My lunch with Dennis Totah, President of Catapult

I had a great lunch yesterday with the visionary, Dennis Totah, President and Founder of Catapult Target Profiling. These guys have their pulse on the lead generation world. As we move into the Sales 2.0 world, companies like Catapult are doing their share of bringing the sales and marketing efforts together.

Their business model is unique and growing extremely fast because they provide services which are spot on with today’s needs:

Contact Discovery and List Building- the cleanest and most customized list anyone would want
Telemarketing- their skilled agents get out there and make the right contacts
Telebusiness and Lead Generation Process Design and Implementation Consulting- they simplify this process so it can scale
Database Management and Processing- they know what a time sink dirty data can be and scrub it well
Salesforce.com Implementaton and Consulting- no more complaining about Salesforce plug-ins when you can figure out how to work around it.

We talked about the state of the telebusiness industry and since my focus is on talent and their focus is on providing the best tools, we compared notes. As Dennis said, “you can give bad reps good leads and they may still mess up or you can give good reps good leads and see dramatic improvements and efficiencies.” So I guess, a lead is as only as good as the talent that stands behind it.

Another thing I agree with Catapult about is that they encourage organizations to build their own lists. This maintains the high quality of the lead, helps create stronger branding and relationship opportunities and also more ownership. It’s amazing how many inside organization task their expensive inside reps with phone jock activities that don’t pay off. Sure, they get their 60 outbounds per day and their talk time is high but the return on their efforts is low quality leads.