Sales Leads or Hot Referrals?

You may recall that previously, we reviewed Jigsaw and Demandbase – two well-known services that focus on giving you an opportunity to essentially buy or trade sales leads and contact information.

And there’s Hoovers and Spoke and many more. Everyone approaches the game a bit differently and you may have used their services before.

These are great sales tools and they save you time and effort on figuring out who is who in your target accounts. But there’s one thing they don’t do.

They give you a lead, a name and a phone number but no introduction. That makes contacting the leads you bought something very close to placing a cold call.

I mean, it’s less than flying blind – but you’re still a good ways away from 20/20 prospect vision.

Recently we saw the launch of a few tools that do take the next step. An introduction to a valuable lead by someone with an existing relationship, instead of a fairly cold sales lead. See, now we’re getting somewhere.

Two services that jump out immediately. There’s Salesconx – a service that lets you buy and sell introductions for money and then there’s Inquisix, which lets business owners and sales professionals exchange trusted referrals.

We took Inquisix for a spin and we were very impressed. You can read our findings right here.

For a summary of tools you can use to generate sales leads, click here.