As an emerging company, one of your biggest challenges is monetizing the addressable market potential and building the first set of customer references. Once this challenge is surmounted, the next milestone is scaling up the sales engine to ensure a continual pipeline and predictable revenue streams.

As an emerging company with limited market access and network of relationships, the task of acquiring the first few customers might seem huge. Presented here is an approach that we have seen working well for companies that are taking their first steps to establish a market presence.

Choose your Market and find your Targets

The first, and perhaps most important step, is to decide what segment of the market you would like to focus on- this is dependent both on market factors as well as internal capabilities. This would entail deciding on a geography or region, size of customers etc. The US, for example, is too big a market for a small company to target. So, you may want to focus more on, say the east coast. Similarly, pick your customer segment carefully using a combination of both ease of access and possible revenue streams.

Within a region, you would want to do apply additional filters such as verticals or technology platforms in use. Once you actually decide on the market segment, you need to prepare your list of prospects.

Try and profile the prospect in some detail- you must collect information about revenue, size of IT budget, IT savviness, management team profile and recent changes, business health and growth prospects, recent spending on technology, funding / financial health and presence of competition. In addition, look out for recent news on the company and the prospect's performance vis-a-vis competition.

Depending on the segment you are targeting some of this information may be hard to come by. But, today, with the internet being as pervasive as it is, and search engines vying with each other to empower the web visitor, research and access to information is easier than you imagine.

Carrying out such research is a MUST as it gives you the understanding, confidence and ability to determine your product / offering fit and enhances the chances of the lead maturing. You would want to start with a list of 200 and 250 companies and aim to convert 4-5 of these into your customers in a year to 18 months.

In other words, rather than adopt a spray gun approach, it is more productive to build a prospect database in a more scientific and systematic manner and then go after these companies intelligently and relentlessly.

Frame the Message

And that also means, determining what exactly to pitch to the prospect:

• Is there something "worthwhile" you can do for the prospect?
• Is there a business challenge you can fix with your solution?
• What kind of revenue streams will that give?
• Are you determining a customer need or are you "finding" a place for your product?
• How can your product do better than competition's?

A lot of companies are in one big hurry to jump into the action for fear of losing time; however, we would like to reiterate that better planning and research prepares you much better for the next stages of the prospecting cycle.

Choose the Medium - E-mail/Calling/Website

The next stage is when the action starts, so to speak, which is trying to make contact with the prospect through a well executed lead generation program. The lead generation program typically comprises a series of campaigns that run through the year.

The importance of planning your campaign's duration, frequency of communication and messaging cannot be underscored. At the same time, be pragmatic regarding the results you can expect- it is unreasonable to expect a huge response to the first mailer. On the other hand, decide what you would communicate after the first mailer; will you send details of your services, or would you talk about some specific case study that may be relevant, or send an article that will be useful to the prospect?

While e-mail campaigns are useful and help you stay in touch, a campaign that integrates calling is far more preferable. Calling needs more preparation and is harder. Here are some prerequisites to get better results from calling:

• Make each call specific to the company by doing research ( this is true of e-mailers also)
• Use a script to train callers to face objections, articulate your company message clearly and prepare for different responses
• Be persistent, try and identify that band of time of the day where you get better results; be exploratory and not rigid in your approach
• "Leaving voice mail and expecting a return call" is futile
• Pay less emphasis on changing name and accent and more importance to clarity in the message and "call to action"
Pay less emphasis on changing name and accent and more importance to clarity in the message and "call to action"

Calling is more difficult than emailing as it requires better, articulate resources. Many companies hire freshers for this role and get poor results. It may be better to deploy people who are familiar with your company, for example, from delivery, and rotate them through this role. This is because a good call can expedite the prospecting cycle considerably, while indifferent calling can lead to wasted time, effort and low morale.

The third aspect is tuning your website, including creating landing pages, to be aligned with your campaign. Simple things you can do are to showcase the service that the campaign is centered around, on your home page. Or, have related customer testimonials, if available, on the landing page. Have some simple web tracking tool to see whether your campaign is leading to more visits to your website. Google Analytics is a great tool for this purpose- it is free (at least right now), and has several features that can help you with campaign management. There are other free web tracking tools available as well.

Lead Nurturing Campaigns

In our experience, a focused campaign does yield results over time. But the biggest challenge is to be persistent and creative. We recommend that companies put in place a lead nurturing program illustrated below for better success and results:

The idea behind a lead nurturing program is to keep engaging with prospects for a longer period of time through a combination of mechanisms, and between campaigns.

Some of the ways are to have a high quality e-newsletter; another effective way is to send articles of relevance. A third way is to send out white papers from your company. Companies with reasonable marketing budgets could consider webinars and webcasts as well as select event participation to augment the lead generation activity.

Keeping a prospect engaged is perhaps the most important, yet often ignored aspect of lead generation. And here, a contact management system can come in very handy. The contact management system helps you plan campaigns and also keep track of follow up action with each prospect.

To conclude, creating an effective sales engine is crucial for emerging companies. Contrary to the popular notion, it is possible to apply systems and processes to create a predictable sales pipeline.