Marketing’s objective is to reach out to prospects and nurture them to build a pipeline of warm contacts who can be further developed into opportunities. Outbound marketing including email marketing, direct mail and telemarketing form the foundation of marketing’s reach out program and the urge, rightly so, is to reach out to as many contacts as possible. Traditionally outbound marketing has, unfortunately, been all about volume, more contacts, more email, more direct mail and more telemarketing. There is a fundamental problem with this and that starts with the urge to build a bigger and bigger list of contacts to market to. The rest of the “mores” are build on top of this, which further magnifies the problem. When you are looking to go after more contacts, you tend to define your “target decision makers and influencers” very broadly so you end up with a list of contacts that is a random mixture of your core buyers and everyone else. The more specific and deep rooted your buyer, greater the chance that your list will have less of them and more of the other non-target contacts. So when you feed this list to the downstream processes of email marketing, direct mail and telemarketing, all hell breaks loose. Email campaigns show a dismal response rate and the response that you get end up being far from qualified. Direct mail reaches the wrong people and goes into the trash can while you wait. Telemarketing reps get hung up on and they loose the confidence in the list. And if your marketing leads from such a campaign flow to inside sales or sales, then you get a heavy push back from sales to not send them leads that are a waste of their time. Garbage IN, Garbage OUT is the result. In most situations, its not that 100% of the leads are garbage so you still tend to believe in the strategy which leads to more similar campaigns. The most important thing is to realize that a “more” strategy without a laser focus will not yield the results you can be proud of. Try a chance. Go for less. Go for focus. Go for smaller campaigns. Test and refine and you will see the results. At ReadyContacts, we are HUGE believers of “less is more” and all out data solutions are enablers for implementing such a strategy.

Sales Come From Conversations: Sales 2.0

I have been tracking Sales 2.0 conference updates from @greenleads and @damphoux this morning and came across this tweet that that RT’d on @readycontacts just now. For the first time in a long time I heard someone say something “real” about the challenge of generating sales. While all the discussions on social media, marketing automation and email marketing are apt, valid and important, at the end of the day people buy from people and that buying cycle gets started with a “conversation”. This is very central to everything we do here at ReadyContacts as every one of our solutions is aimed at helping sales & marketing teams get closer and closer to that “conversation” which helps you engage with your customers and identify opportunities. I think “good quality conversations” should be one of the main measures of sales & marketing campaign effectiveness. Are you tracking “conversations” as a measure? Stay tuned for a lot more on this topic coming up soon.

“My connect rates are great! I connect with someone 80% of the time when I dial any number off my list!” … Aren’t we missing the point here? How many of those dials end up connecting with the real decision maker at that account? Not as many in several cases. Typical scenarios of an inside sales call which are based on ‘not so well qualified’ lists starts off at the operator, gets transfered towards the name on the list and connects but one learns thats not the right person to speak with. So the call goes back to the operator, there is a struggle with the operator who refuses to give out any names of alternative contacts who might be the right person, the call is connected finally to the new contact and one gets referred to another number which belongs to the final decision maker and…..voicemail! Pick up the next contact on the list and start over.

Now even with the most accurate data, it may not be possible to gurantee instant connects to the contact on a list but using low quality lists to carry out phone based inside sales campaigns is a productivity killer. Simply connecting to a name on a list isn’t real connectivity if that person is not the right person to talk to. With connect rates on phones being such a barrier to productivity especially with B2B inside sales and teleprospecting, it’s important to have all the basic groundwork done to gather the best possible data before starting a campaign. The data is often the root of the problem with some general business contacts from unqualified companies and researched contact details being put together to serve as a target list. Having worked with several inside sales teams and building very specific role based customized lists, we’ve seen more than 33% of a sales persons time can be spend in finding the right decision makers to speak to. Going into a campaign armed with good data can make a world of difference simply from working off more qualified information which increases the odds in your favor. 

Here are a few very simple data tips to improve those odds and make your calls more productive:-

•  While building lists, identify target decision makers by their job roles and responsibilites rather than by titles. For example, if you’re selling data recovery software, find the person withing the IT department who is responsible for data recovery and disaster management rather than simply finding an IT Manager or IT Director who may not directly have anything to do with data recovery. This will ensure, whenever you do manage to connect, you would have connected with the right person and won’t have to spend time navigating around the company.
• While building data and collecting information on decision makers, ask for a direct phone number or a direct extension as often as possible. Having direct numbers which by pass gatekeepers can save a lot of time and make connecting easier. 
• Identify alternate decision makers or contacts within each account whenever possible, especially in case of larger accounts which can have multiple decision makers in the same or similar capacities. If one is not available, it offers an alternative path into the same company. Adding influencers within each account is also useful in getting to “hard to reach” executives through someone else within the same department or function. 
• While gathering account intelligence, see if you can find any previous interactions with anyone else from the same company. Having a reference contact can  help in getting gatekeepers to let you through without much resistance.  
• Sort your account data and business contacts by location and time zone. Most executives are reachable at their desks towards the start  and end of their working days and tied up with scheduled tasks, meetings and so on for a large part of the day. Knowing where they are located can help identify when is the best time to hit each time zone or location. 

While it’s not possible to know whether or not someone will pick up the line and connect for sure, it is possible to ensure everything that is within control is set up to the best of possible level. Starting with good data is one of them.

We’ve been building very specific role based business contact lists for our customers very specific campaign requirements for what seems to be a very long time now. Over this time we have worked with such a range of B2B companies it’s difficult to recall every project undertaken especially for those who had a smaller, one time campaign specific requirement for customized role based list building. When we say specific…we mean reaaaaalllyy specifc. Where a companies ideal target decision maker is someone who has a very niche function or role within the company and it’s imperrative for our customers to locate and reach out to them. Needless to say, they can be quite challenging to locate. 

When you think about how specialized the contact needs for certain companies are and how targetted their marketing and sales efforts needs to be, you can’t help but be thankful and think “Thank goodness our company sells only to VP of Marketing or CFO’s” unless you happen to target such niche customers. I’m sure we’ve undertaken a lot of very challenging projects over the last few years but just at the top of my head, here are the top 5 most challenging contacts we’ve had to help companies locate:

At Number 5

The decision maker responsible for Emergency Medical Response System management and tracking software in large hospitals and healthcare centers for a healthcare software solutions company

At Number 4

The decision maker responsible for designing commodity linked investment products in Swiss banks for a high specialized financial systems software consultancy firm

At Number 3

The deicison maker responsible for monitoring performance levels of mission critical systems in large fortune companies along with identifying which systems and servers they were responsible for (for example flight control systems for an airline, ticketing and reservation system for a large global travel company etc)

At Number 2

The decision maker responsible for imaging technology used to study cancer and other cell level research carried out on mice at small animal imaging facilities at pharmaceutical and healthcare research centers for a biotechnology product company

And the Number 1 most challenging contact to locate…

The decision maker or prjoect manager responsible for ruggedizing, shock-proofing, fire-proofing and weather-proofing computing servers used in airforce  jets, tanks and defence weapons systems in large defence contractor/ manufacturing facilities to ensure the software systems in these run under any conditions. This was for a company that provided server ruggedization technology to defence contractors.

(BTW: we did manage to deliver on all these)

Can you beat that? We’d love to hear from other marketing and sales pros in the comments – what is the most challenging business contact you’ve had to locate?

Being involved with business contact list building and managing marketing databases, one gets a glimpse into which are the executives or decision maker contacts that are sought after by companies for their marketing camapigns, VPs of IT, VP’s of Marketing, Directors of Human Resources, CFO’s and Project Managers are just a few of those positions which are commonly in demand by various marketing and sales team. But every once in a while, you witness a new trend or a new profile which is suddenly in demand and these are caused by a new “hot and happening” phenomenon in the markets which trigger a demand for these contacts.

The last very noticable “most wanted” business contact role was that of Salesforce or CRM managers triggered by the burst of appexchange and add on application software for Salesforce.com and fueled by SFDC’s growing popularity. With the Salesforce boom creating a sudden demand for add on software developed on the appexchange platform, a new market was born within companies which are Salesforce.com customers and may have a requirement for Salesforce based applications. The in demand person to know within these companies and have access to for sales and marketing teams was the person responsible for managing Salesforce within these target companies. While the SFDC market hasn’t cooled down by any standards, there is a new target market thats quickly gaining the same kind of impetus.

Online advertising has become a force to reckon with in the last few years. Even as advertising budgets have been hit by the economic slowdown and TV, print and other media have taken a battering, online advertising continues to steam through the growth charts and more and more companies have dedicted online advertising managers, search marketing, ppc experts and online marketing marketing managers to spearhead their online advertising efforts and manage their online ad spend. These decision makers responsible for online advertising are in demand by online publishers, webmasters and several companies offering solutions to online advertisers and need to reach out to the right people. Being more of an idepth contact, building a custom list for you business by calling into companies and identifying those directly responsible for managing a company’s online advertising campaigns is perhaps still the best way to ge an accurate and focussed list of the right deicsion makers within target businesses that suit your requirements. So right now online advertising managers are in demand. I wonder what’s next….Social Media Managers? Twitter Managers? Let’s wait and watch.

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.

When it comes to building lists of decision makers and expanding a marketing database, every vertical comes with it’s unique set of challenges. As a company that builds customized lists of decision makers, we’ve had the opportunity to work across several of these verticals and and been exposed to quite a few challenging ones and one that comes to mind instantly is manufacturing. 

On the bright side, those who work in production or manufacturing are not exposed to quite as many sales calls as some other departments get which makes them in some ways, easier to approach and perhaps more co-operative in terms of sharing information. If you are looking for a very specific person within the manufacturing organization and happen to connect to someone else within the department, more often than not, he or she will help you find who you’re looking for. However that is IF you manage to connect to someone at that facility or connect to anyone in manufacturing at all!

Manufacturing can be a difficult department to navigate through on the phone. Whether one is looking for plant managers, production managers, process managers,, quality control, quality assurance, compliance, safety, engineers, distribution, materials, purchasing or floor managers, the physical nature and the working of the manufacturing department make it very challenging to locate specific decision makers within manufacturing units. Here are some common challenges with building a list of manufacturing units and decision makers:

• Plants of large companies are often scattered across geography and have multiple locations. This makes it hard to pinpoint locations of specific decision makers and determine at which location they are based.
• Contact information such as location phone numbers and postal addresses of manufacturing locations are not often as easily available as contact details for corporate and regional offices online.
• People move around a lot more in manufacturing units and are rarely found behind desks as one would expect in corporate offices and hence its difficult to connect with decision makers and personel within the factory or manufacturing unit. 
• Factories and manufacturing plants are spread across wide areas and its often possible that you would need multiple phone numbers within a single location to get connected to the right building to locate the decision maker you are looking for.
• Limited email access and phone access at all times of the day is another common problem as many don’t check emails regularly and are not reachable on the phone through all hours of the day.
•  

All things considered, calling into these locations to get the correct decision makers is still one of the most effective ways to get an accurate list built and here are a few tips which could help simplify that process:

• Research and carefully map out each and every factory / manufacturing unit location within a company along with as much detail in terms of contact information and contact details for these locations as possible before starting the process of trying to identify contacts.
• For the locations which don’t have easily available contact information such as addresses and phone numbers on the web, call into the corporate office, speak to an administrative assistant to find out how to get in touch with someone at a particular unit location. The corporate office usually have direct contact numbers for these locations.
• Contact these locations and ask for the role you are looking to for. If the admin refuses to co-operate its always useful to research or know at least one higher level manager such as the plant manager to try and connect with them and then ask for the role you are looking for.
• Try to time calls into the maufacturing units during the start and end of a working day as thats when you’re more likely to find decision makers at their desk or more accessible. 
• Remember to confirm which is the best contact number to reach them on, a number of companies will be willing to provide a mobile number for decision makers who are constantly on the move.
• If getting an email address is a problem, try to get an email address of an assitant or admin who will have more constant access to email and note down their email address.
• Don’t go specifically by job title as they are subjective and very often for example, a line unit manager maybe the process quality manager for a particular unit or a quality and responsibilities are managed by someone with a different title in different companies.
• Be patient as it is a long and challenging process to build an accurate list but the quality will pay off.

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.

When selling to high level decision making executives such as C-Level and Vice President level target contacts, the frustration for many inside sales executives is in connecting with these decision makers. More often than not, especially while selling to larger companies, the high level executives are amongst the most difficult to connect with over the phone either because they are too busy to take a sales call or they are heavily shielded by layers of administrative and personal assistants. When a sales person looking to connect with the decision maker is blocked by a PA, there is bound to be some amount of resistance unless you were looking to connect with the PA in the first place that is.

“Looking to connect with the PA in the first place??? What on earth for?” a good percentage of inside sales pros would say but it can make sense in several situations. If you think of it from the perspective of a personal assistant who just received a call where a sales person said “connect me to Amanda Jennings, the Senior Vice President of Information Technology.” …she realized its someone trying to get to the SVP of IT and she will do her job by screening the call and asking what is this phone call with regard to. Without having to think twice, he or she will become defensive and naturally try and withold as much information. Now imagine a sales person calls up and says “Hi is this Linda who works with Mrs Jennings?, I had some questions I was wondering if you could help me with.” .. the tone would have changed and the PA would more likely to listen to the sales person and even be willing to help in some way. No road block.

So why the change? In the first case the person asks directly for the decision maker and its the PA’s job to keep them out. In the second case, when the sales person knows the PA’s name and would like to connect with him or her, then it’s more natural to want to help out and not be defensive. Though knowing the key decision maker and connecting with them is the only way to really have a chance at selling into your accounts, starting off with the PA’s isn’t always such a bad strategy either. PA’s if co-operative can often be a very helpful source of information to help profile the account and get some answers to questions which can help when eventually speaking to the decision makers.

So the next time you are building a list of decision makers for an upcoming campaign, you may want to consider adding one additional target contact to your database. The personal assistant to the decision maker. You never know when it will come in useful.

We have been building customized business contact and decision maker lists for over five years now. We have built them for military technology companies, for data systems integration companies, for logistics software, healthcare systems…you name it. We have helped companies identify target decision makers in Swiss banks, French aerospace companies, Spanish telecom companies, the Pentagon and the CIA. We’ve learned something new with every single customer of ours and their target verticals but all said and done, the end product or database of their target decision makers look similar if you see them structurally and don’t look into the details. The data sheets have the names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses of the decision makers or executives. They will all go back to our customer and those decision makers are going to to be contacted through a phone call, email or a direct mail. 

Now for the spin…I built a tiny list of my own a little while ago today. Last night we finalized some details on a series of interviews we plan to do on our blog which will feature some stalwarts of the B2B marketing world to get some insights and perspectives on marketing database management. The obvious next step for me was to identify who we would like to talk to for the first few interviews and as with any situation where you have a campaign planned (even a tiny one like this) the natural next step was to build a list! It wasn’t till after I built my mini list did it hit me what was so strikingly different about this list. There were no phone numbers, no email addresses and no postal addresses. The key fields were a name, company name, website and Twitter id. I didn’t conciously make a decision to skip the other details which no normal target list would be complete with, I simply decided, I am going to use twitter to talk to our possible blog guests to see if they would be open to doing an interview with us.

Last month when we did a post on B2B Marketing Data Forecast – Blog, Twitter & Linkedin Info A Standard Data Field , @nix left a comment on the post which echoes what I personally feel and I’m sure a lot of professionals in a lot of businesses think as well. @nix said:

we love recieving a direct message on Linkedin, a comment posted to our blog or a tweet from one of our Twitter followers. I’m sure when phones were still new, executives were happy to answer calls but times have changed and more often than not, they aren’t always excited about incoming phone calls.

When I look at this mini list I wonder when a customer would approach us and say something like “we are doing a survey for our CRM analytics and we need to identify and build a list of 300 CRM managers or administrators with their Twitter id’s so that we can approach them to see if we can have about 50-100 take part in our research”. The day that happens, I would probably have witnessed one of the biggest turns in prospect list building. I’m convinced that day is not too far off. Are you?