Continuing my previous post on lead & demand generation for early stage companies, below are #4, #5, & #6. 

I also wanted to share that  I received a nice email from Jim Fowler, CEO of Jigsaw, about my first post thanking me for the mention.  Very cool on his part and a great example of proactive marketing.  I'll cover blog commenting and follow-up as part of #11 below.

Here's a recap of the entire list:

   1. Brokered introductions
   2. Partner marketing
   3. Direct outreach & appointment setting
   4. Tele-prospecting/tele-surveys
   5. Guaranteed lead generation programs
   6. Sponsored email blasts
   7. On-line advertising
   8. Email newsletter nurture programs
   9. Direct mail
  10. Events
  11. Market awareness – self generated
  12. Market awareness – through a PR firm
  13. Analysts
  14. Print advertising

4.  Tele-prospecting/tele-surveys

• This is a softer outreach approach not solely intended to drive to a meeting (although that can happen); mostly you will get information about your targets and possibly stumble across an active project
• There are many different vendors that can provide this service and they generally price on a per company/number of contacts defined per company model.
  
• I am a fan of defining a set of target companies and canvassing them with a 'survey' – questions that help you qualify them as a candidate for your product/service as well as provide you a bit of market research that you can a) use to sharpen and focus your sales efforts and b) package into marketing collateral for a sales tool and PR efforts (survey results)

5.  Guaranteed lead generation programs

• These programs are when you take something (a whitepaper, a webcast, survey results (per above), or the like) and push it out through a publisher (Ziff Davis, IDG, etc.) who then drives traffic to your stuff.  All horizontal and vertical publications should offer some type of option here. 
  
• Generally you will get a guaranteed lead count based on some qualification criteria.  You can probably also ask qualifying questions that you can fashion into "survey results" as well.
• Understand that the qualifying questions are generally not going to identify which leads are best as most people select whatever to get to the download they are seeking.
  
• Also bear in mind that these are warm contacts who have raised their hands about being interested in something about what you do, not you specifically.  It is important to properly manage internal expectations on how strong these 'leads' are.

6.  Sponsored email blasts

• These are generally available through the same publishers as above but these allow you to sponsor or promote on some type of daily, weekly, quarterly email to their subscriber base.  Have some type of marketing asset (whitepaper, case study, survey results, etc.) to promote/hyperlink to that lead to a landing page to capture contact information.
• These are pretty easy to do but offer varying degrees of success.  Again, expectations are important as a list of 40k recipients may generate only a handful of clicks and even fewer downloads.