Our interview series on “How Good Data Turbo Charges Lead Generation” is turning out more exciting with each passing weak and uncovering some really good insights from experts in the B2B marketing and lead generation space. This week we speak to Ardath Albee, CEO of Marketing Interactions and author of the upcoming book E-Marketing Strategies for the Complex Sale which you can pre-order on Amazon. I’ve been a fan of Ardath’s Marketing Interactions Blog and regularly picked up useful lessons completely relevant to what we do at ReadyContacts so I’ve been looking forward to this one and was thrilled when Ardath agreed to do this. Here it is!

You’ve stressed on the value of quality marketing data to readers on the MarketingInteractions blog in a number of your posts , do you think in current economic times CMOs should call for more focus directed toward their customer databases?

Ardath: Absolutely! But not just because of current economic times. Customers are one of the most important and lucrative corporate assets a company possesses.  Often I find that once a prospect buys, the record is not maintained appropriately. Account managers should be charged with not only keeping their customer’s database records clean, but adding information that can be used to segment appropriately for ongoing customer nurturing programs. 

Chances are strong that the customer chose your company for reasons that go beyond your product. Companies have the opportunity to continue to deliver added value to customer relationships, but only if they keep adding actionable insights and information to expand the customer’s database record. It may be tough to segment lead databases in parallel with personas, but there’s no excuse for not delivering targeted communications to your customer base. As long as your database is clean. 

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There is often a debate on whether marketers should focus on developing and cleaning their existing data or spend more time and budget acquiring new data. Is one really more important than the other? What is your take on this?

Ardath: I wrote a blog post, Lift Revenues 70% By Cleaning Up Dirty B2B Data. It was based on a research study by Sirius Decisions where they, “found that from 10 to 25 percent of b-to-b marketing database contacts contain critical errors—ranging from incorrect demographic data to lack of information concerning current status in the buying cycle.” And yes, that 70% lift is true for strong organizations utilizing clean data.

What companies don’t pay attention to is the fact that B2B databases tend to double in size every year. In this economic climate more people are shifting jobs or losing them altogether. I read somewhere that a marketer stated over 30% of her contacts were no longer at their desks. At least she knew that, but what if you didn’t? Dirty data impacts marketing program results across the board. And, let’s face it; you can’t create pipeline progression when your marketing communications aren’t getting delivered to actual leads. Especially when marketing is under tough mandates to prove contribution to sales.

As far as choosing between cleaning existing data or acquiring new data use what you’ve got first. I’ve been involved with a lot of projects recently based on re-engaging dormant leads with terrific results. Companies have already invested money in acquiring those leads. To abandon it in favor of new data is often a waste of that investment. Instead, create a “human touch” program for inside sales to reach out and restart the dialog. And please make it more than, “I just thought I’d touch base…” Deliver something valuable if you want to re-enroll them and validate your data. 

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How important is data quality from a B2B marketing strategy perspective and what can marketers do better to really tap into the full potential of their databases?

Ardath: Data quality is the holy grail of B2B complex sale marketing. Buying cycles are reported as lasting from 6 to 9 months—or longer. That means multiple touches that need to create engagement over time—despite the attempts of your competitors to distract them. 

To get the full potential from a marketing database, marketers should focus on collecting incremental information to flesh out buyer profiles over the course of the buying cycle. This means reaching beyond demographic and BANT data. The more you know about your leads, the more relevant you can be with your nurturing programs. Over time you’ll see patterns develop in your data that can indicate buying stages and propensity-to-buy that help focus your attention on the leads with the most promise. Trust me, sales will thank you.  

Research is emerging to prove that nurtured leads close at steeply higher rates than non-nurtured leads and also confirms they spend more money when they buy. The key to getting those kinds of results lies in the quality of your database and even more so in how you use the information it contains to increase relevance and add value your leads need and appreciate.

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What would you advise readers who are looking to build a high quality lead list / database? Is it worth the additional cost in terms or time or money to focus on acquiring higher quality contacts and more qualified leads versus purchasing or renting pre-built lead lists or database subscriptions?

Ardath: I recommend spending the time, money and effort to build a high-quality list. The more focused you can get on your target market, the better. Most lists you buy or rent are based on title within the organization. Sometimes that works, but what’s even better is when you can target roles. With roles and responsibilities you have a much higher opportunity to generate opt-in and ongoing permission to nurture them because your communications can be tightly tailored for relevance. Precision pays off.

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What are the biggest challenges you have seen with managing CRM and marketing databases among companies you have worked with? Are companies doing enough to update and maintain their data at a level where it’s being leveraged to its fullest?

Ardath: Truthfully, no. Here are a few reasons why this is true. 

1. The marketing database and the CRM system are often disconnected, limiting visibility and knowledge about the disposition of leads throughout the pipeline. 

2. The economic reality is that more people are losing/changing jobs at faster rates and that means data is getting dirty faster and takes more time to manage. 

3. Static information. If your database records contain the same information 6 months after the lead was added, what intelligence have you gathered that you can use to progress the buying process? Marketing databases and CRM need to go beyond housing basic demographic information to include activity history and the answers to progressive profiling questions, and even research notes. 

The upshot is that companies need to consider their marketing databases and CRM systems dynamic, not static, if they’re going to leverage them to their fullest potential. Databases aren’t just lists, they’re sources of intelligence companies can leverage to serve existing customers better and acquire new customers to grow the business.

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About Ardath Albee 

Ardath Albee, CEO of Marketing Interactions, Inc., helps B2B companies with complex sales increase and quantify marketing effectiveness by using interactive e-marketing strategies driven by compelling content. She empowers her clients to create customer-centric nurturing programs that leverage strategic story development to engage prospects until they are sales ready. But, marketing isn’t just about generating new demand. Ardath also helps clients re-engage customers and build loyalty that adds longevity to customer relationships.

Visit her website: www.marketinginteractions.com and look for her upcoming book, E-Marketing Strategies for the Complex Sale

Every company works towards improving their sales and marketing effectiveness. It’s a never-ending process in quest for how to generate better results and in today’s perspective, how to do this more efficiently without exponentially increasing resources to get those better results. The “Lean Mean Marketing And Sales Machine” is going to be a series of very simple tips both from our own experience in business to business sales and lead generation as well as others whom we’ve learnt from. We will share these tips on our blog in a downloadable pdf format pages which are easier to collect in one place and share. It’s not always easy to implement every useful tip we learn but the smallest of tips can have the biggest of impacts on how to improve the marketing and sales process while staying lean.  Here’s the first page of the Lean Mean Sales And Marketing Machine: 

Lean Mean Sales and Marketing Machine

As we continue our quest to uncover more expert insights into how quality marketing data impacts the effectiveness and success of marketing and sales campaigns across businesses we had the good fortune of discussing some of these issues with demand creation and sales 2.0 thought leader Michael Damphousse, President of Green Leads in this interview. The prospect of doing an interview with Mike was exciting as a regular reader of his blog and sure enough, it yielded some great lessons and tips. Here’s what Mike had to say:

Tell us about what Green Leads does and have you been seeing any significant changes in how customers are driving their marketing and demand generation programs over the past few months given the current economic climate?

Mike: It’s interesting, when we were at the recent Sales 2.0 conference in San Francisco, IDC said “Companies that significantly reduce their sales and marketing investment in 2009 will be gone by 2010″.   Green Leads specializes in C/VP level appointment setting programs for b2b companies and our programs are significant investments, but it seems that a majority of the industry agrees with this statement and are increasing their investment in demand gen. In fact, if it’s any indicator, Q1 was a record quarter for us – our revenue equaled that of all 2008.   If there is a downturn in marketing spending, we haven’t seen it.  If anything, I sense that marketers are being smarter about their spending and they are focusing on growing the top of the funnel and possibly cutting back on less tactical programs for the time being.

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How important is data quality from a B2B marketing strategy perspective and what can marketers do better to really tap into the full potential of their databases?

Mike: Contact data is one of the most valuable assets any marketing group owns. Some names have thousands of dollars invested in them.  Some are just new contacts they may have just purchased.  In either case, if the data is inaccurate, the value of that contact is reduced.  We spend a great deal of time validating and researching our lists.  Updating the quality of phone numbers, emails, de-duping, and lots of data standardization.  Every improvement increases the value of that asset.

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What are the common challenges you have seen lead generation and b2b marketers have with building or managing high quality lead databases?

Mike: That’s two ends of the spectrum.  When building lists, most companies make errors by selecting far too many and far too broad a list.  There is nothing that can grind an outbound marketing effort to a halt more than large, irrelevant lists.  I would rather have one name that is exactly my target than a hundred names that might be my target.

Long term, the same mistake can be multiplied by data not being kept relevant and clean.  If an email bounces once, it will bounce a thousand times.  If a prospect has the wrong title, they will always have the wrong title.  Clean out the forest so you can see the trees.

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What are your strategies at Green Leads to feed your team with rich data (role-based contacts, profiled target accounts) and how has that affected their productivity?

Mike: Our business lives off of our lists.  We have reps in 7 states, and in 3 countries in Europe.  All day long each one of them is touching a couple hundred contacts.  If they are dialing the wrong prospects, or if the data is inaccurate, then we are wasting valuable time and not maximizing our client’s investment.  By building extremely targeted lists and paying extra attention to data quality standards, we reduce this waste as much as we can.  As I said above, give me that one, perfect name.

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What would you advise readers who are looking to build a high quality lead list / database? Is it worth the additional cost in terms or time or money to focus on acquiring higher quality contacts and more qualified leads versus purchasing or renting pre-built lead lists or database subscriptions?

Mike: Just do the math.  Is a marketing piece costing you money if it goes to the wrong individual or to contacts that are unreachable due to bad data?  Is a sales rep wasting precious time dialing and prospecting with bad data.  Basically, you get what you pay for, and you can either pay for a good list up front, or invest in the bad list and clean it up yourself.  In the long run it typically pays to start with the good list.

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What are the biggest challenges you have seen with managing CRM and marketing databases among companies you have worked with? Are companies doing enough to update and maintain their data at a level where its being leveraged to its fullest?

Mike: Simple answer.  No.  I see some of the biggest companies we work with throw lists around like scraps of food.  There are no practices for data quality or standards or maintaining an asset.  It’s amazing.  We have clients that send us a list over and over.  They keep telling us they are sending a new list, but it’s got the same garbage names.

We typically just tell them to send us the URLs of the companies they want to target and the exact titles and roles they want to target, then we do the rest. We know our data is good, so we would rather rely in it.

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About Michael Damphousse

Mike is the consummate sales and marketing executive, leading both the growth of Green Leads and the techniques and practices behind Green Leads’ demand creation success. Mike brings over 20 years of senior management experience from a series of high technology and marketing firms. During the past 5 years Mike has developed a new brand of demand creation that leverages both technology and the human asset. After sharing these ideas with other leading demand creation companies, Mike decided to form Green Leads, where he can complement these practices with a higher sense of accountability to the company, its people, its clients and its community.

There is always data cleansing for fixing a database which is plagued with bad data although anyone who has been through the process knows how tedious and time consuming it could be and would instantly look for ways to prevent having to carry out a large cleansing operation again. Cleansing old and redundant data is a necessay evil but allowing bad data to flow freely into your database is a cardinal sin of marketing database management. 

Craig Rosenberg’s The Funnelholic blog posted a great interview with Matthew Quinlan, VP of Field Operations at LoopFuse and in answering one of the Craig’s questions, Matthew brings out a really useful tip in curbing inflow of bad data. Here’s a part of that interview:

4.  What are the top oversights marketers are making regarding lead generation?

A lot of marketers still cling to the notion that by making online form fields required, they will get more data. While it may result in more data, it most certainly results in lower quality data. Is a database full of “asdf@asdf.com” email addresses and titles of “Oh Captain my Captain” providing more value than blanks? Even if you require a validation link to be sent via email it’s really only marginally better results because everyone in 2009 has at least one spam account that they only use for registrations. Resist the temptation to make your Web form fields required. Your data will be more accurate and valuable as a result. 

The source of these leads is often where problems with bad data and inconsistancies come up. The larger the number of different sources and the volumes of leads that get generated and move onto the database, the larger the problem with bad data. The landing page leads, the purchased business contacts lists, the webinar registrations, the event attendees, the business cards collected at tradeshows may all be leads but they are from different sources. Therefore, they have different formats and different data points. Some will have garbage values entered and others may have blanks. The worse thing anyone can possibly do is say “well let them go into our database, we’ll deal with them later.” Later is always too late! They need to be fixed before they get into the database.

1. Examine each lead source whether its a list provider, a landing page form, website registration forms etc and look closely at what can be done to ensure data is normalized and bad data can be filtered out before you get them. Can you remove “required fields” on your landing pages as Matthew mentioned? Can you work with your list provider to deliver the data in the format you need and do those quality checks for you? Could you have marketing enter the business card details and other sources in the format you need?
2. Once you have received the leads, centralize the data and run your own quality check process. Delete any leads which have garbage values filled in everywhere to avoid redundancy, do a data append effort to fill in missing email addresses and other blank fields wherever possible, normalize the data to make them appear like they came from a single source and then upload them to your database. 

If you see bad data entering the database, turn off the taps, work backwards and fix the problem at the source. Good data = efficiency = good results.

We’ve discussed the advantages of setting up a dedicated lead qualification process to help connect with and qualify inbound leads and leads generated from various marketing programs like events, conferences, whitepaper downloads etc. and a recent sequence of events here at the ReadyContacts brought to light another advantage of having a strong lead qualification process in place. 

Your lead qualification process can be your first source of marketing and lead generation campaign effectiveness feedback if you have strong communication between those qualifying leads and those driving the lead generation campaigns. While it may not appear like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, believe it or not, your lead qualifcation team is in one of the best positions to view the effectiveness of the lead generation campaigns that have been executed. 

We were doing a lead qualification campaign for a large, well known technology company who are constantly running a variety of lead generation efforts by sponsoring events, participating in tradeshows and conferences. The leads collected by exchanging cards, registering for conferences, demos and so on go through a qualification process which helps identify the genuine leads which need to be expedited to sales, the cold leads which need to be weeded out and the leads which can be nurtured. A marketing or sales professional working on lead qualification is often the first person to connect with the leads after they are generated and in a position to get a feel of how the leads are reacting to the event which they attended and also get a feel of how they respond to a call from the company. This also puts them in the best position to guage how effective the event or campaign was in generating awareness and also generating high quality responses. On this particular occasion we discovered the leads were not very aware about the event, most were not very qualified at all and the response pointed out there was something amiss. 

The feedback to marketing however revealed that this particular event didn’t work out quite as planned and the turn out / quality of leads wasn’t up to the mark either. The communication between lead qualification and marketing heleped them come to a decision to not spend too much time on that set of leads and also to avoid using that event for future campaigns as it would simply be a waste. This communication between the two sides can really help bring valuable feedback to the table and help improve the lead generation process by detecting what works and what doesn’t at a much earlier stage. These kind of mistakes can be valuable in learning and fine tuning the lead generation machine as long as there is learning and something good comes out of it. Right?

We are excited about posting the first of our series of  ”How Good Data Turbo Charges Lead Generation” interviews where we’ll talk to prominent btob marketing and lead generation experts to get some of their experiences and their views on marketing data, databases and their role in sucessful lead generation programs. We are just as excited that we got to interview noted database and CRM expert Lori Feldman in our very first feature of this series and in the process we have some valuable insights and great takeaways for readers. Without any more introductions and delays, here’s the interview:

You’ve been an advocate for building and managing robust customer and marketing databases, do you think current in the economic times CMOs should call for more focus more towards their customer databases?

Lori: IMO, you can never focus on your customer database enough. It’s the mother ship of sales! Unfortunately too many organizations treat their database like an address book instead of a business asset that appreciates in value with proper care and feeding. 

There are 2 primary database marketing strategies: Retention (keeping the customers you have–critical) and acquisition (getting new ones-urgent). Companies tend to focus on one or the other, but seldom both at once. (Or worse, they treat customers and prospects the same, which is a big no-no.) 

Usually the focus is on acquisition–prospecting, even though it’s at least 7X easier to sell existing customers than to convert new ones. Marketing and Sales sometimes think, “Well, we have those customers already; let’s go get new ones.” They forget their customers are Grade A Prime beef to another company’s acquisition program. Right now with a contracted economy, customer share is stolen rather than created. So it’s imperative to show customers maximum appreciation and head off potential defections. 

That said, if a company has been spending its resources in one area, prospecting, for example, then a great strategy is to beef up sales with the other discipline (customer care).

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How important is data quality from a B2B marketing strategy perspective and what can marketers do better to really tap into the full potential of their databases?

Lori: Data quality has 2 components: Is the info correct? And is it complete? For example, I could have a perfectly targeted list of CMOs at their company addresses, but without phone numbers or email addresses. The info may be correct, but it’s not ready for prospecting, unless I’m using snail mail, which, I believe is an expensive way to begin a prospecting campaign.

I recommend that organizations have at least one Database Champion who’s responsible for caressing the data: completing what’s missing, following up on bounced emails and opt-outs, keeping track of decision makers who are replaced. This last one is very important. One of my clients just told me that in her industry at least 30% of her contacts aren’t sitting at their desks anymore. The economic downturn isn’t just having an effect on people and companies; it’s murdering contact databases. 

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What are the common challenges you have seen lead generation and b2b marketers have with building or managing high quality lead databases?

Lori: The first challenge is finding all the data. It’s amazing how many different places people keep important leads. Here are a few:

·PDA phones

·Outlook address books

·accounting software

·various spreadsheets

·piles of business cards falling off desks

·multiple contact databases at the same company

·different departments at the same company who have pieces and parts of the same contact info 

I recently worked with a new client to set up his sales database. He just bought a 50-year-old company. The customer “database” was a 10″-high ream of greenbar printout–and no electronic version available. Obviously, getting that report re-keyed was priority one. Everything else he had, including sales leads from a manufacturing directory they subscribed to, needed to be matched to that list before any intelligent territory planning or sales call strategy could be mapped out.

Another common challenge for BTB marketers is combining multi-channel data. For example, a lead may come in through the website with just a name and an email address. Then that same lead may call in to ask a question. If the person taking the call doesn’t try to get complete contact info at that point, there may be 2 incomplete contact records instead of 1 good one.

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What would you advise readers who are looking to build a lead list / database? Is it worth the additional cost in terms or time or money to focus on acquiring higher quality contacts and more qualified leads versus purchasing or renting pre-built lead lists or database subscriptions?

Lori: A big list is great–if you have a relationship with them already. You can just turn on a drip marketing program, and away you go. They’re your peeps and they love hearing from you and feeling like  you care. They’ll even help you update incorrect information about themselves if asked. They want to be found.

But in the case of a big prospect list of people who don’t know you yet, don’t let your reach exceed your grasp. It’s too expensive. Only acquire leads you have time to work. I’m a big believer in the hybrid approach: If you don’t have any list, purchase one. But then add sweat equity to finesse it to the quality and target you need, including getting permission to email and finding the right decision maker. It’s a time-consuming and a tedious job but it can be outsourced. But the human edit propels you further down in the sales funnel.

Another mistake I see in building lists is not understanding who the real prospect opportunities are. This comes from not truly understanding your customer base. If companies truly *get* their customers, they’d find more prospects like them and forget about everyone else. But they’re usually afraid of leaving someone out.  When building a sales leads database, I always recommend starting with a customer survey. Let your good customers tell you why they’re doing business with you. Then use that intel to find and talk to the right prospects.

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What are the biggest challenges you have seen with managing CRM and marketing databasesamong companies you have worked with? Are companies doing enough to update and maintain their data at a level where its being leveraged to its fullest?

Lori: The biggest challenge is getting consensus from all database stakeholders (those who are using and contributing to the database) on the Rules of Engagement. I always tell my clients their database will only be as good as their worst user. Whoever that is, because they refuse to capitalize names and streets so email marketing goes out looking like a teenager texted it; or they aren’t sure where to put certain info so they “freelance” their own field definitions; or they refuse to look up to see if a contact already exists in the database, so they routinely add duplicates…often with variation spellings…making them harder to find and fix…these are the people we want to strangle if we’re in charge of marketing results.

The next challenge I see is that organizations fall way short of segmenting their databases. The tendency is to create a bucket of prospects and a bucket of customers, the end. In reality, there are at least 20 ways each of those buckets could be further grouped so that messaging is more relevant and engaging. Organizations do a terrible job with this because they think “list” instead of “personas.” This oversight is the big money suck that could put another 10%-20% revenue to the top line.

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About Lori Feldman

Lori works with business leaders and sales professionals to squeeze every drop of profit from their #1 asset–their customer database. She is a popular national speaker on database marketing, drip marketing, email marketing and social CRM. Lori received the Direct Marketer of the Year Award from the St. Louis DMA and her e-newsletter has won the APEX Award for Newsletter Excellence 2 years in a row. You can find her on LinkedIn and Twitter (@LoriFeldman) or her website at www.TheDatabaseDiva.com.

Selling to a large company is no cakewalk. If anything, it needs patience, perseverence and a very well planned out approach. If you’re one of the smaller companies or startups which has a large fortune company like Microsoft, Walmart, Oracle or Cisco on your client list, you’ve gone through the whole process of getting registered as a potential vendor and your inside sales team has probably been spending sleepless nights trying to get a foot in the door. Most of those who finally did break in, bag a contract and get registered as a certified vendor with these companies would have probably kicked back a few beers and thrown a little celebration for the marketing and sales teams little victory. The next day it’s sights set on another coveted large account. In any large account contract, the sale itself is just a foot in the door. The real reason to celebrate would be because your company is now registered as a certified vendor and by this event, a whole new world of opportunity has opened up within that account. 

Although some aspects of management and deceision making in large accounts may be centralized, by and large, these companies are made up of several smaller units put together. Each of these units managed and run by different decision makers, each with their own agenda, requirements and budgets. To make the most out of a sucessful sale into a large account, you need to be able to repeat that success within other areas of the same company and develop business within that account. To do this, you need to start by identifying where are the simlar departments and who are the decision makers who head these units similar to where you had sucess selling into the first time? Build a list of these units along with the other decision makers and reach out to them consistantly to understand whether you can help them solve a problem similar to how you were able to help another unit within their company on a previous occasion. Developing more business within an existing account can be far more rewarding than pursuing new accounts especially when pursuing large companies which have longer sales cycles.

An ISV we worked with, providing cost effective application development to fortune giants used this strategy very effectively. Deciding to leverage their “certified vendor” status in some of these very big fortune 500 companies, we worked with them to expand relations and develop more business within these companies and the process started with mapping the various units within the US locations of these companies. Each of these companies had several offices all over the continent and each could be divided into several operational units which would each have their own requirements. The next phase was to identify the specific decision makers within each of these hundreds of units who in this case were those responsible for application development or software engineering projects and simultaneously do some basic lead qualification to ensure each was a good potential customer for our clients development services.

The inside sales and email campaigns which followed were very productive and revealed how much easier it is to connect with and sell into other parts of the same organization once you already have internal references and you are listed as a certified vendor. References are no longer a problem, decsion makers look at you as an insider rather than someone selling to them and you’ll find discussions happen a lot more freely. After all,  once you have a foot in the door, you may as well map the rest of the organization, build a list and squeeze yourself in.

A great question in this economic climate and something a lot of companies will be debating on as a strategy till things are looking up again. Iain Lovatt  of Blue Sheep Limited took this question to the B2B marketing group on Linkedin where it sparked a healthy debate on whether marketing should turn all focus to customer retention and keeping the revenue stable or turn to new customer acquisition. The opinions B2B marketers posted come to defend both sides.

The first side believed yes, all focus should be directed towards retention of existing customers. If you have a customer base which helped you bring in $X in revenue, then in such fickle times, rather than trying to tap into new customers which may or may not close, you are better off trying to convince your existing customers to buy again or extend contracts with you for another year. This strategy reduces the risk of a drop in revenue in case new customers don’t close and can’t compensate for old customers who don’t bring in continued business. In some way since you don’t need to educate existing customers on your offering again, the cost of marketing to existing customers is lower. In times when customers are more cautious and take longer to commit, the number of leads or target contacts required in the funnel is also higher and it could make sense to try and stablilize revenues till conditions are more favorable.

The flipside of the coin was not against diverting resources towards customer retention but not at the cost of cutting our new customer acquisition completely.  B2B marketers on this side of the debate suggested this time when lots of changes are taking place and several companies folding or losing part of their customer base, could actually be an ideal opportunity to try and capture some of those customers and take a bigger part of the market share. They agree focus should be on retaining high value existing customers who bring in a sizable amount of bussiness but believe its also important to pursue new customers since there will always be some churn in existing customers and even just to maintain the existing level, new customers are essential. 

The sweet spot should actually be right inbetween. Though its easier said than done, being able to retain as many of your valuable existing customers as possible without having to cut off efforts of targeting new customers (some of whom will turn into future high value customers) is what will trigger growth. While its important to work with what you have and tapping into your existing database of leads, not acquiring new leads and growing that database will result in a shrinking database as it deteriorates with time. Doing one at the cost of cutting out another totally wouldn’t help in the long run. Finding that balance should be the aim. What do you think?

There is a plethora of marketing and lead generation software applications tools out there. Some of them simple, others loaded with features. Some of them cost a small fortune and others are priced as low as nothing. While large companies can set aside significant technology budgets for their lead generation technology, it doesn’t mean small businesses don’t have other options to carry out similar tasks. We wrote “B2B Lead Generation Using The Big Friendly Giant” to help startups and small businesses see just how much can be done with the free services Google offers. Whether you want to build a target list of accounts and decision makers, set up product sites, landing pages, start a company blog or track competitors, there are ways to leverage what Google offers to put these plans into motion. 

Please download a copy from Scribd and let me know if you found any part of it particularly helpful or have any other tips and tricks you’d like to share.

B2B Lead Generation Using the Big Friendly Giant -2009

The US healthcare pharmaceuticals market is valued at several hundred billion dollars. It’s little wonder that it’s one of the top segments in the sights of a large number of b2b companies eyeing a slice of that pie. When it comes to building a database of healthcare leads and decision makers a custom list building approach is perhaps one of the best sources and well worth the time or money you invest in building it. Depending on the organization within which you need decision makers whether its IT, finance, accounting, compliance or administration, role based lists are a lot more reliable and accurate. Some of the larger company databases may not have the level or type of contacts needed and although ready lists can be purchased or rented, accuracy would depend on how recently they were built and unless these lists can be sampled. When the products or services are more niche and require very specific decision makers engaged in the sales process then aside from generating inbound leads and inquiries for the offering, building role based lists is ideal. For example if the decision maker is the person responsible for diagnostics technology in the lab or the person responsible for emergency response systems and software, it’s unlikely they can be found on most directories or ready lists.

To build a role based list, use a telephone based process of calling into to prospective accounts and asking for decision makers by role rather than asking for someone in a specific job title. For example, if the product being sold is a tissue imaging solution for diagnostics, navigating through the diagnostics lab and identifying the person responsible for imaging is a lot more productive than asking for the IT Director or having the name of  the CIO and asking inside sales to connect with him/her. The phone based process is time intensive and slower than buying a list of more general  higher level contacts but the value of having a database of accurate direct decision makers which sales and marketing can connect with quickly is well worth the effort and extremely valuable while going after the healthcare segment.

In a market like healthcare and pharmaceuticals where high quality marketing data isn’t always readily available off the shelf, try building your own. Starting with the right person may help you get that piece of the pie before someone else does.