Jigsaw is a clear innovative in the B2B business contact lists space. All outbound B2B marketing is completely dependent on the quality of the list and Jigsaw came up with an innovative idea that made it possible to buy contacts at a small price, buy lots of them on demand and with a fair bit of accuracy in terms of contact data update.

Having said that, there are clearly two separate camps. Some who clearly hate Jigsaw and some who clearly love it. Here are some reasons why one might not like Jigsaw:

• Jigsaw makes it possible for any person to find your business contact information and put it up on Jigsaw without your permission for all of the Jigsaw users and buyers to use it.
• TechCrunch has a whole slew of privacy related complaints that you can read about here.
• The quality sucks for a range of different verticals including government and manufacturing, which we have tried ourselves and have seen less than 30% accuracy.
• The core model allows a user to upload a contact and get a contact or equivalent points in exchange, which is cool but their TOS allows the company to then sell that contact to any number of customers without giving back anything to the end user who added the contact in the first place.

If you ask any sales person though, they love Jigsaw for a number of valid reasons:

• Jigsaw is the easiest way to get a whole bunch of contacts for any campaign in the shortest period of time with a certain level of accuracy.
• Its better than a lot of other so-called contact databases which are just not as deep-rooted or updated.
• The benefit of getting the contact email address and direct phone number is invaluable to say the least.
• Jigsaw is a great way for someone to quickly get a few names in the target organization at their key accounts to quickly get to their decision makers than having to struggle with door keepers who just won’t let them in.

I am sure there are more pros and cons and I’d love to hear your thoughts as well. I am split right now. I love their model to address this very large and fragmented market opportunity of business contact lists, but I think their model needs to evolve to address some of the downsides. I hope someone there is listening.

Just before the US financial crisis, fall of the banking system and the global economic meltdown, we saw a lot of global companies take keen interest in getting a foot in the growing Indian market. Though India was not spared by the financial crisis that started in the more developed countries, the economy and predicted growth rate of between 7-9% remains quite impressive as against a lot of other places and is still a lucrative market for those who have their eyes set on it. However the Indian market is not always the easiest market to capture or get into.

As simple as it may seem on the outside, there are a bunch of things that have to be taken into account from how things work, government policies, bureaucracy, work ethics, business practices, culture and a whole lot more. Getting things done right needs a complete understanding of all these factors and an ability to adjust to the local market. The best option available to most companies was to tie up with a local partner and settle into the new market with their help. Whether it was purchasing or leasiing office space, getting registration and legal work done, accounting or recruiting staff, partnering with a local firm helped resolve these issues and helped ease the process of entering and growing within a new market which comes with its own very unique set of challenges.

Marketing & sales is no exception. Understanding of the local markets, company structure, decision making process etc is key. Having that local understanding helps tremendously and it doesn’t end there. There are number of bad experinces we’ve heard about or come across where these relationships didnt work simply because the local company on the ground didn’t really understand or respect their offshore counterparts business practices and culture so there can’t be any synergy in these cases. It’s important to find that synergy where both companies have a clear idea of expectations and what needs to be delivered.

When you are looking to build your marketing databases and lists of Indian companies here are a few tips to keep in mind which will help you:-

• Although English is widely spoken throughout India and you can get around fairly well, it’s good to know hindi as well as some other regional languages to get past gatekeepers, navigating to find right decision makers and collecting intelligence. A person is more likely to feel more comfortable conversing with someone who speaks their native tounge.
• Gatekeepers are good at keeping key management shielded from calls and emails but they are also often very well informed of what their executives do and can be great sources of information to understand requirements and so on.
• The CEO or president of the company is more likely to be known as the Managing Director. Managing Directors, Directors and General Managers are often the top level executive decision makers in companies where titles like President and Vice President are not used. 
• Indian executives and decision makers are often more easily reachable on ther mobile phone numbers and are not always offended by those who call them on their cell phones. It’s a fairly widely accepted practice. 
• The best times to reach decision makers and executives in India are between 9:00 am to 11:00 am at the start of the day and the last one hour of the day which is between 4:00 pm and 5:00 pm. 

‘Sell smart’ is the mantra today among business to business marketing and sales professionals. From the time of launching an all out attack on every single name one could gather in their database, b2b marketing and sales has evolved int to a more careful, well thought out and strategic approach based on qualifying prospects before engaging them. Knowing all you can about your target customers is an essential part of this evolution and has become even more relevant in case of the complex sale or selling to large companies.

In a “rich” marketing database, its not just the volume of data or the number of fields you have for each record which gives it more value. It’s the ability of your data to give you as much useful information as possible on your target accounts to give you an edge while deciding how, when and where to engage that account in the smartest possible way. Account profiling and sales intelligence gathering is one of those solutions which helps you get that deeper insight into an account so that you can decide your moves better informed.

If you are a business to business marketing or sales professional and understand the importance of “knowing your target customer” this is a quick slide show to showcase our on-demand, pay per delivery, account profiling & sales intelligence gathering solution. Enjoy!

The one trend we have been following consistently in business to buiness marketing technology is how it’s moving towards being able to identify prospects for your business even before you have spoken to them. Right from lead data capturing, lead nurturing to lead qualification, technology has been evolving to help automate the demand generation process and help marketing and inside sales work smarter.

Website lead capturing for building marketing data has been right at the forefront of most marketers strategy to build in inbound leads this year. It’s scalable, the leads are more qualified and often already partly educated on your offering. Whether they come from form fills, landing pages, rss subscriptions, webinar registrations or downloads, these are now regarded as some of the most qualified and actionable kinds of leads that can be generated. But these are business visitors who have committed enough to give you their contact details and are ready to speak to you. How about the more casual visitors who are interested in reading about your offering or company but perhaps not warmed up enough to fill in any information. Do you have to let these slip through?

Not any more. There are a few very useful applications which not only allow you to track the volume of visitors and their content viewing patterns but also go a step further to help you identify which company those visitors came from which effectively capture potential leads from a simple visit and not necessarily a form fill.  Netfactor’s Visitor Track - Web Leads Technology is one forerunner in this field and helps capture visitors to your company website and also translate which company they are from. Some others include OpenTracker and LeadsExplorer which help identify companies who have been showing an active interest in your website. Although it may not always yield completed data such as the actual visitors name and title if coupled with a data append and lead qualification service, these can be great ways for sourcing more leads which can be nurtured and then developed into actionable business leads.

This is certainly a step in the right direction for marketing automation and online lead generation in making the process more intelligent.

It’s intriguing how marketers are turning to explore new strategies to change their game plan during this time of recession and how blog posts and articles that address this topic are quickly gaining in popularity and demand. As Jon Miller “Sign Of The Times: Marketing In A Recession“ 

For the past two months, the number one post on my blog has been “7 Strategies for B2B Marketing during a Recession: The Definitive Guide“.  Originally published in June, what’s really dramatic is how quickly it’s ramped up since September when the crisis really took hold. Take a look at the Google Analytics report:

Put another way, that’s a 1,300% increase in searches, clicks, and page views on that topic in just seven weeks, and yet another way, each and every day more than 35 people are typing “marketing in a recession” into Google and clicking through to read that blog post.

Similarly other blog posts from marketers that tackled the subject right from the first signs of the banking crisis and discussed possible effects as well as solutions for business to business marketers have seen constant search traffic and even increases as teams are re-alligning their strategies to the current global economic conditions. Some of the other related good reads with helpful insight into this are:

• Don’t Cut Marketing In A Recession - Dianna Huff’s MarCom Writer Blog
• 4Ps Of B2B Marketing During Recession - Eddie Choi
• Should I Change My B2B Marketing Strategies During a Recession? - The OneIMS Blog
• Hiring A Lead Generation Team For Less Than One Persons Salary To Beat The Recession Blues - Neil Sequeira / The B2B Marketing Data Management Blog
• Dealing With The Downturn - Kate Maddox 
• When all are pulling back on marketing during recession: take advantage - LeadsExplorer Blog
• Marketing During Recession - Harish B’s Marketing Practices Blog
• Marketing Your Way Through a Recession - John Quelch of the Harvard Business School Blog
• Five Tips For Marketing In Recession - Glen Gow on the MarketingProfs Blog
• Marketing In A Recession - Seth Godin on his blog
• Should You Up Your Marketing During A Recession? - Jake Swearingen on BNET Intercom
• Strategies For Interactive Marketing In A Recession - Josh Bernoff of Forrester
• Marketing During a Recession? Get The Wind at Your Back. - Scott Clark
• Effective Online Marketing In A Recession - Adam Boydens

In these economic down times when cost cutting is the mantra the positive effect is that it forces you to think out of the box and come up with alternative solutions to ensure you get the most out of your marketing and lead generation dollars. After having discussed this with a number of marketers and bloggers who have debated how will the recession affect lead generation budgets, there are a few things that most of us would agree on:

• Overall spend on online marketing is still likely to rise
• Budgets on offline advertising like television, newspapers, magazines will take more of a hit
• Measurability of results and being able to show clear results on every dollar spent will be important. You need to be able to link spend to what you get back for it clearly in these times.
• There is going to be pressure to generate more leads and more qualified leads during these times and since budgets wont increase, marketers will be driven to do more with less 

Marketing and lead generation is one of those roles where no matter how much you do every day, it always feels that you could have done a little bit more if you had extra hands to work with. Perhaps you have a great email campaign planned out and if only you had someone to help you with list building for a bigger list of target decision makers. Maybe a whitepaper download campaign just went well and you would love to have another done within the month if only you had someone to help you keep up with lead qualification for all the inbound leads generated.  What if you could focus more time on generating more leads while someone else could profile existing leads and deliver clear business opportunties to the sales people? So you need some help and the obvious solution is to hire so that you have that extra capacity but there are things to consider and questions to ask yourself such as:

• Do you need the extra capacity in the long run or is it just a need you feel now because you have short term plans which need that extra effort?
• Will it be worth the time, expense and effort required to have a new team member on board, get ramped up and wait for your investment to start bearing fruit?
• Is adding the head count really giving your team more capacity and efficiency or will it be an overhead in terms of management time and other resources?

There are those who will argue that outsourcing parts of your business to business lead generation activity is not recommended since marketing is a core part of the organization and should not be outsourced but I would differ there. Outsourcing your entire marketing and sales perhaps, but then again not many would do that. Leveraging services like we provide at ReadyContacts.com can actually augment your own internal efforts and help you build that lean mean marketing machine. Once you have identified what parts of the process you could use those additional hands on, give it a run and in time your existing marketing team will be able to step up their productivity without having to augment it with additional head count. Especially with a per performance pricing model or delivery based pricing, you will really find a very clear ROI for your costs and you should be able to get a lot more done for considerably less than an additional employees monthly salary and expenses. So if you are looking for those extra hands and still stay lean. Think about it!

While everyone almost everywhere has been talking about the expected impacts of the US financial crisis on the economy, business, the consumer, growth, here at ReadyContacts.com we are no exception. One of the main points of discussion has been “how will the down economy impact lead generation budgets?”. Will they be slashed? Will companies hold on their marketing spend for a while to tread cautiously, play by ear and then decide what to do about it? How will this impact B2B lead generation efforts in general?

Well its already clear that there is an impact on business spending with heavy budget cuts on jobs, recruiting and salaries which were amongst the first to get hit. Its almost certain that with the slow spending, companies will shift from growth and expansion mode to a lower gear which will be more conservative and lay more focus on sustaining their current positions in the market and that will significantly impact a number of B2B areas which rely on selling into companies that are expanding their operations so it is going to be a lot of work keeping sales going and maintaininig it at the level it was before the crisis. But will lead generation budgets be cut?

We can’t say for sure. Should they be cut? Surely not!. With the buying slowing down, the selling is going to have to increase and with it, looking for buyers will have step up a notch. Essentially more leads will have to be generated to close the same volumes of sales as before the recession. Logically this should mean increasing spend on lead generation but practically this is not likely to happen at all and marketers will be pushed to figure out how to generate more leads from existing or perhaps even reduced budgets.

Hopefully companies shouldn’t panic and stay on course with their plans for developing existing operations. Once things start to recover and the optimism is back, the budgets will also bounce back. Till then the only message we can pass on is don’t lose hope and let depression take over. Stay positive, stay on track and keep selling!

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! 

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.