Our Blog: Roles NOT Titles

Even though I’ve read that surveys conducted this year have shown more than 70% of marketers will shift a large part of their spend to online marketing other surveys have shown that there is no drop in the use of direct mail marketing as a b2b lead generation tactic. Direct mail still has its advantages and can still deliver the desired response rates to b2b marketers. When it succeeds its normally attributed to the content, the layout, the message or a crafty response mechanism. When it fails the fingers tend to point towards the same areas. There is however one other factor which can directly influence the success or failure of a direct mail marketing campaign. The direct marketing list.

Even the most ingenious copy or content for a direct marketing list can yield no results if its directed towards a poor list of recipients. Role based contact lists offer a better foundation for direct mail campaigns. For starters, you know your mailer is directed towards someone within the right role or capacity to act on it. Contact details like names and job titles can be verified again ensuring that you address the prospect right. Most importantly locations and postal addresses can be confirmed so that your mail gets to the right place and the right person. We have seen role based contact lists churn out much better results on campaigns like this and it makes a lot of sense especially if your printed material is expensive and you don’t want it to end up at the wrong location or sitting among unclaimed mail.

If you already have an internal list or purchased list of contacts and you’re still unsure about the quality of the list run it through a list verification process especially to confirm location and address of your prospect which is one of the most critical factors to more opens and reads. In the end you need to know that you have done everything within your capacity to make sure the mail reaches the right person. The rest may not be within direct control but rest assured, you’ve done your bit!

This is an interesting excerpt from DemandGenReport’s interview of Charlene Li about her bestseller, Groundswell.

DGR: You provided a lot of great real-world examples of how companies are using social media to tap into the power of their customers. What are the differences between a B2C social media presence versus the opportunities for B2B marketers.

Li: B2B marketers often think they are marketing to companies – they aren’t. They are marketing to people at companies. In that way, B2B marketing in the groundswell looks a lot like B2C marketing, just at a smaller scale. In fact, I believe that B2B marketers have an advantage in the groundswell – the people you are trying to reach are inclined to have a relationship with you because they want to be listened to, be supported, and embraced because they see a direct correlation and benefit back to their businesses.

This caught my attention because it is something I come across everyday as I speak with CEOs, VPs and Directors of Marketing at technology companies. Most marketers don’t get the fact that they HAVE TO market to people and not to companies. I’d say the “people” part is something that needs to be expanded and understood further. B2B marketers have to spend a lot of time understanding the roles and responsibilities of the “people” who buy their products to fully comprehend how they think and what might excite them. At ReadyContacts, we try to preach this everyday to everyone we speak with because “knowing the people who buy your products” is a key starting point to start targeted sales & marketing 2.0 efforts which are more about conversation, personalization and nurturing rather than cold calling, push marketing and mass mailings.

While directing marketing and sales dollars on phone based, email and direct mail campaigns are a necessity to most businesses, wasting them by running them on poor quality un-verified lists or contact databases would rank on the seven deadly sins list somewhere between greed and sloth. If your business contact lists have been sitting a while before they were actually put into use the chances are a good percentage of those contacts are no longer active contacts and you will still incur expenses on every phone call attempt made to them, every mailer sent to them or every email that bounces or remains unread simply because all those contacts were dead ends to start with.

Using a list verification service on your sales data before running campaigns on them may involve a small initial cost to get done but will leave you with a verified list which will give you better results, clearer metrics of your success rate on the list and help you cut costs by preventing waste of time, resources and money that would have been put into connecting with business contacts who were either unqualified or no longer in those roles. Depending on what type of campaigns you intend to use your B2B list for, verification can be done for contacts, roles, addresses & location, phone numbers, titles or any details which are essential. If you have a new recently developed list for your campaign where you can rely on its quality then go right ahead but the next time you plan to use a list which you are not too sure about consider getting it verified and you’ll be happy with the results.

Telemarketing campaigns are an inherent part of B2B sales and despite some of the difficulties associated with it, it remains one of the most important tools for sales and lead generation for companies everywhere. An effectively executed telemarketing campaign always starts off with an effectively build business contact lists. You’ll often find companies tweaking their sales pitches, adjusting their opening lines, working out objection handling, timing their calling hours and running analytics on results but the target list used was randomly put together from a bunch of different sources or downloaded from an online business contacts database which may not have been ideal for their telemarketing campaign.

An ideal list of contacts for telemarketers should:

• Have the names of direct decision makers to save the sales persons time and connect to the right person
• Contacts that have been identified by roles, not title so the sales person need not spend time finding out if they are talking to the right person
• Should have a direct extension or one-hop number to avoid having to pass through gatekeepers on every attempt to reach the contact
• An email address at hand should it be better to contact the decision maker via email before or after a call
• An alternate contact in a similar capacity should the primary contact be unreachable over a number of attempts
• Any additional information at hand either about the contact or the company which could be useful to know before actually speaking to them

Whether you use a business contacts and sales list building service or build your own customized database remembering these few essential requirements during the list building process will go a long way in making your telemarketing campaign more effective.

When it comes to complex b2b sales and selling a product or service that is so specific in nature that you need to identify an equally specific role within your target organization the options you have before you to source such leads are narrowed down. Most company and contact databases have general contacts which are not role specific. Most vendors who sell b2b lists build these based on titles or departments and will need to be carefully filtered to get what you need. Depending on your product there maybe some niche conference or event lists which may be able to provide you with relevant decision makers but they may few and far between which makes relying on them for a steady supply of leads unpredictable. This is where building tailored business contact lists for such specific roles one of the best options.

In the past we have helped locate roles as specific as engineering decision makers responsible for testing durability of servers used in military installations and tough environments. Managers responsible for storage of R&D engineering data and decision makers who are responsible for analytical software used to predict trends in the market for financial investment organizations. The common trend in all of these is that they are very specific roles in nature and possibly the only ones who can really evaluate the value of the specific offering being pitched to them. The only way to accurately locate these specific decision makers is by connecting within the company and asking around within the right department for the person closest fit to the role. It can be highly time consuming while actually building out the list as tracing specific people within an organization is never easy but can be highly time saving when a salesperson has a direct contact he can connect with and pitch the offering to directly. So if your product is complicated or you need to reach a very specific person within a very specific role, customized lists are your best bet.

The ever so popular scenario in so many businesses today. Marketing teams doing their best to source as many contacts and sales leads to pass on to the sales team only to find the sales team unhappy with the business contacts they are getting and the cycle just continues. Acquiring business contacts and lead lists from various sources to upload them into the company CRM so that sales people can use this data is not an easy task but has to be done to keep supplying fresh business contacts for sales teams to pursue. In the end these efforts will only be effective if the sales folks who have to make use of these contacts are satisfied with them. So just what do they look for in a contact list? Well if I were selling and received a list of business contacts here are a few things I would like to see in them:

• I would like to pick a business contact, pick up the phone & dial the phone knowing well that I am reaching someone in the right role who knows exactly what I’m talking about when I speak to him/her and wont say “you’ve got the wrong person and thats not really my area”
• I would like to have complete contact information for that person so that I can call, email or send something via snail mail for the person handy without having to spend my time digging it up
• I would like to have a direct number or extension for the contact wherever possible so I can by pass gatekeepers and connect with them quicker
• I would like to know that if I post something to the contact at the address provided it will go to the right place and not to a location which may belong to the same company but not where the contact is located
• I would like to know that when I call a contact that he does in fact exist in the company and hasn’t left the organization last year which is often the case with older data that has been on the shelf for a while

A business contact may not necessarily be a qualified lead and sales folks don’t always expect this but a well built list where extra care has been taken to insure you have a correct and verified contact to connect with in your target accounts can make life a lot easier on them and more importantly a lot more effective in a shorter time as against working with poor quality contact lists and data. Invest your resources in a better source of business contacts and keep your sales team happy.

Do you sell into companies which are are Salesforce.com customers? If the answer is yes then I can relate to your need to build a database of very specific contacts who are directly responsible for managing Salesforce.com for their companies in order to get any traction with sales and marketing campaigns. While the higher level Vice President of Marketing or Vice President of Sales are usually the final decision makers for salesforce.com application add ons and related products, the sales operations or SFDC manager is the person who often makes a great point of contact to start selling. It is this contact which is a perfect example of some of the valuable role-based contact discovery we have done here at Ready Contacts.

While building a target list for companies who sell into Salesforce.com companies there are two universal questions they need to know about each account they plan on selling into:

• Does this company use salesforce.com as their CRM?
• If yes, who is the person directly responsible for salesforce.com operations and managing the use of SFDC within this company?

While in some companies Salesforce.com is directly overseen by a VP, Marketing in others it can managed by a Sales Operations Director, CRM Manager, Salesforce.com Manager, Marketing Manager or others based on the structure of the company. In certain cases this person could also be within the IT department and directly oversee Salesforce administration and day to day operations related to the CRM. Knowing who is the best person within the organization to speak to discuss Salesforce.com related requirements is essential to approach these accounts and locating these contacts and building your lead database can be a time consuming task but should be worth your effort. A consistent effort of navigating marketing departments at target accounts and qualifying them to understand whether they use Salesforce.com will help build a steady pipeline of leads and then talking to folks within marketing and sales will really help you determine who to sell to within the organization and give you that dependable database on which you can build an effective sales effort. So if you sell into Salesforce.com customers focus on building a great list. The rest will follow.

When you are selling into mid-sized and large organizations, most likely you have multiple business contacts within your target account who drive, influence and take decisions. Depending on the industry vertical as well as the way your target accounts are organized, it is possible to have varied business contacts who take part in the decision making process. For example, if you are selling a web security product in the Education, Banking and Health care markets, you will find that the types and roles of contacts who drive the final decision in each of these verticals are varied. Understanding the web of contacts that drive and influence decisions for your product is critical for your sales and marketing success. Before you embark on expensive email, direct mail and telemarketing campaigns, the first order of business must be to acquire all business contacts at your target accounts who are expected to take part in the overall decision making process.

It is also critical to understand how every industry vertical may be different before defining who are your target contacts in each of the verticals. We recommend that you identify these by the roles and responsibilities they hold so that you get the right set of contacts to start with. Missing the mark on this critical foundational piece can lead to failure of all subsequent sales & marketing campaigns. Focus on understanding your decision makers and define them well for every vertical. Then simply build out a list of such role-specific decision makers and influencers to create your core CRM database of business contacts who you care about the most. Getting this right is crucial and its important to use the right team internally or outsource list building to the right vendors who gets it.

Fail on the core list and you will just see more failures in your sales & marketing campaigns. The list is at the heart of your sales machine, and its success or failure.

Finding very specific role based contacts at deeper levels within an organization structure can be critical to connecting with the right people for your sales. While you can start building a list of higher level contacts like CIO’s, CTO’s and some of the top VP level contacts using ready lead databases like Hoovers, Onesource and ActiveContacts, purchasing ready lists from vendors or using search engines to dig them up building a list of help desk contacts who are responsible for issues regarding email security is a lot more specific in nature and needs a completely different approach.

Research using search engines and most databases wont turn out great results for such specific contacts at this level. Calling into the target account and navigating via phone till you find the right person by role will ensure you have a much stronger list. To find these help desk contacts who look after email security:

• Call into the company and connect to the CIO’s office and ask to be connected to the IT help desk or the person in charge of the IT help desk
• Using reference contacts which you get from the Admin to the CIO or the CIO’s assistant who generally know the IT organization structure very well find your way to the IT help desk or a more general contact within the IT department
• Once you’re connected to someone at the IT help desk ask for the person within the help desk who is generally responsible for handling issues related specifically to email security. If you can’t connect to anyone at the help desk but can manage to speak to someone within IT who may know the right person to contact for any issues related to email security, possibly at the It help desk.
• Once you have the persons name and role confirmed you can check back with the CIO’s office for any specific details like an email address which you can use to get in touch with the contact

In depth contacts like this can provide you with great leverage in the sales and make a good starting point for any sales person but there are no easy short cuts to building a great b2b lead list of operational level business contacts. If you need to get to the root of this, you have to dig deep!

Conference lists and relying on them completely as your source of leads is a thing of the past. Buying conference lists as target lists for running campaigns is always an option but its not always everything its cut out to be. Some of the drawbacks of conference lists are:

• They are a list of potential prospects who attended a conference and not a list of your own ideal target accounts
• The attendees list of a conference may or may not be the best point of contact for your campaign and although they may be generally relevant to your campaign the key decision maker for your product or service may be in another role
• While if the conference list is very recent most of the data including contact details should be fresh and accurate but dated conference lists sold well after the actual event can have outdated data and may not be as effective in the campaigns
• Unless every company or attendee at that conference is a potential target for your business there is a good chance you will end up paying for data that you don’t need in the form of accounts or attendees that are not relevant to your campaigns
• The right conferences don’t always happen according to your sales plan and targets so relying on them completely for your lists may not be the best sources to depend on

Developing custom B2B lead lists can involve more work but can be highly effective since they overcome the drawbacks of traditional conference lists. With on demand lead list building services like ReadyContacts.com the process can easily be outsourced for a price thats well worth the ROI and provide better value than traditional conference lists. So the next time you find yourself waiting for the next conference to happen so you can find new contacts to fill up the lead funnel, try a customized list building effort and you may be pleasantly surprised.