With the advent of technology and the growth of the consumer era, there has been a tremendous flow of products and services to serve customers. These goods and services further face huge competition from the peers existing and operating in the same market. These goods and services also face tough competition from the companies which exist and operate on other windows which can directly or indirectly affect the sales and processing of such sales in the segment in which the business is operating.

Though advertising is often used to promote and highlight the best-selling features of the product, advertising is often concluded to be a passive medium of sale in which there is just one way communication happening between the customers and the sellers. In such a passive medium, it is hard to gauge the reaction of the customer and assess the possibility of closing the sales. But in this hardcore competitive era, in which the company faces a multi-faceted competition from all quarters, it is important to track the customer’s responses and behavior and make a concerted effort towards closing the sales deal.

This is even more important in the case of business-to-business (B2B) market where the numbers of customers are limited and the sales volume is massive. This B2B segment generally does not only target advertising and promotion as the only means of attracting the potential customers.

This personal selling technique would only be beneficial and useful in case the target customers are chosen well. Otherwise, such personal efforts would prove to be a sheer wastage of time and effort of the company and the results would be negative after putting in the best of efforts. The identification of the target customers, thus becomes the most important step in the entire process. This step, therefore requires due diligence and sincere efforts. This process of identifying the target list of customers is better known as the lead generation campaign. This campaign is the first step in the process of sales and is the most vital step which would decide the success and failure of the sales process. This lead generation campaign would let the company get a concrete list of customers whom they should target and pursue to close on their sales.

Such lead generation campaigns start with gathering data about all the prospective customers for the company. Such a preliminary list can be generated by accessing the company’s past sales record, company’s databases regarding the customers contacted during the previous years, company’s webpage and the traffic on such web page, the blogs maintained by the company and the type of visitors visiting such pages and the traffic that surfs such blogs, and telemarketing databases.

When such information is gathered, such information is then processed in a way that each customer is individually targeted and a sincere effort towards closing a sale is made. Such an effort would only be successful in case the initial list generation is done with due diligence.