Sourcing for leads is like solving an equation in elementary algebra, most of the time we do it by trial and error.

In this part of the world, the person who is responsible for leads sourcing, in many SME organizations, is also the same person who manages sales and marketing; and we always regard the combined business function as “business development (BD)” in general.

So, the all-in-one BD manager basically is required to manage tasks efficiently from leads sourcing, scoring, acquisition, nurturing … all the way to closing the opportunity. To get the job done under the lean-and-mean resources, that random trial and error will be a luxury because time is precious, budget is tight, and it is going to be a fall short of sales target. Life just couldn’t be more difficult.

I am not leading you to buy a CRM solution although it sounds very much like a pitch intro Instead, I want to share some handy practices which might help you to at least choose the best sourcing partner. So that you can improve your return on your next marketing spending, turn your trial and error into an educated guess, then find your leads more effectively.

As a matter of fact, one of the common leads sourcing practices nowadays is to be found by the leads on the Internet sourcing portals. Well, this is the fact that the sourcing portals want you to believe. But it is a partial truth. In fact, sourcing portals just like many of their SME customers, they rely heavily on the search engines to recruit their leads.

Cartoon by Dave Walker.
Find more cartoons you can freely re-use on your blog
at We Blog Cartoons.

Let me show you how. Go search “China SD Memory Card” on Google. Find out who is paying for the Google sponsored ads. Then go to the Google Adwords Sandbox and find out how many advertisers are competing this keyword and how many people are searching for this keyword. All your sourcing partners are doing this exercise for their search marketing campaigns. Their goal is to drive referral buyers traffic from the search engines and sell it to you.

My “China SD Memory Card” example may not be a perfect case but it illustrates my point. Proper word choice is critical when it comes to search marketing. I believe there is a distinctive difference on search pattern between B2C and B2B from a buyer perspective. Instead of searching for “China SD Memory Card,” an experienced B2B buyer may punch in “SDMI +RoHS +CHINA.” It looks technical but more specific with industry knowledge.

So I believe you can do this exercise better than your sourcing partners. Because you own the wisdom of your industry, you know how to be found by the best accurate keywords and phrases. Even though at the end of the day you need a sourcing partner or join a trade show, you can test the result of the marketing spending by comparing your “pseudo” search marketing money against the service fee paid for the sourcing partners. See who can target the leads more accurately.

Hmm… but let’s play fair. Your sourcing partners have done a lot more than only the search marketing. They spend top dollars for many big advertising campaigns and brand marketing, buyers promotion, etc.

But talking about only the leads sourcing on search engines, even though they pay top dollars, they probably do more trials and errors than your educated guess.

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