Lead acquisition involves finding leads, and then capturing them. This post focuses on generating "lead prospects."

Of course, a great source of leads is your existing customer base, which presents arguably the best cross-sell and upsell opportunities since, being customers, they've already (literally) bought into your product. For net new leads, however, I recommend one or a combination of three online marketing strategies, depending on your business:

1. Seek them out
The ease and efficiency of email marketing has meant that businesses are buying prospect lists in larger quantities and greater frequencies than ever before. List vendors offer high-precision targeting, allowing you to slice and dice by industry, geography, role, company, and even past purchasing behavior.

We have some great partners on the AppExchange for this. Every good marketer tests -- fortunately, all of these solutions offer some free trial or low-volume starter option.

• Jigsaw. A popular online database of millions of business contacts and company information.
• Reachforce. Find contacts by company and/or role. Option to pay per project or on a subscription basis (entry price is $5000)
• iProfile. Database of Fortune 500 company profiles including their IT department org charts. Especially useful for software companies.
• Demandbase.  Buy sales leads and marketing lists on a pay-as-you-go basis.
• A+ Lead Finder. Helps you select from the over 50,000 lists out there and manage your lead generation campaigns.
• Spoke Sales Prospecting. Identify new prospects from a network of over 35 million people at over 900,000 companies. Search for leads by title, company, industry, geography, revenue or other target account criteria. The Spoke Network enables you to find mutual contacts from which to request introductions.
• Sales Spider. Free business social network for sales and marketing executives that allows you to search by industry and geography for qualified leads, government tenders and prospect lists. Members can also post, review and reply to B2B classified ads.
• LinkedIn mash-up. Search for user profiles and data on LinkedIn, a popular social networking site for business professionals.
• Faceforce.  View Facebook friends directly from within your Salesforce account, lead, and contact records. Augment traditional Salesforce fields with rich, dynamic Facebook profile information including photos and mutual friends (Note: I'm biased because I wrote this app :)

In general, buying lists is more effective for certain products than others, ie those that 1) have an already-established need, such as mature products which don't require much additional education or market development (eg, emailing an expecting mother with special offers on baby strollers) and commodity products where you are competing on price, or 2) have an obvious need, such as new products that solve a critical pain point (eg, new version of popular cookie with zero trans-fat). For these, it's much more compelling if you have a trusted brand (ideally in the product area) and the claim is credible at face value.

It's probably a waste of your marketing budget to cold-call on behalf of any product or service requiring explanation or convincing at the needs level. It also helps if the typical contract duration for your class of products is shorter, since the probability increases that your prospect happens at that moment to be looking to renew or source a new contract.

If you already have prospective contact data and want to verify, update, and/or dedupe, the Data Cleansing section on AppExchange has over a dozen offerings, such as Access Hoover's, OneSource Account Intelligence, DemandTools, Diamond Data, CleanCRM, RingLead Declone, and the solution in my opinion with the best tagline, DataTrim -- your data laundry service.

2. Let them find you
Depending on your product, it might make more sense for you to let leads find you instead of spending precious marketing dollars on lists of contacts who send your email directly to their spam folders. Especially in the B2B world, it's hard for marketers to "generate" demand. Either the demand is there, or it isn't.

The big breakthrough with online search marketing was really about finding prospects at the moment they are ready to buy. Whether you are already employing search marketing techniques or just looking to get started, Salesforce for Google AdWords provides an instant and seamless integration between Salesforce CRM and your Google AdWords campaigns, allowing you to track all of your website activity, associate ad clicks to inbound leads, and measure campaign ROI. Thanks to a strategic alliance announced in June between salesforce.com and Google, this application is free to all Salesforce users and comes bundled as part of the marketing application in all new orgs. For existing orgs that do not have SFGA installed, you can get it with three clicks from the AppExchange.

If you really want to get fancy, there is a new solution on AppExchange, Marketo Search Marketing (interesting pricing -- 7.9% of your AdWords spend, or $499/month), that takes SFGA even further with tools that allow you to optimize ad bids based on which keywords resulted in opportunities and deals. Marketo also offers “what-if” analysis and forecasting, landing pages, and keyword discovery.

In addition to search marketing, you'll also want to focus on improving your organic search relevance (aka "search engine optimization) -- that is, how high up on the search results page your website turns up on a search for relevant terms. For more on search strategies, check out the Learning Center on our in-house Salesforce for Google Adwords blog.

3. And make sure you know (and respond!) when they try to find you
Do you know who is visiting your site? What happens when a prospect visits your site? What about your competitors? In the age of spam, web users are increasingly wary of lead capture forms, especially earlier on in the sales cycle. Two innovative new tools on AppExchange help you address this:

• Domodomain. Identifies website visitors based on a proprietary database of Internet activity tracking and immediately collects and presents up-to-the-second information about the prospect's company.
• ActiveConversion. Identifies new leads (by company) based on online activity. Tracks the online activity histories of your Salesforce leads and contacts.

Bonus Marketing Tip of the Day
Offer a free trial. Get people hooked, and then they'll buy.