Prayag Narula, CEO of LeadGenius, sat down with Demand Gen Report to discuss how B2B sales and marketing organizations are prioritizing personalization with the help of micro-segments, the right data and efficient campaign planning.

In this interview, Prayag discusses how being a marketer has never been both easy and difficult all at the same time.

The company is in the business of assembling B2B marketing lists – an industry dating back centuries to city directories and beyond.

LeadGenius, a Berkeley, Calif.-based account based marketing platform, raised $4m in debt and equity Series B funding.

It’s the one element most online marketers believe every B2B business must have. Account-based marketing is the hot area for service providers, with B2B vendors across all industries rushing to add it to their suite of online solutions.

"LeadGenius announced today that it has raised $10 million in Series B funding.... the company says revenue increased 6x in the past 20 months, with customers including eBay, Box and Weebly."

LeadGenius is focused on so-called Account-Based Marketing, which is an approach to B2B marketing, where sales people send out highly-personalized messages using multiple channels to different decision makers. Today, much of this outbound marketing activity is done through point solutions, said Kulkarni. "Our customers are using a huge variety of partial solutions. They'd use Dun & Bradstreet to construct a list of customers. Then they'd use a separate tool, like LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and then a third tool to send an email, like Yesware for email. We bring these tools under one umbrella."

The company’s software can mine the web and create a directory of individual decision makers at targeted companies, creating a profile for each company in the database. Current LeadGenius customers include eBay, Box and Weebly. "What Marketo does for inbound marketing, we will do for outbound marketing," said co-founder and Chief Executive Prayag Narula.

LeadGenius uses innovative technology to deliver the highest-quality contacts to businesses based on their ideal account profiles. LeadGenius’ ability to deliver custom leads at scale will boost your marketing team’s contact database, giving you an edge over the competition, no matter what your industry.

LeadGenius has emerged as a category leading tool in the sales stack. Over the past three years, LeadGenius has grown from a Y Combinator-backed start up to an essential lead generation and outbound solution for some of the biggest names in the game

MobileWorks hires mostly college graduates with skills like research, writing and editing photos. Companies come to them with a task and they find the right workers to do it. They can work from anywhere. It's all online."The biggest secret sauce that we have is that we believe in paying people fair wages. We believe that if people are invested in the projects, they would do better work," said [Prayag] Narula.

[Video] Alex Ohanian (founder of Reddit) on why MobileWorks works

“This is the next logical step,” [Anand] says, of hiring a mobile workforce. “Companies are finding they need more flexibility than just hiring folks in their own backyards. If they find someone who is really talented, and willing to work 10-to-20 hours a week, they can hire that staffer no matter where they are in the world.”But not just any worker with an Internet connection makes the cut, Kulkarni warns. The company gives a series of aptitude tests to those who apply, and then matches their skill sets up with companies in need. One of the company’s founding principles, he says, is paying better wages for workers.

Startup founders, especially those up to their necks in product development, don’t always have the head for building the kinds of customer bases required to keep their business afloat.That’s where Y Combinator alum MobileWorks comes in. It first raised funding for its approach to building a virtual, on-demand workforce, and now it’s trying to bring that distributed team to bear on another weighty problem: building up a user base. Long story short, MobileWorks CEO Anand Kulkarni is trying to offer user acquisition as a service with a feature called LeadGenius (though I think we can all agree that UAaaS doesn’t have a great ring to it).

[Anand] "We're going after temp agencies and big outsourcing firms. In the offline staffing space, you're talking Adecco and Manpower controlling a $9 billion market. It's an industry that's screaming to be brought into the modern age. And even the online marketplaces out there, it's a question of vouching for quality. And then there's traditional outsourcing: Wipro, Infosys, et cetera, which are way too expensive for small organizations or individuals."

The usual turnaround time is 24-48 hours, which might strike you as a bit long, but I didn't mind because it's work I didn't have to do. Pricing starts at $49 per month for 2 hours of work and tops out at 160 hours a month for $1499 – this means you could hire a full-time "employee" (which is actually a crowd of thousands of people) for about $9 per hour.

In fact, many of MobileWorks’ business clients — the users of those first million tasks — were startups that built entire products while using MobileWorks’ labor force. Jessica Mah,the young CEO of Indinero (the company which has been dubbed “The Mint.com for small business”) said that MobileWorks had become the backbone of a few of its major products.