Technology start-ups tap growing potential in automated lead generation

Alongside the Centre’s push for a digital India, a number of start-ups have brought technology products and platforms into spaces the country’s earlier IT boom did not impact.

Big data and analytics venture Zeta, for example, has digitised employee benefits and reimbursements; SpiderG has introduced e-invoicing for smoother and full-cycle electronic transactions between businesses; Rubique attempts to match SME borrowers to a wider range of institutional lenders, reducing unpredictability in that sphere. Similarly, lead generation, core to every business, till recently hadn’t seen technology intervention until some companies began to see its potential.

If once upon a time, pre-sales teams manually searched the internet to find prospects and build databases, technology-led lead generation now adds efficiency that wasn’t possible earlier.

With technology-led lead generation, businesses can put talent to more efficient use, reduce operational costs and receive insights.

AeroLeads, a start-up that was soft-launched in early 2015, has its software crawling websites of businesses to track publicly available phone numbers and other contact details, potentially shaving off many man hours spent in prospecting alone. If, as the company claims, 7,100 business clients are signed up on its platform and using its ‘freemium’ version, there’s utility and value in its offerings.

Further, about 20 per cent of those signed up on AeroLeads seem to be start-ups, and many of them in India; 70 per cent of them are reportedly small- to medium-sized businesses mostly in the US, but there are a growing number taking to technology-led prospecting in India, too.

Pushkar Gaikwad, founder, AeroLeads says: “Indian SMBs were largely tech-averse, or at least uncomfortable with technology, for many years. But there’s a big trend among businesses of using more and more SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) platforms. So our early challenges have eased.”

Gaikwad shares that over 200 of the 7,000-odd businesses that have signed up are paying clients. He claims AeroLeads currently makes anywhere between $20,000-50,000 a month.

Gaikwad is “extremely excited about India as a market,” and is aiming for revenues of $3-5 million in 2017-2018.

Technology-enabled data collection saves time, money and manpower. But what if, while keeping technology-led prospects generation at the centre, services can be uniquely shaped for client enterprises? Coaching and advisory services start-up GrowthEnabler seems to be on such a path with its GEPii (GrowthEnabler Personalised Intelligence Interface).

“Because what you need is intelligence. Not only do you need to crawl the web, you need to assess the data,” says Rajeev Banduni, CEO, GrowthEnabler Global.

GrowthEnabler has access to a large number of start-ups. Many of the CXOs the company talked to were reportedly concerned about being on top of the disruptions created by start-ups across global markets. In the past, keeping up with this disruption meant many large enterprises decided to either set up accelerators for start-ups, or acquire them, or collaborate with them.

GEPii is targeted at informing CXOs of large enterprises in a way that may help make corporate decisions less arbitrary. Based on intelligence from meaningful data, large enterprises can be clear from the beginning which start-ups to collaborate with, for example. GEPii tracks start-ups across sectors. A scoring mechanism adds further perspective to GEPii reports, and GrowthEnabler’s analysts would ideally be able to make sense of the data in ways that matter to large enterprises.

Banduni says: “If you are a CXO, you want a score of a set of start-ups based on their financials, the strength of their founders and their innovative index. You’ll want to know if they have filed any patents, and are their products ready. GEPii currently manages around 52 parameters… we do a qualitative and quantitative analysis.”

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