Founded in 2013, LeadCrunch offers an artificial intelligence platform for generating business-to-business (B2B) leads. Olin Hyde, the CEO and Co-founder of LeadCrunch, talks on why branding matters in B2B marketing, his brand name, domains, and will AI replace salespeople in the foreseeable future.

What does Leadcrunch do and how was the idea for it born?

LeadCrunch is artificial intelligence for business-to-business marketing. It finds best-fit prospects and generates qualified leads and appointments by running campaigns. We enable companies to scale demand and control how they grow. Unlike legacy tools like ABM, intent, and firmographic targeting, our self-learning A.I. finds missed opportunities, reduces waste, and accelerates revenue. We charge on a cost-per-result basis. So our customers can buy what they need when they need it. We do not sell subscriptions at this time.

The idea for LeadCrunch was born out of work we did for the US Navy to improve military targeting. 

If you could have any name in the world, would you still pick LeadCrunch.com? Why?

Yes. LeadCrunch reflects what we do (generate leads) and how we do it (crunch numbers). We are a highly analytical company that strives to measure everything that matters. Our culture is driven by six core values to turn our customers into heroes. First, we recruit our team to select people who are masterful, purposeful, and autonomous. Then we have another three values to define how we turn these individuals into a cohesive team: focus, optimism, and trust. These values are rooted in behavioral economics and the psychological studies of survivors and champions.

If there is a better name for us, then it would be more about our culture than what we do. That said, LeadCrunch is a recognizable brand. And it’s a name that is at least as good as Amazon. What does Amazon the company have to do with Amazon the jungle, river, or region? The same can be said of Apple. It’s dumb only if you don’t know it.

Who is your target customer and how is your brand name helping in reaching them?

We serve enterprises that are experienced in demand generation. More than 500 enterprises have used LeadCrunch over the past three years. So yes, as one of the fastest-growing companies in the USA, it’s safe to say our brand name is reaching our customers.

We learned that we deliver the most value to customers who run multiple campaigns. This gives our A.I. the ability to learn the true nature of our customers’ customers. We excel in markets where there is a high customer lifetime value, a complex selling environment, and where the sale is fairly technical.

We often hear entrepreneurs say “We are B2B, our brand doesn’t matter that much”, you seem to have a strong brand and very professional presence online, why is that?

B2B brands matter in a different way. Personalization and emotional connection drive consumer marketing. Conversion rates for B2B marketing actually go down when you personalize messages. Why? Businesses make decisions with groups of people. These groups seek consensus. So B2B branding is more about enabling groups of people to make informed decisions than it is about making them feel good about themselves.

As I said earlier, our brand is built around what we do and how we do it. This works for technical buyers. Our best customers are analytical marketers. They want to know why we are different from other demand generation competitors.

We are always seeking to improve our online presence. The big idea about mastery is that you never achieve it. This is why we have achieved our status in such a short period of time. If you are trying to solve a problem as hard as demand generation, then humility should come naturally.

Our approach would not work for consumer brands. If you used our approach to name a television company, you’d come up with something like “Entertaining Diodes.” This works great until TV technology evolves past diodes. If you used our approach to building a professional presence, you might name your show “We’re Learning”… which is probably too honest of a title to attract a big star.

Do you operate globally? Is there a minimum size for a business for them to be a good fit for your services?

Yes, LeadCrunch generates demand on a global scale. We work with any business that sells to other businesses that have at least 100 customers for us to use a model to find their next 100 prospects. We typically like to see our customers have a marketing department with at least 20 professionals and have at least 12 unique pieces of content, such as case studies, white papers, etc.

You have the .ai domain as do many businesses related to AI. You do have the .com across social media and as your main domain, what drives that decision?

Good catch. When A.I. works, we call it software. When it doesn’t work, we see a lot of people promoting artificial intelligence. Early on, we resisted mentioning AI since there were so many people claiming to have AI when all they had was software. We took the approach of proving it works by delivering remarkable results. Now we see that many of our customers want to know about A.I. They want it demystified. So we spend a lot of time educating customers with “lunch and learn” sessions. We really don’t think social media is a good place to teach something as complex as “how AI works.”

Our .ai domain redirects to our .com domain. We own both. The decision was to stick with .com as it has more links and SEO.

Can AI beat a good salesperson? Do you think it will eventually completely replace the need to have salespeople?

No. A.I. will not replace salespeople in the foreseeable future. They serve different functions. A.I. augments human decision making by analyzing vast amounts of information to find patterns. Salespeople serve a higher purpose: They build relationships between people by overcoming fear, doubt, and uncertainty.

The need for salespeople is absolute. Without them, your company will die. The need for A.I. is discretionary. If none of your competitors have it, then you can live without it. But now that A.I. has gone mainstream, you must have both. Combining a great salesperson with A.I. tuned to understand your business enables you to crush your competition. Think of the salesperson as the tennis player and A.I. as the racquet that delivers unassailable advantages.

What would you advise B2B entrepreneurs on naming, branding, and online presence?

Do a better job than we did. Earlier is better for branding and naming. Once you get above $10M in sales and are growing at 100% per year, it becomes a painful and expensive distraction to change names or think about branding. No one wants to slow a train down to change names. One of my VC’s portfolio companies had a terrible name yet grew to $50M ARR in less than 3 years. Then they spent $1M on changing to a better name. It cost them a year of growth and some excruciating board meetings while marketing had to explain why it was necessary for the long-run It was. That company is on track to exceed $100M two years later.

What should your audience expect from you now, what’s next for Leadcrunch?

We are here to help our customers win. When you become a LeadCrunch customer, you can count on increasing your customer lifetime value as you reduce your customer acquisition costs. We deliver the best leads with the most accurate information. 99.5% of all leads we deliver are accepted by our customers. That’s 30x better than our competitors.

The next step for LeadCrunch is to start to expose some of our tools to the general market for free. You can expect to see LeadCrunch do things similar to what HubSpot did with their WebSiteGrader.com.

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