It’s very gratifying to me to watch how quickly and successfully the data industry has evolved in its lead generation capabilities over the last two decades. We’ve moved from the legacy print directory model to highly sophisticated, multi-sourced signals and other inferential data to more precisely identify and pre-qualify sales leads. But where do we go from here?

I have long said that the path forward for data publishers is to move up the so-called value pyramid, from poorly differentiated “there’s a pony in there somewhere” lists that characterized the legacy print directory era to today’s evidence-based, high-confidence, highly targeted sales leads. The top of the value pyramid is actually making the sale on behalf of your customer, presumably in exchange for a sizable commission to justify the effort. Many data producers would be thrilled to shift from $100 sales leads to $10,000 commissions. But when you even scratch the surface of this idea, you see large obstacles, not the least of which is trying to scale a business model like this.

 So what’s the next highest level of value? Pre-qualifying leads. In this model, the data producer takes the leads it is generating, and further qualifies them by making direct contact, and asking, for example, “are you actively in the market for a new CNC milling machine?” If the answer is in the affirmative, you have developed information of extremely high value. A number of companies that sell technology sales leads have been doing this for a while.

 Alas, at the present time, this is a market-dependent idea. Technology marketing and sales teams tend to be highly sophisticated when it comes to lead management. But for most markets, as I’ve noted before, marketers are still out primarily looking for lists to load into automated marketing platforms, and most sales teams prefer to trust their instincts and sales prejudices over verified data, meaning great leads end up on the floor and the data producer is told its data wasn’t very good.

 All this suggests to me that for data producers to move further up the value pyramid, a lot of market education is going to be required first, and that will take a lot of time and resources. We’ll get there, but not anytime soon.