Marketing Lead Generation - Push or Pull Strategy.

In one of my networking websites there was an interesting debate on Push Vs Pull strategy for Lead generation in an IT company. I have explained the concepts and my thoughts on theese strategies.

We all have been using various strategies to generate business leads and maintain a pipe line. Some strategies work for you in which you generate interest and in some strategies Customers hover around you looking for solutions.
The strategy could be defined in 2 ways. (For those who don't know)
A “pull” selling strategy is one that requires high spending on advertising and consumer promotion to build up consumer demand for a product. E.g. Advertising a White Paper, Online Advertisements, and Website Inquires et al.
A “push” promotional strategy makes use of a company's sales force and trade promotion activities to create consumer demand for a product. E.g. Cold Calling, Webinars etc.

In Perspective to the It industry I feel Push strategy is suitable for most of the IT industry as per se. With experience I have learnt that there is safety in numbers as most of the companies are small or medium scale, very few which have reached the status of Infosys, TCS et all. These companies need a lot of prospects in a pipeline so that they can convert an get more projects in. So methods like cold emailing and cold calling work best to the advantage. Even though if one has the resources even then I recommend a balance of pull and push strategies.

I work in a medium sized web 2.0 specialist company called Tekriti software (www.tekritisoftware.com) who specialise in providing services in open source technology to media, social, retail and ecommerce companies in the US, UK and the Indian market. I use a mix of both the strategies but always focus mostly on push selling methods / strategy and it gives the best results.

Will come try and keep posting articles as and when I get the time.
Vikram Sahay Mathur