespeople are inefficient and spend time on low-potential leads. Without a means of consistent quality lead generation, salespeople can’t convert buyers into customers and generate revenue growth.
Sales teams need high-quality, targeted leads at a consistent rate; however, this can be nearly impossible to provide in a short timeframe. With the right expertise and technology tools, our Interim C-Leaders are helping companies achieve this goal and generate exceptional outcomes.
Expertise in lead generation and building high-performance sales and marketing teams is required. Our interim C-Leaders use a variety of techniques and tools to drive rapid enhancements across various client-facing business units. However, with the ever-expanding SaaS marketplace, there seems to be a tool for everything. This makes it difficult for an inexperienced leader to filter out the noise and hone in on the right solutions. Cortado can help to reduce the pool of potential contenders in your tech stack to ensure that you choose the right tools for your lead generation process and everything that follows it.
Lead Generation is a Persistent Challenge
Suffice it to say, your portco is not the only one wondering how to generate high-quality leads.
Conquering the Lead Generation Process Challenge
Normally, fixing a lead generation process problem can be a lengthy process in itself, but portfolio companies can’t wait. They must meet the accelerated business goals of their private equity owners. This requires creating highly accelerated business processes.
One way to work rapidly is to deploy the smartest tools on the market. By using the right tools, our Interim C-Leaders can solve problems in weeks that would normally take months to fix.
We use tools that help our Interim C-Leaders build profitable growth quickly. We have a rigorous selection process before we adopt new tools. New tools must meet these criteria:
- Align with our solution strategy
- Make our revenue-growth experts more effective
- Be easy for us and our clients to use
- Provide innovative insights that we could not access before
- Deliver real benefits to our customers in the short and long term
Specifically, in terms of the lead generation process, the right tool(s) will allow executives to accomplish the following:
- Define what a good customer looks like (also known as the ideal customer profile)
- Develop buyer-focused Sales and Marketing (S&M) strategy to target various buyer personas
- Generate top of funnel volume through improved visibility into the prospect universe
- Improve lead quality through data enrichment
- Monitor buying signs and trigger events that result in high-propensity to buy
As you’d expect, finding a single Swiss Army Knife tool to accomplish all of this is unlikely. Most portcos use more technology tools than they need at a substantial cost, creating a gap between the current iteration of a portco and its most profitable potential.
Through our research and testing, Cortado has found the proverbial needle in the haystack. Our interim C-leaders have put this tool through all of the tests in our client work and have regularly exceeded expected outcomes. The tool is LeadGraph, and it is reshaping our clients expectations for developing a healthy and reliable lead generation process.
LeadGraph Passed Our Selection Process
LeadGraph is a digital platform that uses familiar and advanced enterprise-grade filters to aggregate business data. Its primary goal is to “find leads that look like company’s closed-won customers by using superpowered filters you won’t find anywhere else.” LeadGraph is built on a knowledge graph that captures public domain data for over 250 million companies and over 900 million contacts.
Its primary function is to fill a company’s sales funnel with a robust number of qualified leads. Essentially, it aims to be an all-in-one solution for the lead management and generation process. LeadGraph achieves this goal better than its competitors because it has access to:
- 4x more companies than LinkedIn and 2.5x more than ZoomInfo
- Emails and phone numbers sourced and ranked across 4 providers
LeadGraph also delivers advanced functionality that gives companies more ways to find their Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) and break through to buyers, including:
- Search for ICPs by any keyword, technographic data, funding information, or other criteria
- Narrow down 250M global companies to the perfect ICP using familiar and advanced enterprise-grade filters
- Prioritize closed-won lookalikes through customer-similarity scoring metrics
- Access deep insight on every lead including revenue, headcount, office locations, and funding rounds
- Isolate employees within a prospect customer via job title, department, or job function
Right Tools + Right Expertise
Cortado’s Interim C-leaders know the importance of making a rapid impact. One of our favorite LeadGraph capabilities is the ‘quick leads’ function that instantly generates prospect leads based on the customer ICP. With this vast database, LeadGraph can provide underperforming sales and marketing teams with a greatly increased volume of high-quality leads and guaranteed improvement. This immediately allows you to test the quality of your newly reformed lead generation and management process.
Some of our lead generation process reform outcomes have included:
- 10-fold increase per week in the first 30 days
- Up to 70% increase in conversion rates
- 200% improvement in conversion to deals
As mentioned earlier, the right tool(s) must meet our six general criteria, and specifically for lead generation, must meet an additional six requirements. Here is how LeadGraph performs to those criteria.
- Identify ICP: When a company has not yet clearly identified its ICP, LeadGraph can provide data to build a foundational ICP.
- Data Enrichment: When companies don’t have their own data enrichment tools or consistent data capture, we can use LeadGraph to enrich all accounts to ensure the information is complete and updated.
- Evaluate the Competitive Landscape: Learn who your competitors are, how big they are, their branding and messaging, trigger events, and market news about them.
- Single-Screen View: LeadGraph provides one screen showing all insight on a lead, including new hires, key events, competitors, and more.
- Data Visualization: Provides graphical views of information that help users digest, understand, and act on the data faster and more effectively.
- Trigger Event Newsfeed: Key events in the industry that may indicate buying signs for prospects; all on one convenient page.
Maximize The Efficacy of Your Teams
Our Interim C-Leaders can get results fast because we are experienced users of advanced tools like LeadGraph. Plus, we have decades of practical experience turning underperforming teams into sales and marketing juggernauts. Whether the gap in your lead generation process is due to experience or software, Cortado can help you find the right solution.
To learn more about how our experts can help your organization generate the robust and actionable leads you need to grow revenue, contact us for a consultation.
To better understand your organization’s lead generation capabilities and identify potential technology gaps, download our lead generation technology checklist.
