Our Blog: Roles NOT Titles

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.