Infer Introduces Net-New Leads

Infer, a provider of predictive applications, today launched Net-New Leads to equip sales and marketing professionals with more promising lists of outbound prospects. "We have clients that get tons of inbound leads, but we also work with companies that operate in a competitive market and can't afford to wait for their prospects to come to them," says Jamie Grenney, vice president of marketing at Infer. "We choose not to be the sole provider of leads to our customers, and remain data-vendor agnostic, because we believe that would lead to diminishing returns."

Net-New Leads complements Infer's inbound lead and behavior scoring solutions, which help companies determine what prospects are most likely to convert based on the wealth of information stored in Salesforce CRM and marketing automation systems such as HubSpot, Eloqua, and Marketo. Previously, Infer offered companies the option of using a standard model to score their leads; the new release gives customers the option to pay for higher-quality prospect lists based on the customizations they specify. As part of the new offering, Infer will work with the customer's data provider of choice. Additionally, the vendor will begin to announce integrations with select data providers. The first of the integrations, also announced today, is InsideView, provider of a CRM intelligence platform.

One benefit of working with a broad selection of data providers, Grenney says, is that it allows companies to focus on the types of metrics that will lead to the outcomes they hope to achieve. A company whose goal is to ensure that employees meet their quotas in the Northeast region will require a different set of parameters than a company that is hoping to break into an untapped industry, for example. Infer works with companies to establish parameters and passes them along to the appropriate data provider so that the client pays only for the leads that are most relevant, Grenney says.

Net-New Leads also makes it easier for companies to switch data providers according to their evolving preferences. "There is no one data provider that can provide [an organization with] all the data that [it needs]," Grenney says. "Companies need to go to different data providers for different situations." While one data provider might be a reliable source for account-related information, for instance, another might be more skilled at delivering contact information. Depending on an organization's goals at a particular point in time, one provider might be more suitable.

Though the list of companies currently adopting the solution is still under 10, it is being used by companies such as Xactly, Grenney notes. In a statement, Xactly's CMO, Scott Broomfield, spoke optimistically of the benefits promised by Net-New scoring: "Not only will this save us time and energy, it will also assure that our sales team can focus on the right prospects."

The vendor does not yet have enough information to provide definite indicators of ROI, but the goal, according to Grenney, is to reduce the level of effort companies expend once they've invested in leads.

Pricing is still not fixed and will be determined according to the feedback given by customers, Grenney says. "The [total required] commitment is definitely light," Grenney says.