LeadMachine Refines Sales Prospecting to Improve Return On Investment; Ziff-Davis' Web-Based Sales Tool Pre-Qualifies Trade-Show Generated Leads

Business Wire, May 11, 1999

LA JOLLA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 11, 1999--

Ziff-Davis (NYSE:ZD) today announced that LeadMachine, a powerful web-based sales and marketing tool from ZD Market Intelligence (ZDMI), can help companies refine sales prospecting and improve return on investment.

Trade shows like NetWorld Interop represent an enormous opportunity to generate sales leads. In fact, company sales representatives will meet more potential customers in one hour on the show floor than they will in one month in the field. Tradeshow generated leads can be sound, but turning them into sales requires prompt follow-up with the most promising contacts. While this crucial step can be cumbersome, LeadMachine simplifies the process by doing the research and automatically posting the results to a password-protected Web site.

"Most technology companies do a great job of generating sales leads through trade shows, direct mail and advertising," explained Larry Friedberg, Vice President of Product Planning. "But if the lead is not pre-qualified, tracked and responded to quickly, the company has lost a sale, wasted marketing dollars and in turn, negatively impacted its return on investment. LeadMachine can help companies avoid this problem by giving sales teams direct Internet access to the latest pre-qualified leads by territory, product or company."

By matching company-sourced leads against ZDMI's comprehensive database of 10 million US businesses, LeadMachine pre-qualifies and tracks, by source, a company's prospective customers. Pre-qualified customer leads, or Smart Leads, are posted by ZDMI on a password-protected Web site for easy access by the company's sales force or marketing department. Smart Leads provide a complete picture of the prospective customer, including key contact, enterprise and technology information - everything needed to quickly close a sale. Once Smart Leads are identified, ZDMI takes it a step further by calling all Smart Leads to see which are ready to buy. Those that are ready to buy are qualified as Hot Leads. Either way, ZDMI notifies the company by email any time new prospective customer data is added to its Web site.

In addition to providing complete data on qualified leads, ZDMI's LeadMachine also provides a comprehensive Internet-accessible database metrix that allows companies to maintain ongoing, end-to-end control of their prospective customer database. With a click of a mouse, sales organizations can determine:

-- How many names were originally searched; -- How many out of that number were sorted as hot leads; -- How many of those hot leads were called; -- How many of those called were qualified; and -- How many of those qualified were closed.

About ZD Market Intelligence

ZD Market Intelligence, formerly Computer Intelligence, is a leading provider of sales and marketing solutions to a wide spectrum of computer and telecommunications companies. More than 10,000 users access ZD Market Intelligence data on a regular basis.

ZD Market Intelligence's extensive research capabilities provide a variety of products and services that help companies sell and market more effectively. All are based on proprietary-information databases of technology usage and buying activity in large- to medium-size businesses and homes.

Headquartered in La Jolla, ZD Market Intelligence has U.S. offices in Cambridge, Mass., Norwalk, Conn.; Sunnyvale, Calif.; and Dallas, Texas. European headquarters are in Paris, with sales offices in the United Kingdom, Germany and Spain, and sales agents in Belgium and Switzerland. Samples of ZD Market Intelligence's extensive marketing solutions, including electronic demonstrations of LeadMachine, SalesNet and EnterpriseView are available on the company's World Wide Web site, www.zdmi.com.

About Ziff-Davis

Ziff-Davis is a leading integrated media and marketing company focused on Internet-related technologies, with principal platforms in print publishing, trade shows and conferences, on-line content, television, market research and education. The Company provides global marketing and media strategies for reaching key technology decision-makers worldwide.