Proactively Offer Value as Lead Gen

I’m a big fan of proactively offering value with little friction as a way to generate leads. The most common example of this is free white papers, webinars, and product demos/trials. There’s a newer class of this model that is even more compelling — one that is customized to the specific prospect, but completely self-service.

Here are a few examples:

• Vitrue offers a Facebook brand grader
• Pardot offers a free caller ID service to see the companies on your website
• Netcraft tells you what technologies a site is running

I’m confident we’ll see more of these types of free, simple services in the future as a way to quickly provide value to prospects in an automated manner.

What else? What are some other examples? Do you think we’ll see more?