If there is one thing we’ve learned about Enterprise systems sales, it’s serious business! Within the realm of technology sales it’s possibly one of the most challenging products and solutions to sell with complex decision making involved, several stakeholders who need to get involved with the decision making process and a long sales cycle. Then there is the entire sub industry which surrounds an enterprise system from providers of additional functionality software, data integration solutions, module building, maintainence and a whole lot more which thrives on a large base of companies which run their daily operations and depend on enterprise resource planning software. SAP is almost synonymous with enterprise software and ERP solutions and if you are a marketer or sales person selling into accounts which run SAP then you would know within each of these organizations lies a little sub organization of those hired to work on SAP.

This group of people become the valuable inner circle of decision makers and influencers of any SAP related purchase decision and knowing who are the possible roles to look for can become critical in being able to reach out to these accounts and connect with them. While calling into companies to locate a SAP contact one has to be more than a little specific given the number of people who can be working around a large implementation. Here are some of the common SAP business contacts by title to help you determine who to reach out to:

• VP, Enterprise Systems
• SAP Audit Manager
• ERP Director
• SAP Training Manager
• Senior SAP Consultant
• VP of Business Intelligence 
• Senior SAP Architect
• SAP Project Manager
• VP Enterprise Architecture
• SAP Business Solution Architect
• Enterprise Architect
• SAP Technical Analyst
• SAP Payroll Consultant
• SAP Project Co-ordinator
• SAP Security Analyst
• SAP QM Analyst

These are just some of them and each company providing solutions needs just some specific ones who will be primary decision makers for their sales process. Who is your target SAP contact?

There is no such thing as a free ride but what about free b2b marketing databases? We’re not talking about the free trials, free subscriptions or free sample lists but if a vendor is actually offering a free database of business contacts how much should you trust it? This thought came about after reading a forum where a marketing professional was told they can be supplied with a free database of director level contacts within a specific vertical and was wondering if anyone else is familiar with how to get free databases. While it’s great to fall into free database full of decsion making contacts, it’s best to be at least a little skeptical about it.

There are great free sources of business contacts out there such as LinkedIn, Jigsaw (if you have contacts of your own which you can trade) and even articles or content published online but when it comes to ready lists to use for marketing and inside sales campaigns, it is important to understand how the database was put together and important to question it’s quality especially if it’s being offered for free since there are significant costs involved in building quality databases. More importantly you need to ensure relying completely on this free data doesn’t cost your business more than you’d pay for high quality reliable data. After all, cost doesn’t always manifest itself in the form of money.

Accurate data which is well qualified and meets exact requirements allows for a targeted effort and better results. If the business contacts are not your exact target decision makers, have inaccurate contact details or are no longer valid, you could end up wasting a lot of time. If these are used for inside sales campaigns, then you’ll have very little success with phone calls reaching the right people and again spend a lot of time  looking for the right ones. The loss in efficiency in marketing campaigns or sales efforts could well cost more than the data.

Damage to repuation is another risk an organization can face while relying on data thats not well focussed and qualified. Just as much as reaching out to the right people within organizations can help build relationships, reaching out to the wrong people can help damage your company’s repution and ruin those chances of building those strong relationships.

Lastly, adding unreliable or poor quality data to your database will just end up diluting the value of your database and incur more costs in cleansing and cause more ineffectiveness if used for lead nurturing or future campaigns.  So if you stumble on the fortune of what seems to be a great list from the outside which hasn’t cost a dime, be skeptical first, examine it carefully, determine if it’s really as good as it seems and if it is, I suggest you go buy a ticket for the grand lottery because today might be your lucky day.

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

Although the company’s internal marketing or lead database and inbound leads is the best place to start looking while building out targeted email lists for upcoming campaigns, there is a constant need to replenish these databases with new email lists and fresh leads. Inbound leads aside, whether you are looking to build target list on the basis of geography, industry, company size or any other segmentation, there are a number of different sources out there offering business contacts with email addresses. While each of them work on varied models and range from a few cents per contact to several dollars a contact, it’s important to read between the lines and understand the underlying value proposition of each source while deciding on which one will work best for you. For example a custom target list building service service such as ReadyContacts or Reachforce offers a different value proposition in terms of highly customized role-based lists built fresh as per your specific needs versus subscribing to Hoovers or OneSource which gives you a very large number of existing high level decision makers and executives in a company. Both types of sources can help you build a target list for email marketing however they are quite different in the value they provide so it’s best to really evaluate how each source works and narrow down on what would be most effective for your company and campaigns.

Here are some sources you can refer to if you are out looking to build or acquire a new b2b target email list:

These are just some of the resources you can evaluate when you need to build a fresh business to business email list. Remember to carefully evaluate what you’re getting in terms of value from each of these and select the one that is optimum. Are there any other resources you’ve tried out or any experiences you can share on this?

I was going through the Phone Works Inside Sales Compensation Report – Q4 2008 which got me thinking how outsourcing or contracting a solutions provider like ReadyContacts for certain areas of inside sales such as lead qualification can really help curb costs. The survey and report by Phone Works is quite comprehensive and good to go through especially if you need a benchmark to compare costs for doing some of these activities in house versus using a vendor.

I won’t advocate outsourcing everything and relying only on a vendor for all your inside sales and lead management needs but given the cost of having full time inside sales reps or executives, it’s possible to segregate some of the activities which can be done just as well by a dedicated vendor not only to save on salaries but also to use this arrangement to your advantage and focus your inside sales force on more important areas like generating appointments.

For example, the survey shows the average base salary for a telesales representative responsible for appointments to closing sales over the phone can range from $44K – $100K with an average of $65K. A sales development representative responsible for generating leads, developing the lead databases, keeping the lead pipeline full, qualifying leads to setting appointments would draw an average base salary of $54K or an average total package of 86K. It’s possible to contract activities like lead list building, phone based lead verification and lead qualification on “pay per delivery” model at a lower monthly spend than recruiting a full time tele-sales representative for these activities. However, the efficiency really kicks in once you leverage the fact that you have those activities taken care off by a third party so you can now have your internal tele-sales team focus on setting appointments or converting those leads.

Eventually, there are a lot of things to weigh out before deciding whether it would benefit the company to contract some of these activities or grow the internal team to handle them but, it’s the combination of the two working well together that we have seen work the best. So if you are wondering whether its a good time to grow your inside sales team, this is an option to start thinking about. Are you leveraging third party vendors for your inside sales? What’s your experience been?

Rich Data: Role-based Decision Makers Are Key

Mike Damphousse of Smashmouth Marketing blog posted an interesting analysis today comparing the value/cost of inbound versus outbound marketing. With the rise and hype of social media, there is a lot of discussion around how to leverage social media for B2B lead generation, but what is really missing is the fact that social media takes a lot of time and effort, the results are not easily measurable and it is time you are taking away from other proven channels for pipeline development, specifically outbound marketing in B2B. As Mike points out, while inbound marketing is a necessary element, it must be clear that its just not going to replace outbound marketing, especially telemarketing.

If we leave out low priced software or SaaS offerings which cannot justify a large inside or field sales force, the rest of the B2B market segments usually have significantly priced products and solutions where sales cycles can be long, prospects need to educated and relationships need to be build to develop a qualified opportunity. In such cases, while inbound marketing may take a long time to reach the complete segment of buyers (especially considering the fact that a tiny fraction of B2B buyers are interacting with social media for their buying decisions, other than Google search) and it may take more time from there on to qualify the leads. Compare this to a systematic outbound marketing effort and I am positive that the results will be a lot more effective and in a shorter period of time.

Having said that, outbound marketing will only be as effective as the quality of data that its structured around. Broad brush approach of calling on large lists or emailing house lists is not going to cut it. Rich Data must be the foundation of your outbound marketing if you are to get highly effective cost per lead metrics. Rich Data is list of contacts and profiled accounts that help you understand who are your critical decision makers and influencers at your target accounts along with key sales intelligence details at the account. Rich Data ensures that your telemarketing team will be focused on having conversations and not on trying to discover contacts and pre-qualify accounts. The telemarketing team is just 1 call away from a fruitful conversation with a laser focused contact who is their buyer. With Rich Data, email marketing also becomes orders of magnitude more effective as messages are clearly focused reach decision makers who “get it”. Organizations that don’t realize the value of Rich Data to power their outbound marketing will continue to see mediocre results and its not appropriate to compare these results with any inbound marketing results for any analysis of the two.

Magazine Opt-in Lists have been a consistent source of “names” for B2B marketers for a long time. Logic was that is a person subscribed to a VoIP magazine then she must be a qualified buyer or some sort of an influencer. Also if she has opted in to received the magazine then she knowingly has opted in to receive messages from number of other businesses that she may not even know of. Guess what, both these assumptions were wrong all these years and they will be (more) wrong going into the future. Like everything there are some exceptions but the truth is the a large number of people subscribe to trade magazine for FREE by simply filling out a form and barely read them. If you charged $1 for the subscription, a majority of them may not even fill out the forms. Secondly, the opt in in much magazine subscription forms is not evident at all to the end user. So even if we assume that a particular user wanted to seriously subscribe to a trade magazine, we cannot be sure at all that she is ready to receive messages from other business hawking their products and services. 

More importantly, in today’s world of permission marketing, its just a waste of time to use someone else’s opt-in list to send your messages. Magazine subscriber lists are a good source of cheap bulk list of names but you must carefully determine if they can deliver any value to you whatsoever even if they just cost a few hundred dollars. For B2B marketing magazine lists are dead because: 

• The subscribers may not be your specific decision makers or buyers
• The subscribers may have already moved on from the companies they worked at when they subscribed to the magazine
• The subscribers tolerate 3rd party emails being sent to them only because they get the magazine for free and not because they want to be marketed to

Opt-in lists are critical but they can be only valuable when you build them internally via your own websites. Ardath Albee has a good post on how you can do this. Also I believe traditional trade magazine subscription lists will be replaced by the new generation online trade communities like ITSecurity.com or Times of Virtualization. 

A lead database is no longer a rolodex. Lead data doesn’t come from standard business cards. Lead sources are plenty and highly varried whether it’s from social media, free trials, whitepaper downloads, landing pages, custom built lead lists, webinar registrations or other sources. Lots of lead sources can mean a lot of leads for your marketing database which is great news! The bad news is lots of lead data sources can also mean a lot of different formats, a lot of different data points and a lot of inconsistency in your database records. That is something you need to avoid.

The cleaner and more consistent your marketing lead data is, the more effective it will be in generating consistent “sales ready” leads whether you use a lead nurturing solution, an email marketing application or just simply run individual campaigns off your data. If you imagine your lead generation sources, your lead database or CRM and nurturing machine as three parts of a larger machine connected by pipes, you can’t really do much about data being inconsistent at the lead generation level. Different sources collect different data points. A newsletter subscription form may collect nothing but a name and and email address where as a landing page form fill can collect additional details like telephone number, Job title and company name. Changing the sources is not always an option.

The pipeline between the lead generation sources and the lead database (or CRM) is the point where you can fix this problem. One of the biggest causes of inconsistent and incomplete data is allowing leads generated at different sources to flow straight into the database assuming it can be corrected or dealt with later. It almost never happens! However, this is the point at which you need to put in a data normalization process which helps fill in missing data points and standardizes your lead records before they get to your CRM. Some of the things you may want to do before they get past this stage are:

• Filter out any garbage records which will just be redundant
• Maintain a “minimum required” fields like name, company, address, email, phone number and job title which have to be filled in before considering it a completed record
• Append missing data such as email addresses, postal addresses, account information which is missing
• Check for duplication
• Format and standardize job titles, number formats, naming conventions and so on

When it comes to sources of business contacts as leads there are a number of different options. They are among the most valuable commodities in business to business sales and marketing and when you’re out shopping for them, you’ll notice they come in different packages. 

Pay once for unlimited use – This is the kind of pricing model which needs a one time upfront investment usually in the form of a subscription fee or purchase amount which gives you a years access or an export file of a fairly high volume of business contacts you can use as and when you need to use those business contacts.

Pros

•  You pay one time and have access to those contacts whenever you have a need
• They are usually larger databases with more contacts which could be suited to those who need volume over focus
• Considering the volume of contacts and data you have access to the cost per contact is much lower and your investment is spread across a larger number of contacts

Lead lists and business contact data are an integral need of almost every marketer or sales person in some form or the other. Whether you need to build a list of target customers or you simply need to locate one decision maker within your target account along with contact details, here are some sources you should take a look at to find what you need:

Hoovers Online – Online Business Information Directory (Subscription based)

OneSource –  Global Business Information Source (Subscription based)

ReadyContacts – B2B Custom Role Based Business Contacts List Building (Pay per contact delivered)

Jigsaw.com – Directory Of Companies and Business Professionals (Pay by points system or purchase exported lists)

Spoke – Business Networking Site (Business networking model)

Linkedin - Business Professionals Network (Business networking model)

iProfile – Global IT Business Intelligence (Subscription model)

ActiveContacts – Vertical Based Deep Rooted Business Contacts Databases (Subscription based)

Zoominfo - Directory of People and Companies (Subscription based)

Demandbase – Marketing List Building & Purchase Business Contacts (Pay per use model)

These are just 10 good sources for your lead, lists and business contacts requirements. Does anyone have more they could add to this list which could be useful?