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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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About Ardath Albee 

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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About Michael Damphousse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

B2B marketing database management like any other function of an organization has it’s own language and its own terms peculiar to those who use them and sound greek to those who don’t. Data-speak is what you can call it! No matter how vague or complicated any of these words may seem, they all have very simple explanations and anyone can learn how to walk the talk once they break it down to its simplest meaning. Here are some of them we’ve picked and completely broken down into simple explanations:

• Address Hygiene: the level of accuracy of contacts and mailing addresses on a list
• Back-end: the database where the records are stored
• Cold List: a list of contacts which have not been previously contacted or engaged yet 
• Data Append: adding missing or additional information to existing records like adding missing email addresses
• Data Migration: moving data from one place to another. For example moving records from an Oracle database to Salesforce.com
• Data Export: downloading records and data from an application into a simple list format such as a Microsoft Excel sheet or CSV file
• De-dupe: is short for de-duplication. A term commonly used to remove two identical records in a database or list so that it has only unique records left
• Dead Contact: a business contact in a database who is no longer in the same company or job role and thus is not useful as a target contact anymore
• DNC: short for Do Not Call an abbreviation used to mark records or contacts which are not to be contacted again
• Email list bounce rate: a statistic which helps understand out of a total list of emails sent, how many emails bounced or failed to reach the recepient due to a bad email address or some other reasons
• Gatekeeper: usually a term associated with a secretary, admin or administrative assistant who monitors access to a higher level executive
• Geographical Database: a database restricted to a fixed geographical area for example list of printing companies in Atlanta, Georgia
• Opt-in list: list of emails where the receivers have agreed to receive solicitation emails from the sender. List of emails authorized by owners for marketing use
• Primary Contact: the key decision maker within an account who is the main point of contact for all marketing and sales targeted towards that account
• Prospect-List: a list of potential customers or business contacts who are qualified enough to be possible future customers
• Record Status: an attribute assigned to a record to either understand where it stands within the sales or marketing cycle or convey some message about the record
• Reference Contact: not a primary decision maker but an alternative contact within the account a sales person can use to connect with the primary contact
• Supress List: a list of records, names or email addresses which are to be excluded while working on any campaign or email reachout
• SIC Codes: short for Standard Industrial Codes a four digit US government recognized number assigned to businesses to classify them under a set of industries
• Vertical Specific Database: a database of accounts which all belong to a single vertical or industry type such as Financial Investment companies or Furniture Retail companies

Any more that come to mind?

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.

Everyone talks about target marketing, improving the focus of their marketing camapigns and going for the personalized marketing approach. There are discussions on how to get efforts more targeted and then people are assigned to overhaul the website to make it appeal to different market segments or decision making levels. Some are assigned to developing different email content, website content, downloadable documents which are specially made for each target buyer segment while others are busy brainstorming other ideas on how to woo each target market segment with a message which will strike a chord with them. Has anyone checked to see if the contacts in the company marketing database are segmented accordingly? Ooops!

You can’t run targted marketing campaigns on data which has not been segmented! Segmenting your data is step one to planning a targeted marketing campaign as soon as you’ve identified who your customers are. Even if you have a single product for example: a payroll management software for the hospitality industry, its still possibly to customize messages and campaigns for the Payroll decision maker, the VP of Human Resources and the CFO. Alternatively you may want to hit C-Level executives with a with a high level overview on how you product or solution can help their business and hit those directly responsible and those who will use your solution with a more detailed message. In either case, however you decide to plan your segmentation and target messages, your database and business contacts need to be segmented and sorted accordingly. 

To do this the team responsible for data management and data cleansing needs to come together with the team thats planning out the targeted marketing strategy, understand their common objectives and sync the data accordingly. Well tagged data which has complete information such as contact level, contact organization, department, contact type and similar attributes are far easier to sort compared to contacts which consist of names and contact details. For example if you need a list of VP-Level contacts from the Finance organization, the data can be easily sorted IF each contact was associated with these fields. Scheduling a periodic data enrichment effort along with your data cleansing and maintainence routine will help ensure these attributes are added to your data which makes it easier to manage when needed in future. 

So before you plan your next targeted marketing campaign, check to see if your data meets your segmentation needs. If it’s not, there’s some work to be done.

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.
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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.