Post by guest blogger Mike Rogers, Director of Business Development, Customer Effective about PointClear sales leads.

At Customer Effective, we help clients maximize their customer relationships using solutions based exclusively on Microsoft technology. As a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, we are consultants and solution implementers serving midmarket and enterprise organizations worldwide.

We have been a client of PointClear's for about one year, and were introduced to them by Microsoft. As a young, small and growing company, we are hungry to fill the top of the sales funnel, and we've experimented with all sorts of lead generation approaches. We tried internal marketing campaigns, search engine optimization and hired our own inside sales representative before turning to an outsourced B2B teleservices provider.

I initially based my decision to outsource on personal bandwidth limitations. PointClear provides a full-time equivalent, dedicated prospect developer, as well as a program manager who keeps me up-to-speed, sends pre-meeting updates including recorded calls, fields questions from our team about messaging, and generally helps me to develop an efficient rhythm that allows me to run the rest of my business.

I have personally implemented teleservices campaigns in the past, and I get almost daily calls from other providers. However, our success with PointClear is due to proper on-boarding that includes a meticulous process to train the prospect development team on our background, products and especially the kind of information we need to support sales opportunities.

For each opportunity, we receive not only detailed background information and a specific next step, but also a digital audio file. That is something I have never seen before! The audio files provide very specific context for our sales reps as they engage a potential buyer. Additionally, they help us determine tactics for "re-heats" in situations where some ongoing nurturing is going to be required.

About 25 percent of our qualified opportunities come from PointClear, and we now have enough deals in the pipeline that the ROI on this effort is likely to be superb.