"All of a sudden, I was Kenny Madden on steroids."

Madden says RainKing makes him more productive than he ever dreamed possible. He says RainKing is now the first application he starts up in the morning, even before he reads his email.

"It was like suddenly everything's there on a silver platter for me," says Madden. "It just gives me more time to be able to make more intelligent phone calls to people that are in a position to at least listen to what I have to say."

"RainKing gives me a little bit of an advantage over the big boys, because I can be really really really specific, and really targeted."

Customer Case Study - Security Software

AlterPoint doubles flow of qualified leads with RainKing

    Austin, Texas-based AlterPoint provides network governance solutions for major firms with large, complex networks. They are a relatively small company selling into some of the biggest firms in the world.

    Kenny Madden, a seasoned software marketer, is Director of Sales Development for AlterPoint; his job is to penetrate major accounts and tee-up hot prospects for their outside field sales force.

    A big part of Madden's job is mapping his market and targeting the best prospects to call on. Until RainKing came along, he was having a major problem finding a good way to find high-quality leads for his sales force. Madden, an affable Brit, spent countless hours doing labor-intensive market research himself — sometimes spending as much as 20 hours a week on this tedious task. While he used such lead-generation techniques as email marketing campaigns and white paper downloads, a good chunk of the lead-generation activity at AlterPoint was, and still is, outbound calls — which need backup intelligence.

    "For example, someone would say to me, 'We need to get into a large financial services firm,' so I would literally spend three hours on some very very detailed research, to put together a really good, coherent, targeted specific message to the CIO. And I was doing that multiple times throughout the week," says Madden.

    While he used a subscription-based org-chart service, he found the static PDFs they provided outdated almost immediately, and the next release usually wasn't available until six months down the road.

    There had to be a better way.

    Several months ago, Madden's VP of Sales passed on an email from Paul Marcus, one of the sales reps at RainKing. Madden had never heard of the company. "But Paul said, 'Let's have a five minute conversation,' which then turned into 45 minutes. I found we shared a lot of values in our approach to sales and marketing."

    Madden quickly realized that RainKing would allow him to learn in 10 minutes what would have taken him literally hours of research in the past.

    RainKing offers an online subscription database that's the result of the daily efforts of more than 30 well-educated and well-trained research analysts. RainKing employs what its calls the intelligent phone call (TIP) ^tm — basically a phone interview conducted by a well-educated, well-trained professional research analyst with key IT sources at a company. After several TIPs, RainKing comes up with a lot of very precise and accurate contact data and intelligence on the key buyers of technology services and products. RainKing then explains and maps out the technology decision making process and provides this valuable data and intelligence in an on-demand, subscription database and marketing platform.

"All of a sudden, I was Kenny Madden on steroids."

    Madden says RainKing makes him more productive than he ever dreamed possible. He says RainKing is now the first application he starts up in the morning, even before he reads his email.

    He can get inside the office of key IT managers and executives in seconds, searching by such criteria as company name; keywords, such as "telecommunications", in job titles; or the technology platform a company is using.

    By typing in the name of a company, for example, Madden immediately gets a listing of key IT decision makers at the company, including such details as accurate email addresses; direct dial telephone numbers; the person's professional background and intelligence on the technologies they're responsible for; and their management level within the organization — who reports to whom.

    "It was like suddenly everything's there on a silver platter for me," says Madden. "It just gives me more time to be able to make more intelligent phone calls to people that are in a position to at least listen to what I have to say."

    He finds that even if he gets bad news, it saves him immense amounts of time. "If I know the right person right away, at least I can find out if they've already made a decision and gone with a competitor. It's not the answer I like to hear, but I don't have to waste my time or waste their time . Or if a company does not meet my specific ideal prospect profile, I can just tick them off my list and move on to more fertile ground. With RainKing, I find that out right away. Before, I would probably find it out after spending maybe a week."

    AlterPoint's sales team has a very specific definition of a qualified lead. The company must have a designated need, a specific project, an allocated budget, and a project deadline. In the short period since he began using RainKing, Madden has seen a measurable increase in leads. "Before, I was making 200 to 300 research phone calls a week, and having 20 to 30 conversations, which brought me one or two very good qualified leads at Fortune 1000 accounts. Now, I'm getting two or three qualified leads a week, and I would attribute one or two of those to RainKing."

    But the benefits go beyond that, into areas that aren't as quantifiable. "It's just saving me a day of making loads of phone calls. I can just spend 20 minutes looking at a company profile and that answers a lot of the questions already."

    After using static org-charts, Madden stresses that the real-time updating is like night and day. And he's found RainKing's research team to be very responsive. Once he discovered an incorrect email address, and he sent an email to the RainKing research analysts responsible for the record. Within minutes he had a response back, and 10 minutes after that the researcher had sent him the correct email address. "That was hugely impressive," he says.

    RainKing also alerts subscribers to management changes and "hot projects" companies are working on. "That's amazing to me," says Madden. "I go in there every morning. I see X company has this project going or that person's changed roles. While some of them aren't appropriate to what I do, I've often followed up and that's given me a small entrée into the account."

    After years of searching for the perfect sales research method, Madden believes he's found it in RainKing. "RainKing gives me a little bit of an advantage over the big boys, because I can be really really really specific, and really targeted."