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May - 2010 - issue > Top 10 Most Promising Tech Companies
LeadForce1 The Next Google of the B2B sector?
Vimali Swamy
Monday, May 10, 2010
A large B2B enterprise in the IT sector had great success in driving enterprise visitors to its website through multiple marketing campaigns. However, out of 15,515 visits from US companies, there were just 19 form fills which translates to a meager 0.1 percent. Thus, it was unable to effectively translate the opportunities provided by the website visitor traffic, into sales.

The net result, it lost out in identifying and converting a lot of prospects who visited its website. Also the company had no visitor tracking mechanism and was unable to assess and analyze visitor behavior on its site. This lack of information and insight into the browsing behavior of the visitor, limited the sales team in developing a targeted pitch when approaching these visitors who registered. The company also failed to decipher the stage of decision making the visitor was in. Such information would have enabled them to develop a more customized lead nurturing plan, resulting in shorter sales cycles.

But things changed once the company approached LeadForce1. Founded in 2008, the Santa Clara headquartered company is a provider of next generation marketing automation solutions.

After deploying LeadForce1, the company got 4,298 leads out of the 15,515 visits, thus taking the conversion from 0.1 percent to 28 percent, a whopping 22,621 percent ROI! According to the customer’s VP of Marketing, once LeadForce1 was deployed, they started phasing out forms from their corporate website and felt that forms were a thing of the past with LeadForce1 in the picture. LeadForce1 also gave rich and real-time pipeline intelligence and made marketing automation intelligent.

LeadForce1 transformed the way the company’s sales and marketing team approached and responded to lead generation, lead management, and sales follow-through. Using LeadForce1's exhaustive analytics reporting, the marketing team was able to deliver key leads to their sales teams across geographies.

A recent survey by IDC states that 50 percent of sales did not meet its quota last year and the primary reason for this was that the sales team did not know their customers well enough. "Online marketing is rapidly displacing traditional forms of marketing such as direct mail, display advertising in print and electronic media such as radio and TV. Despite a myriad of marketing activities, prospective customers visit the corporate websites as their first step. But most companies are not equipped enough to filter prospective clients from casual visitors and report on them in real time. It is to revolutionize the way B2B sales opportunities are discovered and nurtured that we started leadForce1," says Srihari Kumar, CEO, LeadForce1.

With its next generation SaaS-based marketing automation solution for online marketers, the company delivers a game-changing real-time marketing automation solution for enterprises that converts enterprise visits to the corporate websites into qualified sales leads, determines website visitor interest and intent, and enables sales teams to reach decision-makers more effectively and close deals faster using patented business intelligence and data mining technology. "We provide significantly richer lead data than most solutions in the market today, enabling enterprise sales and marketing teams to uncover hidden opportunities, accurately identify decision-makers, and deliver powerful, targeted, real-time responses and offers to potential customer. In simple terms, we help convert corporate websites from online brochures into lead generation machines," says Shreesha Ramdas, COO, LeadForce1.

In most cases, websites have a landing page where in the visitors are asked to fill up a registration form stating their interest in the company. But in most cases, online visitors suffer from form fatigue, resulting in them failing to fill out the registration forms, hence causing the marketing team to lose out on valuable leads. What LeadForce1 does is analyze the visitors in multiple ways. It delivers daily email alerts containing detailed information on website visits to the marketing, sales and executive teams. It also analyses and sends valuable information such as name of the company, possible reason for visit, the intent or interest of the visitor in a particular topic or product, the pattern or regularity of prospect visits, the identification of the person in the prospect company with the purchasing power, and other buying indicators.

With the help of all the collective information the internal sales team is able to easily identify and qualify web leads with the help of daily website reports; the direct sales team is able to generate specific offers and packages to meet prospect requirements; and the marketing team is able to focus their marketing campaigns on specific industry sectors that show the greatest interest in the company’s product and technology.

Within a span of two years, the company has made long strides in the industry and won over a large number of customers. "LeadForce1 gives us actionable data for building our sales pipeline that other services lack. Combined with its ease of use, the actionability makes it the most effective lead generation solution we've used for our website." says a happy customer, Bert Armijo, VP Sales at 3Tera, a division of the $12 Billion IT giant, CA Inc. (NASDAQ:CA)

Kumar attributes the success of the company to two factors — striking a balance between innovation and operational excellence and the fact that they chose to enter the market at a prime time when the need for marketing automation was being felt by the industry.
Despite a good run over the last year, there is an immense challenge that lies ahead of the company. "Though the market is transitioning, there are many corporates who are yet to open up to next generation solution like ours. Educating the industry about new developments is going to be the primary task for us in next few years," explains Kumar Malavalli, the company’s Chief Strategy Officer. Then there is also the advent of competition from other players like the CRM solution providers, web analytics companies, and marketing automation players who are looking at expanding to this new market. But Malavalli is confident that the company has the IP advantage and the first mover advantage to keep it ahead in the league.
Since its founding, LeadForce1 has been rapidly riding the growth trajectory and becoming a critical contributor to the industry in terms intellectual property. With the B2B lead generation market estimated to be a $75 billion market, the future looks extremely promising for LeadForce1. "With the market as big as this, there is another opportunity to create a GOOGLE in the B2B segment," says Kumar. If he plays his cards well, LeadForce1 may just become the one!

http://www.leadforce1.com/


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