Searching on Google for Sales Leads: Is Lead Generation the Answer?

“I asked for a table and they brought me a lampshade”

Great quote from Rafael Benitez (Spanish Football Manager). I never thought I would mention football and sales lead generation in the same breath. Let’s look at the accuracy of Google results when searching for sales leads online. Love to get your views on this!

Imagine you are a sales representative (Max Speed from our initial blog on the size of the eCommerce market) and you are now searching the internet to find new sales leads. This is the number one pain point for sales teams worldwide. Let’s try this out. Simply enter the search term ‘Lead Generation’ into Google.com & you will receive a mixture of results:

• Software directories e.g. Capterra, G2Crowd, etc
• Marketing automation software e.g. Hubspot, Marketo
• CRM software e.g. Salesforce, Zoho
• Blogs
• Lead Generation services

Sadly these results are not what the sales representative is looking for. He does not want to buy a CRM or Marketing Automation software. Nor does he want to buy a service to optimize his sales pipeline. The sales representative wishes to fill his sales pipeline with high-quality sales leads. Why are the search engines returning a mixed bag of results?

The Rise of CRMs

The big problem for the search engine is that the words ‘Lead Generation’ has been used by Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Market Automation, and Lead Management service companies over the last 30 years. Since the 1990s, CRM has become a big business. Worldwide CRM software totaled $26.3 billion in 2015, up 12.3 percent from $23.4 billion in 2014, according to Gartner, Inc. This means the CRM and Marketing Automation companies have the marketing budget to pay Google, Bing, Yahoo for advertising their company using the search terms most likely used by salespeople. However, these companies are more about lead nurturing and automating the marketing and sales workflow, vs lead generation.

The truth is, when you buy a CRM you must fill it with sales leads. So where do you get your sales leads? It is only in the last 5 years that there has been a breakthrough in lead generation technology, and this has been driven by deep web analytics technology & by big data companies.

While this is great news, how does a true lead generation company raise above the other pretenders in the crowded but limited first page of Google? Should we pay a king’s ransom or is there a better way to get our voice heard? We love to help sales representatives around the world hit their sales targets. I welcome your view.