Missing on business leads? Get discovered with LeadSquared

Leads play a crucial role when it comes to strengthening the marketing and sales of any company. Companies that miss on engaging and nurturing business leads, fail to capitalize on the initial investments put in getting those leads, resulting in more lost opportunity. Prioritizing the leads is also one of the major challenges faced by the marketers which become cumbersome in the long run. In an attempt to fill this gap, LeadSquared’s technology helps such business setup a lead capture automation system that will bring down the lead leakage to zero.

Founded by a trio Nilesh Patel, Prashant Singh, Sudhakar Gorti, LeadSquared is second venture of the founding team. The first one was an outsourced product development firm (Proteans) that was started in 2003. In an interview with Rashi Varshney, Nilesh Patel, CEO & Co- Founder, LeadSquared spoke about how enterprises are evolving and how LeadSquared is aligned with it.

Edited Excerpts

How has the business requirements of SMEs evolved over the years? What are the trends?

Hundreds of new businesses are getting registered in India everyday. All of these are SMEs or micro businesses. Even before the business is formally launched, the Gen-Y SMEs are thinking marketing-first, and are pro digital. Most of them will have a website from day one, communicate with customers on WhatsApp and spend on marketing to get discovered on the Internet. Older SMEs had a certain way to do business, but theyare gradually embracing the new reality and are willing to adapt systems and technologies to improve their business performance.

LeadSquared’s customers are primarily small and medium businesses. The SMEs that are adopting technology are able to react faster to the customer inquiries, provide better customer experience and increase their win ratio while competing with larger rivals.

What tops the mind of enterprises when it comes to gain a competitive advantage in the market?

The most important consideration for businesses is getting discovered; you won’t get a chance to compete if your buyers can’t find you. Ability to react faster to customer inquiries is extremely important for businesses that offer a little differentiation to the buyer. If you inquired in Justdial for packers and movers, it is likely that you will choose from businesses that call you in first. So these businesses will spend on automation to react in the fastest possible way to customer inquiries.

Reacting fast to customer inquiries is just one of the ways to create high quality customer experience. In our opinion delivering high quality customer experience is the most important element in building competitive advantage. It is not restricted to how fast you react but spans across marketing, sales, support and the product or service experience.

What are the major challenges companies are facing in follow up with the leads?

First and foremost most businesses have broken lead capture processes that result in massive lead leakage. With no organized way to capture leads it is very hard to keep track of how they are being followed up. Missed leads equal lost revenue opportunity.

All leads are not equal; some may buy immediately and others may buy in the future. Businesses mostly cater to the leads that want to buy now. The smart businesses however, use lead management solutions to ensure that the leads that want to buy later, are also kept engaged, and are connected with automatically, at just the right time in future.

How LeadSquared is aligned to address the requirements of the businesses?

Businesses use LeadSquared to make their leads travel faster down the sales funnel with:

Lead Capture Automation: LeadSquared makes it easy for businesses to capture leads at the point of origin, whether it is online, offline or via phone. Using responsive landing pages, marketers and business owners can generate more leads from their online spend.

Lead Distribution: To ensure shorter response time for customer inquiries it’s important to send the leads to appropriate sales people fast. Using LeadSquared, businesses can distribute leads based on city, product or any other rules to cut down the response time.

Marketing Automation: Every lead is an opportunity but all of them won’t buy from you. Businesses use LeadSquared’s marketing automation technology to engage and nurture leads to make them sales ready, and create future opportunities.

Sales Acceleration: Automated lead engagement scoring technology makes it easy for business owners and sales people to focus on leads with the highest potential for conversion.

Marketing and Sales Analytics: You get detailed marketing insights about the campaigns and sources driving qualified leads and revenue for your business.

Mobile App: Businesses with field sales people use LeadSquared mobile app to manage their field operations.

What is your strategy to tap opportunity in the India’s market?

Indian market offers huge opportunity for LeadSquared. First, we are investing both in online and offline media to make LeadSquared discoverable. Second, we are using inside sales development engine, which offers us the ability to reach a highly targeted set of customers in metros and non-metros to build targeted outreach. Third, we are creating personalized outreach with field sales operations located in metros.

What is LeadSquared’s growth trajectory?

LeadSquared beta was released in February of 2013. We started seeing traction in July of 2013. Since then we have had our share of issues associated with a typical SAAS business. We overcame those issues and have managed to grow 15% to 20% month on month.

What is your expansion plan?

We see huge and growing opportunity in India, and will continue to invest here. International markets also offer the opportunity for us and we plan to serve them out of India. We are planning to raise 10 million dollars to expand and build our business.