inding quality leads for new customers is both a necessity and a challenge for any salesperson. How do you know if you're finding the right people? How do you know if you're finding the best leads? How do you know if you're being creative enough in your search? Do you have enough time to keep up with all of that?

TrueAdvantage, Inc. is an answer to each of those questions. Its sales intelligence and lead-generation services help all sorts of companies identify and close new business. It specializes in gathering information and then tailoring it for each of its clients, based on industry focus as well as products and services.

In short, TrueAdvantage helps companies transform information into intelligence, which allows salespeople to target prospects who are more likely to buy. Its lead-generation services are customizable to meet the needs of any business, from small ones to Fortune 500 companies.

These days, sales organizations across the board need to focus their prospecting efforts on companies that "are more likely to buy" products and services. How a company identifies these prospects gives it a strategic advantage over the competition. Companies are realizing their biggest opportunity for success lies in how they sell.

Salespeople have had to adapt, too, using new ways to find prospects, qualify them, develop the opportunities and manage the ensuing relationships. The Internet and other electronic resources, for example, provide a wealth of background information for researching potential customers.

In the past, people have bought prospect lists based on a potential customer's profile, which, in turn, is based on revenue, industry or number of employees. Using these lists, salespeople needed to make hundreds of phone calls to unqualified prospects.

TrueAdvantage's Sales Intelligence Data Base and Customized Lead Generation Programs take a lot of that guesswork out of the process and provide some creative ways to generate business for yourself or your organization. By aggregating data into one database to give a "one-stop shop" approach to prospecting leads, TrueAdvantage puts salespeople in the right place at the right time.

"About four years ago, Jaret Christopher, TrueAdvantage's CEO and founder, was researching projects for his clients by calling on companies and going onto the Internet. He was searching out the information on his own and forwarding the information and leads to people," said Andrew Connelly, who oversees business development for TrueAdvantage. "He started a bigger business, got people to invest and developed a technology that turned into the information-mining systems that TrueAdvantage uses today."

Christopher's company patented a Web crawler and proprietary database to locate and package the information.

"Millions of companies have been researched," Connelly said. "We started at the top, with Fortune 500 companies. We then looked into all publicly traded companies. We have now researched millions of businesses, including even the smallest businesses across the the entire United States."

The true advantage in using TrueAdvantage to search out sales lead information is not just the sheer volume of data the company is able to gather. It really comes from the variety of ways that information can be interpreted and ultimately used for generating solid leads.

"For each of the companies we've researched, an intelligence report will provide overview information, like who the principal clients, investors and partners are," Connelly said. Those intelligence reports are "sliced up" or tailored and grouped to each TrueAdvantage subscriber's particular business focus. "The first step in mining information is our patented Web crawler. The crawler and our research staff look for certain business events or trigger events."

Seven categories of trigger events then are recorded in the proprietary Sales Intelligence database and can help salespeople determine the health of a company and spot areas of industry growth or new trends.

"Every time an emerging company or any other company receives venture funding, we know," Connelly said. "We track new business deals, so when a company lands a contract or a business is seeking contracting help, we know that. We know about any in-person or online filings for new incorporations. Any time a business relocates, signs a new lease or files for building permits, we know that, too.

"Our 'hiring hound,' or hiring intelligence, tells us which companies in the U.S. are hiring in a variety of positions. Any management changes - who has been appointed to which position at which company - are also tracked. Any mergers and acquisitions that happen in the U.S. are noted also."

Before the information is posted to the database, it goes through a quality-control approval process, Connelly said. Each event has a date as well as up-to-the-second time listed so that subscribers know how current the information is.

"We aggregate information from many sources," Connelly said, "prospecting databases across various industries. For example, we can capture information on company relocations based on orders placed for furniture or telecommunications services. Then we go and research that company. "

Along with the Web crawler and database, TrueAdvantage also utilizes old-fashioned man/woman power. It has a staff of almost 100 that spends time on the Internet mining information on companies. TrueAdvantage also partners with third-party vendors.

"We have a lot of different relationships. We have 150 different content partners who may be able to find information we haven't come across, that we may be able to license, purchase or promote," Connelly said.

On the TrueAdvantage Web site, subscribers can do broad searches or pinpoint certain industries and companies for narrowing prospects. Different sections of the site store archived information for tracking buying trends; a prospect manager for tracking contacts helps follow up with prospects and accounts. Connelly said the database gets updated with improvements for better mining about every two weeks.

Subscribers also receive daily e-mails with updated leads and information on any industry, company or trigger event. Connelly said there is a training department to show new subscribers all of the features of the service.

For salespeople who would like to branch out and broaden their business horizons, subscribing to TrueAdvantage makes sense. As Connelly said, "We're not just loading up information. We're making prospecting smarter."