A lead, as we all know, is an individual or company that has indicated some level of interest in potentially buying a product or service. This is an important first stage categorization of any sales process.
Technically, a lead is represented by data, and the potential value of that lead is dependent on the level of accuracy, how current the contact information is, and the comprehensiveness of the data that constitutes the lead. In other words, a lead is only as valuable as the data that comprises it within a CRM application or other sales-driving system.
Fortunately, lead value ROI is generally pretty easily obtained as a function of the sales line. It is very measurable, and one can see over time that the more accurate, complete, and timely leads are likely to drive the most revenue and have the greatest value to the sales organization. Therefore, investing in the quality of lead data can have a measurable and rewarding payoff.
This is one of the primary reasons many organizations come to StrikeIron - to enhance the value of their lead data. Our real-time customer data quality offerings can validate email addresses, physical addresses, and phone numbers to ensure a lead is accurate, and it can even correct missing or inaccurate contact lead data where possible.
We can also add a sizable list of additional data points, including company demographic data points, residential information (from sources such as the Census Bureau), latitude and longitude coordinates, and other data points that add some additional value to the lead and optimize it for the purposes of a sales organization.
Best of all, our easy-to-integrate APIs are available out in the Cloud (meaning no reference data maintenance and a flexible subscription model), making it easy to plug into just about any CRM, marketing automation, or other lead management system via the Internet.
So as we are in the sweet spot of need for a large number of attending organizations at LeadsCon, we have found much success in the past with this conference. As a result, we will have a pretty sizable contingent of folks at the event in New York City this week.
Drop by and say hello (booth 202) and learn more about how to rev up the value of leads. Oh and by the way, we will be giving away some iPad2's. Hope to see you there!
StrikeIron's Global Address Verification Web Service enables addresses to be validated for existence and accuracy in over 240 countries around the world. This Web service is a very useful, easy-to-integrate API for checking shipping addresses, validating customer data, identity verification, and several other use cases where address accuracy is important. A simple SOAP or REST call from a Website, business process, application, or mobile device (a single line of code in most development environments) is all that is needed to invoke the service and verify a global address via the Cloud. We take care of all the underlying reference data updates, so the most recent, accurate data is in use at all times.
One of the primary methods for validating a global address is "basic" verification. It requires only an address line, a country-specific locality line (such as city, city & state, city & province, etc.), and the country. Using that information, the appropriate country-specific postal reference data will be utilized to provide the result.
Just for demonstration (and fun), here are a few sample addresses that demonstrate validating some famous addresses around the World:
In each case, the three parameters are used to validate the existence of the address, provide the necessary postal codes, and also provide a formatted address line which could be used for mail delivery.
There are also some more advanced functions which provide the ability to localize an address for a given country ("Germany" versus "Deutschland" and "Milan" versus "Milano" as examples), perform in batch, and provide more advanced result codes such as confidence levels.
Here is a list of supported countries (and corresponding postal reference data granularity).
If you would like to see how it works with your data, please contact us at sales@strikeiron.com (or call us, +1-919-467-4545) for a trial. It's also available fully integrated into Salesforce.com.