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?

Having checked out Mike Damphousse’s blog post Ethics & Wonder/Amazon’s Mechanical Turk/Kiva on his experience getting a data related task done through the new online marketplace, I had a chance to check it out myself and ponder what this means for us as a B2B Marketing Database Management company. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk has been making buzz waves among marketers among other professionals who have been exploring to see just how they can leverage this to get some of the more routine tasks done. Also getting them done at a very competitive cost by putting them on the listing for providers to bid.

Essentially an Odesk or Elance of task related work, Mechanical Turk is a market place for both providers and requesters of very process oriented tasks like researching, identifying, labeling, transcribing and data related tasks which need some amount of human intelligence as opposed to tasks that can be automated. With several willing providers who can work from the comfort of their homes a lot of these jobs can get done for a fiercely competitve price which even outsourcing companies wouldnt be able to match given their operating costs. Will this mean all marketing data related work is going to head towards this?

I’m not sure it will. A good part of what we do at ReadyContacts does involve that “human touch” simply because there is a difference in quality between automating that process and using human intelligence to get the results. For example we could simply build B2B decision maker lists by pulling records from an internal database and delivering them at a competitive price but we don’t. Our team calls into every target account and locates decision makers by asking others in the company for their specific job role rather than their job titles. Eventually a sales person will need to go through this step to identify if they are really talking to the right decision maker. Calling in to build a list is a lot more expensive but in the bigger picture, we deliver something that will save our customers time and help them get to their decision makers quicker. 

Similarly there are de-duplication applications available that will help you clean your CRM data and remove redundancy and help you lower costs as against hiring someone to do this. Will it work the same? Not entirely. For example, it would help remove two accounts titled “Citi Group” or two leads named “John Smith” but it wont know “Peoplesoft” is a part of “Oracle” or know if a certain company has been taken over, merged or a lead is no longer working in the same company. The same goes for email verification and appending. There is some human intelligence required in most of these tasks to do them better. Does this mean there wont be room for ReadyContacts and other B2B data companies?

Well Odesk and Elance have been doing millions of dollars worth of software development projects for the masses with very capable developers as far as India, Israel, Ukraine and Singapore sucessfully delivering projects. So I’m sure this can be replicated with Mechanical Turk for other tasks. However Odesk and Elance haven’t put larger software companies like Infosys out of work, its only opened a door to the masses as an affordable option to getting development support and Mechanical Turk should have the same effect. We’ll have to wait and watch.

Any readers with experiences having used Mechanical Turk for any of their projects?

Do lists make up an important part of your lead generation strategy and are they an integral part of your lead pipeline? If the answer is no, then the rest of this post isn’t going to be all that useful but if it is yes, then read on! This is the question we have been asking a number of our customers and prospects while talking to them not just because it helps us know if what we do can be helpful for them but also helps reflect on how you build or source those lists if they are important to you. 

Though even in cases where inbound leads are the staple, every now and then as a marketer you come across a need for a specific set of decision makers or contacts within a target set of accounts that you feel has potential and you would like to try reach out to them. Thats when building custom lists help supplement your lead requirements. While some companies do lay a lot of emphasis on building high quality lists for their campaigns by leveraging their inside sales teams others don’t really regard list quality as an important factor since they can be qualified at a later stage. They look at building volume lists with as many contacts as possible and then going through the long process of qualifying them and identifying the good ones. If contact lists are an important part of your lead strategy then the focus has to be on quality and not quantity. You want to add the best possible list of contacts at well qualified target accounts to your CRM and work towards nurturing those to qualified opportunities rather than looking to fill it with random contacts. Using custom built role based lists is far more effective as a long term strategy to building a better internal company marketing database than purchasing ready title based lists though you may get a lot more in terms of volume for the latter at the same price band. 

Customers sometimes have a need for a custom list just as a small one time requirement to experiment with an email reachout or one off direct mail campaign but feel that you need to have a larger minimum requirement or solutions like those we have at ReadyContacts need a bigger committment which isn’t true. There isn’t really a requirement that is too small or too large when it comes to an on demand custom list building effort. Its something you can order as per your requirement and as and when you need it which is what differentiates it from having a long term committment with a lead generation services provider with a minimum committment. The need for marketing data is not completely consistant at different times of the month or year so why should the supply be?

When lists are an important part of your lead mix, give it the attention it should get and it will pay off! 

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.

When any company is looking out for B2B lead sources and especially for a database of companies and key executive contacts, Dun & Bradstreet’s Hoovers Online company database is on everyone’s evaluation list. Having been around for several years and with a comprehensive database of over 23 million companies, its rightly amongst the most widely known online source for company and executive information for business to business marketers. Other than the sheer volume of data that Hoovers maintains, the amount of data on each company ranging from financial figures to locations is very comprehensive and an excellent source for company intelligence which can be useful while targeting them.  

As a business to business lead source, the Hoovers Online database comes with some of the high level executive contacts in each company, some with email addresses and some without. Although they have only high level executive decision makers such as the CEO, President, COO, CIO, VP Finance, Treasurer, VP Human Resources and so on, it can be a good source of leads provided your best target contact is a very high level executive. Hoovers currently offers connectivity to Salesforce CRM and works well to populate your Salesforce account with target companies and high level contacts.

While the Hoovers Online database is an asset to almost any marketing team, if you are on a budget which doesnt suit the subscription fee required to access Hoovers or the business contacts you need are more deep-rooted and more specific roles than the high level key executives it offers, then it may make more sense to use a custom role based list building service like ReadyContacts or evaluate other alternative sources. If these are not constraints, a Hoovers subscription is always a valuable asset to have.

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

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

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

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

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! 

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

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

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

Continuing from our last post on Linkedin Vs Jigsaw For Your B2B Business Contacts, we’ll move on to two more heavy weights as sources for B2B marketers and sales people to build their target lists of leads and locate business executives. Hoovers and Zoominfo are well established sources for locating business contact information with different approaches. Both of them have their pros and cons which is what has to be weighed out before you decide which one best suits your needs. Here is a an overview of the two contact sources:

Hoovers

• What is it?
  • Hoovers is arguably the largest proprietary company information database with detailed company profiles and information on over 25 million business organizations. The database has detailed company overviews, locations, addresses, financial figures, competitors, news releases and key executives for each of these companies making it the gigantic resource on company information it has been known for.
• How do you locate contacts?
  • Hoovers is a subscription based database and while there are a set of free access companies, to get the most out of it you will need a subscription to get started. These can range from $75 per month for the most basic to considerably more for an enterprise subscription. The search criteria is quite extensive and you can search for both companies or contacts and even generate lists based on some parameters that matches your target set of accounts and contacts. Hoovers does offer Salesforce integration to populate a companies Salesforce accounts with the company or contact information they may need straight from its own data. Alternatively, lists of companies with executives can be exported into csv sheets and used
• What are the pros of Hoovers as a business contacts source?
  • With over 25 million organizations in the database its easily one of the most comprehensive sources of company information you can have access to. Along with its network of sources, Hoovers has managed to keep this enormous database up to date and the company information is quite reliable
  • Each account or organization is profiled with rich company intelligence which is valuable for sales persons and each contact or executive comes with a title and often with other details such as a bio and email address
  • The database is ideal for building target B2B lists and the export function ensures you can put all the data you need into a csv format and upload to your own CRM or application
• What are the cons of Hoovers as a business contacts source?
  • Not all the contacts will have complete direct contact information like direct phone numbers, direct addresses and email addresses so from a campaign perspective some amount of work may be required if you wish to make contact with these executives via email or direct mail
  • Hoovers provides users with high level key executives within companies which are mostly C-level to VP level heads of the important functions of the company. It may not be suited to your sales or marketing efforts if your best target contact is someone deeper within the organization like a manager or director level decision maker

Zoominfo

• What is it?
  • Zoominfo is an intelligent search engine which is built for searching company information and profiles. With about 3.9 million companies and 42 million people that can be searched, it provides a good source for business contacts and has two products ZoomExec and ZoomPower Sell specially made for sales and marketing to generate their lead lists
• How do you locate contacts?
  • Depending on whether you need high level executives at your target accounts or a wider range of business contacts you can select between the ZoomExec and ZoomPower Sell paid subscriptions. Once you are a registered user you can search by company names, revenue ranges, industry, contact job titles, level, geography and more. Each of these contacts comes with required contact information in terms of phone numbers and email addresses. Company information and profiles are also quite extensive and will provide most sales perons with the details they would need to know
• What are the pros of Zoominfo as a business contacts source?
  • With the Power Sell version having utp 25 million contacts at 3.9 million companies Zoominfo may not be the largest database but definitely more than sufficient to meet the needs of most b2b marketers and sales persons
  • If you need only higher level key executives the option of being able to subscribe to the smaller ZoomExec helps provide a more cost effective option to subscribing for what you may not really need
  • The search functionality is great to generate exactly the kind of lists you need by selecting your parameters and its ideal for building b2b target lists that can be exported and uploaded to your CRM
  • The contacts come with an email address and a phone number making it perfect to use for phone based reach outs and email campaigns as well
• What are the cons of Zoominfo as a business contacts source?
  • It may not suit your requirements if your target contacts are more specific in role as the contacts are a mix of contacts across different organizations and not role based contact which may be better suited to those selling more niche products to specific decision makers
  • Since most of the data is from search based technology and the size of the data is vast, over time the quality of the data can deteriorate or may not be as relevant
  • If you don’t require a full years subscription or are not likely to make the best use of the volumes of contacts or data throughout the year it may not offer a cost benefit as a pay per use model might since you are paying a subscription fee

All said and done, both of these are proven sources of company data and offer great value in their own ways. Evaluate them carefully see whats best suited for your own requirements. Stay tuned for more businiess contact sources!

When you are looking for decision maker business contacts within specific target accounts there are a a few names that instantly come to mind like Hoovers, Onesource, Spoke, Jigsaw, Zoominfo, ActiveContacts and Linkedin to name some of them. While each of these are great sources for company information and locating business contacts and decision makers in companies, they are quite varied in terms of what they offer and the model on which they are based. While selecting a source for your contacts its good to know what these are and weigh them out to determine which is the best source for your specific requirements. Here’s a quick overview on Linkedin.com and Jigsaw.com, two contrasting models that revolve around business contacts and b2b leads:

Linkedin

• What is it?
  • Linkedin is an online business network built to connect business professionals much like social networking sites such as Facebook.com, Orkut.com & Bebo which are a network of friends and social relationships. Users sign up and setup a profile for free and start linking to other connections or professionals they know who also have Linkedin accounts. This will give you access to not only your connections profile information but their connections and connections’ connections as well. In short the more connections you personally know and add to your account, the larger the business network you will have access to.
• How do you locate business contacts?
  • Once you have built your network by adding connections you can search through your network of contacts by various criteria such as company name, location, industry, keywords, contact names, titles and so on. By clicking on a contact name you will have access to any information that contact has made available on his/her profile which can include a lot of detail such as previous employment history, position, job role and responsibilities, interests, education background as well as testimonials from others who have worked with them. In short there is usually a lot you can tell about the person professionally from viewing their profile which is a huge plus for sales and marketing professionals
• What are the pros of Linkedin as a business contacts source?
  • Sign up and setup is free, you can get started and build a business network of contacts over some time without any upfront investment
  • If you know about 50 people who you can add as connections it can give you access to up to 2 million contacts or more
  • Users often provide a lot of details about themselves professionally from current position, roles, responsibilities, areas of specialization and more which can be extremely valuable to sales and marketing efforts
  • Since users update their profiles and information by themselves most of the data is quite reliable and makes this model one of the stronger sources in terms of data quality
  • With over 25 million users signed up it provides a good range of contacts at both executive as well as more deep rooted levels
• What are the cons of Linkedin as a business contacts source?
  • Since is based on a networking model, the depth of contacts you will have access to is dependent on how many people you know and can connect to in your own network. If you know fewer business associates who use Linkedin, your own network will be smaller and hence the access you have to others within the Linkedin network will also be less
  • It’s a useful source for finding individual contacts or locating decision makers within few accounts but does not have an option to bulk download contacts or export so that they can be uploaded to a CRM. It’s not ideal for lists that are needed for campaigns
  • Linkedin profiles don’t provide complete contact information such as postal addresses, phone numbers and email id’s. So it may not be as well suited as a direct information source to run direct mail, telemarketing or email campaigns

Jigsaw

• What is it?
  • Jigsaw is an online directory of decision makers and business contacts targeted especially at sales and marketing professionals who need to locate specific contact information on decision makers at accounts they are looking to target. Users can sign up free and then use points to buy a business contact they need. It uses a combination of a paid and social model where the user can either buy points for cash or earn points by sharing and uploading business contacts he/she already has in exchange for business contacts he/she needs which someone else may have added.
• How do you locate business contacts?
  • Before you start out locating contacts you need points in your account which works as credit. You can either earn points by contributing data that you already have or simply buy credits for money. Contacts can be searched through company name, industry, title, location and several other criteria. Once you have located the contacts you need you can simply buy them in exchange for points from your account. Alternatively Jigsaw also sells lists of contacts from within the database which allows you to select a list based on industry or types of contacts etc and purchase an export of the data to use in campaigns
• What are the pros of Jigsaw as a business contacts source?
  • The Jigsaw database has accumulated over 9 million contacts with a large range of contacts at almost all levels of an organization from executives to those at a deeper level which makes it one of the larger databases of its kind and provides a great source for contact information
  • The point system allows users to pay for only what they need virtually like buying contacts off a shelf and not having to pay for a subscription they may not make as much use of so its a pay-as-you-go model
  • The ability to earn points by contributing data allows you to barter your existing contact data and can enable you to access the contacts without having to use cash if you already have data that you can share
  • Jigsaw provides complete contact information from names, job titles, email addresses, postal addresses and direct phone numbers which makes it ideal as a source for email, tele and direct mail  campaigns
  • The option of buying a list is useful especially when you intend to upload the data into a CRM or other application for running campaigns
• What are the cons of Jigsaw as a business contacts source?
  • Although having a database of 9 million contacts is a benefit, it can also be a drawback since there is a fairly high percentage of contacts which has expired and although there is a system in place for users to mark bad contacts, the sheer volume of data makes it difficult to maintain the quality of it so its not uncommon to find contacts that no longer exist in their roles
  • Since the data is not added by the contact themselves, updates don’t reflect in the data when people have moved from their positions or companies
  • The lists are defined on a certain criteria and while you can specify the type of contacts or accounts you need, the contacts are identified by the type and level of contacts you need and not role based contacts which are more customized as against ready lists

Whats the verdict? It depends on what suits your requirements and is best for your marketing and sales efforts. So choose wisely!