Big Data for Lead Generation

Going back to the idea of Technopology, I’ve started thinking about how the idea of “Big Data” comes into play, because analyzing large sets of data about your customers and your industry can create useful insights for sales and marketing. There are early adopters with this thinking and more and more businesses are beginning to look at how to harness their data from a variety of sources so they can improve operations, create new solutions, understand their customer better, and even use it to improve their sales cycle. 

Microsoft is certainly getting into the game with everything from supporting Hadoop and Hive to making the data available through a variety of services, including Excel.

What I would like to see is a solution that taps into some of the data sources available through the Windows Azure Marketplace, and based on some pre-defined business logic, automatically trigger the creation of tasks in a CRM system as a method of lead generation. This way, when world events happen, or even certain types of news related to my customer, a task can be added for me in my CRM system telling me to call my customer with a suggested topic already identified.

I’ll be thinking of examples, but please share your own ideas with me in the comments or via Twitter: @BrianGroth