Hacker News Reader

Comment by badclient | Hacker News Reader

What does lead research entail? Will they cold call for 40 hours?

Lead research means looking through a known set of public/private data sources to figure out if a target user is reasonable for a service. Generally it's not cold calling to get data, although we've done that in a few cases.

I'll give you an example: one client uses LeadGenius to identify each new small business incorporated in the state of California, and study 6 parameters about the business to determine if they've chosen a certain kind of service provider yet, and if they haven't chosen one yet, how to get in touch with them.

We'll see if we can make this more clear on the page -- thanks!

Isn't there a difference between user acquisiton as a service and prospecting as a service? Clicking this link, I thought you did the whole sales process.

That's useful feedback! It depends on whether your users can convert automatically based on information from an email. It takes some domain expertise to describe potential users, so we prefer to leave that to clients. We might step in that direction at some point -- I'd like to see us positioned somewhere between Adwords and true outsourced sales.

Could that sometimes resort in scraping email addresses from public websites, such as.. say from a forum or Craigslist?

Thanks for clearing that up, because I assumed that by "lead" you mean a contact who is already interested and primed. Maybe I have been using the word incorrectly for a long time, but I never thought it just means "potential target who has never heard about my company and won't know what hit them if I called them up".

In that case, I see a problem with your product and pricing. You see, if I still have to do the cold calling in-house, you're just offering me email addresses. Those may or may not be mostly from my target demographic, but I don't see how that's worth 2000k a month if I still have to pay sales people to do the actual work on top of that.

My suggestion for you would be to either drastically lower your prices and be clearer about what your customers are getting, or - much better - offer them the whole sales workflow in one package.

Thanks! We actually do mean a contact who is interested and primed. There are two stages: first researching leads, and the second reaching out to them to schedule contacts. The $2000 plan incorporates both pieces.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com