Every book on business and best practices emphasizes why you should buy only as much as you need and when you need it. Overstocking anything in large quantities much before you are ready to use or process it is a cardinal sin in manufacturing or production practices. No one would dream of splurging budget in advance on piling up stock, most of which will not even end up being used. Then why do it with purchasing business contacts lists for sales or marketing campaigns?

I recently read a great post by Brandon Hull of SalesTeamTools.com titled “Sales Leads: Why Buy 5,000 When You Only Need 50?” which simply resonates the point we drive to our customers as well as other marketers.  Build more focussed lists of business contacts that you need and ‘pay as you go’ so that you are not paying for what you dont need or dont need at this point of time.

Here are some reasons why it makes sense to take only as much as you need:

• Spending thousands of dollars on an annual subscription to a large database like which have millions of contacts when you may use a few hundred contacts through the year would be paying for something you dont need.
• Investing a sizeable portion of your budget on a large database subscription in advance means you are blocking a part of your budget and you have incurred a cost well before you need to.
• Business contact data is perishable and has a shelf life. Purchasing a large list well before you are ready to run your campaign will be a waste with data going bad while its waiting and will need to be cleansed before its ready to use again.
• Smaller customized lists tailored for your campaign and has only those contacts you need will help you measure your ROI a lot more clearly and give you better results for your spend.
• By paying for only as many contacts as you need you can control your costs and stretch your lead generation dollars much further by controling waste
• You break away from the bad habbit of trying to pitch to every company out there whether qualified or not just because you have their contact information and start making your campaigns more focussed by acquiring contacts only within accounts that you feel are qualified.

When it comes to sales, marketing and looking through good crm data there is a quick acid test that I use. If you can look at a record and it helps you completely visualize the company/customer and instantly help you profile or score it as a good prospect or not…then you have good data. It may not be as comprehensive as a lead profile created by having conversations with a target account but good data gives you enough key information points for you to answer a few questions with a quick glance and give you a fairly clear idea of what kind of an account it is. When you look at a target account, the least it should answer is:

• What is the name of the organization?
• Where is it located?
• What is the website url?
• What vertical is it in and what do they do?
• How many employees does it have?
• Whats their annual revenue?

From these data points you can conclude the kind of company, where they are located and its size in terms of revenues and employee strenght and see if it fits your criteria. However based on your product or offering, there are always other questions that you can have answered by adding additional data points to your crm data. For example:

• Is the company listed on an exchange?
• Does it have a holding company or what is the company structure like?
• How many outlets or locations does it have around the world?
• How many locations does it have operating within the United States?
• What were the last major press releases and news events related to this account?
• What are the divisions and product lines of this organization?
• Which countries does it operate in?

Having worked with companies in the telecommunications and messaging technology space we’ve also understood the importance of being able to build very focussed role based lists of telecom decision makers within their target accounts as a source for leads. While in larger organizations there can be a more disticnt telecom department headed by a ‘Vice President, Telecommunications’, in other organizations the role of telecom management, messaging and communications may be the role of an IT Director or Infrastructure Manager depeneding on the type of organization. Selling communications technology in to larger companies can be especially cumbersome unless you have identified the right decision maker which can be that one person in a thousand who can really understand your offering and evaluate what it can offer his/her organization. 

The exact nature of your product or service can make a big difference to the best contacts to reach out to as well. For example the decision maker for a telecom expense management product, a mobile messaging application and a VOIP based calling solution can well be three different people within the same organization. This is all the more reason a role based approach towards identifying your buyers plays an important role in selling successfuly into your target accounts. 

Another aspect to building lists for the telecom vertical is for most offereings, qualification and profiling of each account plays an important role. Knowing the number of users or understanding the potential size of each account can be instrumental in qualifying whether the account is worth going after or not and can save a lot of time and resources if they have been qualified at an earlier stage.

While lead generation through websites, events and other channels are great sources for leads within this segment, when it comes to aggressively going after specific accounts you have on your list, role based decision maker list building is the way to go! 

It’s great to see an SEM campaign that you have recently invested in generate a few hundred or so inbound leads. Just how much of those are really qualified to go into your lead nurturing process or how many of them are sales ready? Its common to see leads generated through online ad clicks go straight to a CRM and enter the lead nurturing stream or get assigned straight away to sales without being qualified or scored. In reality only a small percentage of those hundred odd leads may be qualified leads which are worth following up on. An even smaller percentage maybe actionable sales ready leads which need to be followed up on right away. The rest of the leads that are completely unqualified whould be filtered from the process ahead before they enter the nurture or sales cycle. Here is why you should put in a lead qualification process as soon as they are generated :

• Unqualified leads will bloat up your lead pipeline and have you believing you have more good leads to work with than you really do
• Unless the leads are qualified and sorted, you wont know how effective that SEM or online campaign was. Total leads will give you volume of leads generated and only qualified leads which can be used will really give you metrics on how effective it was
• With more unqualified leads in the funnel, you will end up wasting time and money reaching out or trying to nurture and lead that was not a prospect for your product or service in the first place

Eran Livneh of MarketCapture.com did a post on “The killer demo: why demos are killing your sales” which has some good takes on how even great demos can sometimes kill your sales chances if a few fundamental things are not done right. One of the four reasons he mentions why demos often fail to bag the sale is :

The people interested in the demo is usually not the people that can buy

While getting buy-in from the intended user is important, the key to making the sale is reaching the decision makers. Most decision makers are not interested in the details. They want to know how you’re going to solve their business problems, not how your screens look like. Many of them wouldn’t even know what to look for in the demo. If the person you are dealing with is asking to see a demo that’s a clear red flag.

I was going through an interesting post by Chris Golec of Demandbase titlted “The 5 Key Elements of Microtargeting” and it’s a great read since the practice of microtargeting campaigns to get better results is gaining in popularity among marketers and sales persons. From our own experience we know that communicating highly relevant messages to focussed target groups can yield much better results than spending on hitting large lists of irrelavant contacts. Two of the elements (points 2 & 3) in particular which Chris mentions:

1. Do not sacrifice quality to save pennies: If not updated, any given list is likely to become more than 25 percent out of date after just one year. Microtargeting only works if you have fresh, high-quality contact data.
   
2. Only buy the business contacts you need: Many data providers require marketers to buy large lists of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of contacts to meet their minimum. Yet, a highly targeted campaign may only focus on an audience of hundreds, or even fewer. Over-sending to thousands to fulfill the data provider’s requirements is a recipe for disaster.

If you are a Salesforce.com user and have an active account with a good amount of data being updated regularly within the CRM, then you would also have noticed the need to have your Salesforce data cleaned. If your sales machine is more efficient by using a great technology platform like Salesforce.com, then bad data is an issue you need to have a solution handy for to prevent any inefficiencies that it can cause. Luckily, there are a number of solutions out there to evaluate which you can find in the form of a salesforce.com appexchange application which can connect with your SFDC account or a data cleansing service to keep your data healthy. However before we go to the solutions, here are some of the common problems when it comes to salesforce data:

•  Duplication - possibly one of the most common problems and creates redundancy as well as inaccurate reports
• Incomplete records - from missing contact details to incomplete mailing addresses or annual revenue figures there are usually several important data points which can be missing and need to be completed
• Junk Data - inbound web leads with garbage values, data from download campaigns and lists which have junk records, these accumulate within the database and serve no purpose. 
• Expired Data - contacts who are no longer active, company addresses which have changed, companies which have been acquired or merged. Expired data needs to be updated to be useful again
•  Unclassified Data - records which have made it into the database without being labeled correctly or allocated to a campaign, a source, owner or category. 
• Non-Standardized Data - unformatted data with differences in following a standardized nomenclature, currency, address format etc

Migration from one CRM system to another or even swicthing from managing customer data in spreadsheets to Salesforce.com or some other CRM can be tedious. Once you have your new CRM configured and ready to use, although adding new records that were not previously there is quite simple, shifting previous data into your new CRM often needs a good amount of effort and a few things you need to pay close attention to. The data in your existing format may need some amount of formatting, enrichment and cleansing before its ready to upload into the new system and instead of considering it an evil that comes with the migration process, you could also look at it as an opportunity to get your data cleaned up and in shape to reuse within your new system.

Here are a few tips to keep in mind while migrating your CRM data:

• Remember “Murphy’s Law” and make sure you have an exact back up of your previous data and your new CRM as it stands before the migration porcess so that if anything goes wrong you can roll back to where you were before it all went wrong.
• Check a data upload format or a some reference which tells you which additional data fields are compulsory in the new CRM and identify how it’s different from the fields you currently have or your existing structure for records.
• Carry out a data append effort to add any additional data items that are missing, remove those that are not required and make sure you have complete records which are ready to be migrated to the new CRM. If you dont have the bandwidth to do this internally, make use of a data cleansing service like on ReadyContacts.com 
• Use the opportunity of having to go through all the data to update it, normalize what is there and ensure its ready to reuse.
• Categorize your and label your data very systematically as soon as its moved to the new system, It makes retrival much easier and the more data you have which has not been put under the right sets, campaigns or is not labelled, the messier the database will be at a later stage.
• Put into practice any policies on entering data as soon as users switch to it so they are familiar with the new requirements and are particular about data that goes into the system from day one.

Here is the report on the conversion of qualified web leads to oppotunities generated between Saturday and Sunday with an estimated closing time of between 2 and 3 weeks. Here is another report of total leads generated by various channels and the return on investement for the first half of last month. Here is the ratio of emails sent with projections for revenues of next month based on last years open rates. Just because your CRM software gives you a million reports and does analytics like nobody’s business, it doesnt mean you need to use all of them.

With all the analytics features available now, it can get confusing if you are tracking 30 different metrics every week to understand where your lead generation or sales figures stand at that point of time. Printing and analyzing unnecessary reports can actually become more a bottle neck in your lead management process rather than being  a source for information which can help you better it. In short, if you spent half a day on reprimanding your sales team for a reduced number of sales calls and number of hours spent logged onto the CRM as compared to last month when your monthly revenue from qualified opportunities was actually higher this month…..then you are missing the point.  Too many data points to analyze can often create a wrong impression and shift your focus from results to questions on how much activity was there?, how many campaigns were run, how many raw leads were added? 

Good reports have only the metrics you need to track. Additional ones that need to be pulled up to solve certain problems or take a closer look into how a particular campaign worked can be done when required. Here are a few pointers that can help remove the noise created by distracting analytics reports and still give you visibility into your lead management:

•  Create a dashboard which has only the metrics you have identified as important to track on a daily or weekly basis. Any other report can be pulled on a need basis.
• Track the simple metrics which show you the results and where you stand in terms of those results. In the end the aim is to generate results from all the activity and not just generate activity since thats what lead generation entails.
• When you compare metrics, compare them with the right context. As we mentioned, if your sales people did less calls than last month but still got more customers than last month, then they did something right, not wrong. 
• Tracking metrics is pointless if you cant convert what you leanrt from them in to tangible action items and use them to improve on the results.

Maybe there should be a report on all the pointless reports some of us end up reading just because we can. Or, we could simplify it and get what we need to know and filter out the rest.
 

Coming across an interesting read on how many startups end up hiring highly experienced salespersons and executives from Fortune500 companies only to realize it doesnt always work out in every case. It got us thinking about our own experiences and what we have seen with candidates from different sales backgrounds and which ones seemed to fit better in a startup environment. What we could conclude based on these (and not to an absolute extent) is that those who had sales experience in a smaller business and products similar to our own were the best fit for us.

The more experienced candidates who have been managing sales at larger businesses were quick to understand the requirements, know the products and services quicker and were clear with their concepts. However they were perhaps less ‘hands on’, used to more resources for executing, getting leads qualified, lead data ready in their CRM systems, access to expensive subscriptions of databases and used to following a process for getting customers. These are not negative traits in any respect because beyond a certain stage to close volumes of sales that larger businesses need, these are things that will help you close them. However start ups don’t always have access to these kind of resources and sales can be more about adjusting to what you do have and using them to close those first few customers that can take the business to that next step. The start up sales person may have to wear multiple hats and switch from building lists, to qulalifying leads, to hosting demos and closing sales within the same working day. Selling higher value products with longer lead times may not have the same dynamics as selling larger volumes of lower cost products where the buying can happen quicker and experience in one may not mean you will be an instant success at the other.

So when you are selecting for a startup sales team, keep in mind:

• The type customers you are going after
• The size of accounts/deals you are going after
• The roles that salesperson will have to play and whether his/her skills match
• The kind of sales experience they had prior
• There is a clear match in expectations on both sides
• What has worked best for you im your organization