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

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

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

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

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

This is about the time of the year when B2B marketers and sales professionals start sharing their forecasts of trends we are all likely to see in the year ahead. We all think about them, debate them, place our bets and take these into consideration and keep them in mind while developing sales and marketing strategies for the year ahead. So it just seems to make sense that we here at ReadyContacts share some of our views on what we can expect to see with marketing lists and data for 2009.

Marketing lists and data??? Change? Ofcourse. Why not? If you asked the same question just 15 years ago in 1994, the B2B marketing list would have looked quite different. For starters, it would either be a written list or perhaps an MS Excel, Dbase or FoxPro list which simply had company names, postal addresses, telephone numbers and possibly a fax number. It wouldn’t be unusual to see lists without “website urls” and “email addresses” which became a standard field in most company databases some time later. So if you are a skeptic, take my word for it…marketing data and lists do evolve!

Moving a few years ahead, 2008 has seen a lot of activity and technology which has impacted the way we sell. It’s been the year of Twitter, inbound lead generation, online marketing, SEO, content development, marketing automation, lead nurturing and a whole lot more. The absolute fundamentals of sales and marketing may not change but the approach and tools certainly have been so its only natural that the lists that we use and the data in our CRMs also get impacted by these trends and we will demand better and higher quality data. If I had to pick one word to summarize how data in the form of CRMs, cold calling lists, email marketing lists and others would change in 2009 it would be “Rich”. Marketers will demand richer data which will be reflective of what data they need to equip themselves for the kind of marketing and sales programs that are relevant in 2009.  What has become relevant is the multi-touch approach that companies have been adopting where they use multiple channels from email, phone calls, website content, newsletters, direct mail, social networking like Linkedin, Twitter & blogs to connect with companies and decision makers rather than sticking to just one or two modes of communication.

Whats the result on lists and data? I believe we will start seeing more companies need richer data on their target accounts and decsion makers. We will see data points such as Linkedin account, company blog and Twitter id become standard fields in many databases. Companies will demand these details to connect with their customers, comment on their blogs, follow them on twitter and connect with them through these channels. Even inbound leads through online form fills which are incomplete will only be really valuable with complete contact data and the more information you have on your accounts and customers, the more you understand them, the better informed your own reach out will be. 2009 will see a shift in focus on quality of data i.e.

• Richer company or account data including detailed profiles, product lines / offerings, news, intelligence, blogs and online channels
• Inbound leads that have been cleaned, completed, qualified and enriched with additional data points
• Decision makers which have been qualified, relavent or useful for the database and can be nurtured till ready
• Complete contact details for decision makers including direct phone numbers, email addresses, profiles, blog links, social/business network profiles, Skype / Twitter ID, RSS feed etc

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?

A great DemandGenReport article by Kenneth Krogue, President of InsideSales.com titled Picking 5 Of The Top 5 Time Wasters of Inside Sales & Lead Generation simply echoes our belief that spending more on building better lists translates to spending less time looking for people and more productivity. Among the ‘5 Time Wasters’ that Ken brings across very well, the first of them is relying on “Poor Lead Generation Resources”. Here is a paragraph from the article:

TIME WASTER #1: Poor Lead Generation Resources
Why cold call if you can have inbound leads generated from an effective marketing campaign at a fraction of the cost? Our biggest and best clients take this seriously and use web, radio and television outlets to provide sustainable and scalable sources of qualified leads.

It’s all about the leads. We don’t see nearly as many successful companies leaving the lead generation process to their sales people. If you don’t provide pre-qualified leads, at least provide your sales teams with good lists to call. Good lists cost roughly 5% to 10% of the money you spend on labor costs and can increase results dramatically (we have seen results as high as 1300%), yet some companies we studied left their reps to spend as much as 40% of their time looking for someone to call. Not only are you wasting your most valuable resource—your sales team—you risk losing your most effective sales reps to companies that are willing to give them a higher rate of success by providing warm leads.

We also advocate using dialing technology to triple or quadruple the contact rates of new leads and allow
salespeople to spend less time between conversations with decision-makers. Dialers that connect your sales reps to a live call as soon as he or she has ended another call will keep your sales reps busy making sales—increasing their success and profitability.

Best Practice: Invest in good leads or lists. The Internet is already the fastest growing and least expensive source of leads for almost every business. Create an effective website and generate leads.

A quality list for you sales team is worth the extra cost in terms of budget or time. Spending time on a poor list where you have to look for people, dont have complete contact information and eventually reach people who are not the right people to talk is pure waste. Work with good data and you will get better results. Read on to check out the Ken’s other 4 top time wasters for inside sales and lead generation here. If you find your inside sales team spends too much time trying to locate decision makers and people to speak to, build a good list now!

Getting started with building custom target lists of decision makers for your sales and marketing campaigns using ReadyContacts is probably not as complicated as you may have thought. A number of customers who we have spoken to are initially a bit wary of what the process will involve and how much of their time and assitance will be required during the process. The answer: Very little!

In fact it’s really about defining exactly which decision makers or influencers you need within your target companies and conveying this requirement clearly to the ReadyContacts team who will handle the rest.  Here is a quick slideshow on how you can get started if you need to have a custom lead list built:

See! Now that wasn’t so tedious was it? If you want to try this out yourself our free trial offer is still on and we can help build you a small sample list to evaluate. Simply fill in the request form!

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

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

Although most of our custom role based list building is done for business to business sales and marketing purposes for our clients who need to reach out to some very specific decision makers in specific job roles, they are not exclusively the only ones who can benefit from this solution. As we had discovered from earlier experience, a well built custom list of role based executives can be a goldmine for effectively connecting with the right executives for executive management recruiters and headhunters too.

One such project we worked on quite recently was for a financial investments company who were looking to recruit or head hunt some very qualified and exclusive executive management talent from some of the top European investment companies. The executives they were looking to locate were highly specialized in very niche financial product development positions and the exact nature and responsibilities of their work was crucial to their recruitment requirements. Based on this, our team spent time locating these high level executives with these special profiles along with their direct contact details which in turn helped our customers connect with them and discuss their offer without much trouble.

A custom executive list building service really helps cut out a lot of the time consuming groundwork that recruiters and headhunters have to regularly go through. Once the executives that you need to target have been located with contact information, the process of connecting with them and continuing the process is simplified and your productivity will increase significantly. So if you are headhunter or executive management recruiter looking to develop on your database, role based list building is the way to go!  

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.