It wasn’t until recently that I understood the power of “crowd sourced.” I guess it had never occurred to me that it was possible to cherry pick the best of the collective knowledge/expertise/skill set/ wisdom of a community.
My first experience of this was using 99Designs.com, a crowd sourced design website. Need something designed? Business Cards? New logo? Updated Website? Post a description of what you need done and dozens (and sometimes hundreds) of designers compete to provide you with the very best design.
The upside is that you have tons of designs to pick from and only pay for the very best design (at a price you set at the beginning). Its like the ultimate gladiatorial death match with only top contestant left standing. (ok maybe its not that dramatic)
The downside if that you’re too picky you’re on the hook to pick at least one of them.
So after completing out first contest and getting some great designs from it, I started thinking, “What else can this be applied to? Say Lead Generation?”
Sometimes the best answers are staring you right in the face
It was around the same time that I was struggling to get a bird dog program started in our company.
We needed more leads but didn’t have the cash to invest in hiring a sales person, increasing Adwords spending, buying a list, or any of the hundreds of other ways to generate leads.
Using our own employees, who already understand the business, who we already pay, and who would probably prefer for the company to do better than do worse, were the perfect people to turn to for help.
For nothing more than a little extra awareness on their part they could be reporting back new business opportunities for the company.
It would be like crowd sourcing our community of employees to do lead generation for the company.
Boom, the crowd sourced lead generation light bulb when on.
And to be honest, it worked out great, at first….
Operating at Scale
The bird dog program, essentially crowd sourcing our own employees to do lead generation was really effective. The problem was running it at scale.
It quickly became overwhelming to manage the whole process.
Even a dozen employees each reporting back a couple of lead each week become unmanageable.
Which ones did I follow up on? Which ones are new? How qualified are they? Do you have pictures of it? Should I revisit certain leads at a later date?
Drowning in leads is a great problem to have but it can be disruptive with long sales cycles. There’s a tendency to not qualify leads as well and assume that quantity that overcome quality.
There had to be a better way to manage the process. Unfortunately, there wasn’t.
Scratch Your Own Itch
I finally got tired of dealing with the overwhelm and decided to scratch my own itch and build the product I needed to help me.
But it couldn’t just be another CRM. It had to be location based with a seamless mapping integration so that I could see, at a glance, where these leads were in relation to one another (To keep me from crisscrossing my routes all over town to visits these leads or job sites.)
It had to integrate images. A picture is worth a thousand words couldn’t be more true when managing a subjective service like street sweeping.
Crowd Sourced Lead Generation via BirdDogLead
And with that, BirdDogLead was born.. well being born (we’re currently in private beta release)
BirdDogLead is a cloud based web application specifically for employee sourced lead generation and tailored to the pavement maintenance industry.
Visit http://www.birddoglead.com to get on the waiting list.
Companies on the waiting list will get exclusive pricing discounts when the product is publicly launched.
With this simple web and mobile app, companies can implement an effective bird dog program in their company and actually take advantage of the power of crowd sourcing their lead generation.
(Even if this doesn’t seem right for your company yet, sign up anyways and get a sneak peak of how a software product is designed, developed and marketed)