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?

We are excited about posting the first of our series of  ”How Good Data Turbo Charges Lead Generation” interviews where we’ll talk to prominent btob marketing and lead generation experts to get some of their experiences and their views on marketing data, databases and their role in sucessful lead generation programs. We are just as excited that we got to interview noted database and CRM expert Lori Feldman in our very first feature of this series and in the process we have some valuable insights and great takeaways for readers. Without any more introductions and delays, here’s the interview:

You’ve been an advocate for building and managing robust customer and marketing databases, do you think current in the economic times CMOs should call for more focus more towards their customer databases?

Lori: IMO, you can never focus on your customer database enough. It’s the mother ship of sales! Unfortunately too many organizations treat their database like an address book instead of a business asset that appreciates in value with proper care and feeding. 

There are 2 primary database marketing strategies: Retention (keeping the customers you have–critical) and acquisition (getting new ones-urgent). Companies tend to focus on one or the other, but seldom both at once. (Or worse, they treat customers and prospects the same, which is a big no-no.) 

Usually the focus is on acquisition–prospecting, even though it’s at least 7X easier to sell existing customers than to convert new ones. Marketing and Sales sometimes think, “Well, we have those customers already; let’s go get new ones.” They forget their customers are Grade A Prime beef to another company’s acquisition program. Right now with a contracted economy, customer share is stolen rather than created. So it’s imperative to show customers maximum appreciation and head off potential defections. 

That said, if a company has been spending its resources in one area, prospecting, for example, then a great strategy is to beef up sales with the other discipline (customer care).

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

Lori: Data quality has 2 components: Is the info correct? And is it complete? For example, I could have a perfectly targeted list of CMOs at their company addresses, but without phone numbers or email addresses. The info may be correct, but it’s not ready for prospecting, unless I’m using snail mail, which, I believe is an expensive way to begin a prospecting campaign.

I recommend that organizations have at least one Database Champion who’s responsible for caressing the data: completing what’s missing, following up on bounced emails and opt-outs, keeping track of decision makers who are replaced. This last one is very important. One of my clients just told me that in her industry at least 30% of her contacts aren’t sitting at their desks anymore. The economic downturn isn’t just having an effect on people and companies; it’s murdering contact databases. 

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

Lori: The first challenge is finding all the data. It’s amazing how many different places people keep important leads. Here are a few:

·PDA phones

·Outlook address books

·accounting software

·various spreadsheets

·piles of business cards falling off desks

·multiple contact databases at the same company

·different departments at the same company who have pieces and parts of the same contact info 

I recently worked with a new client to set up his sales database. He just bought a 50-year-old company. The customer “database” was a 10″-high ream of greenbar printout–and no electronic version available. Obviously, getting that report re-keyed was priority one. Everything else he had, including sales leads from a manufacturing directory they subscribed to, needed to be matched to that list before any intelligent territory planning or sales call strategy could be mapped out.

Another common challenge for BTB marketers is combining multi-channel data. For example, a lead may come in through the website with just a name and an email address. Then that same lead may call in to ask a question. If the person taking the call doesn’t try to get complete contact info at that point, there may be 2 incomplete contact records instead of 1 good one.

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

Lori: A big list is great–if you have a relationship with them already. You can just turn on a drip marketing program, and away you go. They’re your peeps and they love hearing from you and feeling like  you care. They’ll even help you update incorrect information about themselves if asked. They want to be found.

But in the case of a big prospect list of people who don’t know you yet, don’t let your reach exceed your grasp. It’s too expensive. Only acquire leads you have time to work. I’m a big believer in the hybrid approach: If you don’t have any list, purchase one. But then add sweat equity to finesse it to the quality and target you need, including getting permission to email and finding the right decision maker. It’s a time-consuming and a tedious job but it can be outsourced. But the human edit propels you further down in the sales funnel.

Another mistake I see in building lists is not understanding who the real prospect opportunities are. This comes from not truly understanding your customer base. If companies truly *get* their customers, they’d find more prospects like them and forget about everyone else. But they’re usually afraid of leaving someone out.  When building a sales leads database, I always recommend starting with a customer survey. Let your good customers tell you why they’re doing business with you. Then use that intel to find and talk to the right prospects.

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

Lori: The biggest challenge is getting consensus from all database stakeholders (those who are using and contributing to the database) on the Rules of Engagement. I always tell my clients their database will only be as good as their worst user. Whoever that is, because they refuse to capitalize names and streets so email marketing goes out looking like a teenager texted it; or they aren’t sure where to put certain info so they “freelance” their own field definitions; or they refuse to look up to see if a contact already exists in the database, so they routinely add duplicates…often with variation spellings…making them harder to find and fix…these are the people we want to strangle if we’re in charge of marketing results.

The next challenge I see is that organizations fall way short of segmenting their databases. The tendency is to create a bucket of prospects and a bucket of customers, the end. In reality, there are at least 20 ways each of those buckets could be further grouped so that messaging is more relevant and engaging. Organizations do a terrible job with this because they think “list” instead of “personas.” This oversight is the big money suck that could put another 10%-20% revenue to the top line.

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About Lori Feldman

Lori works with business leaders and sales professionals to squeeze every drop of profit from their #1 asset–their customer database. She is a popular national speaker on database marketing, drip marketing, email marketing and social CRM. Lori received the Direct Marketer of the Year Award from the St. Louis DMA and her e-newsletter has won the APEX Award for Newsletter Excellence 2 years in a row. You can find her on LinkedIn and Twitter (@LoriFeldman) or her website at www.TheDatabaseDiva.com.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marketing data is a long term and constant requirement. How much data is needed can vary with time in the short term but the need for marketing data for most businesses doesn’t diminish over the long run. So when marketing executives evaluate sources to help them address this requirement and help them build more data or maintain their data, they need to be able to identify the two types of data providers:

1. Marketing Database Providers
2. Marketing Data Partners

Marketing database providers are good for a one-size-fits-all kind of solution. These include list providers, rented list providers, database subscription services or off the shelf data which a company can simply buy and use if it can fulfil a requirement well. It’s by no means a bad option and can be very cost effective in many cases or ideal for a quick addition of fresh contacts or accounts into the funnel. Compare it to selecting a suit for an ocassion: if you like it and it fits well, buy it. It will fulfil your immediate need for a suit to wear to that event or ocassion.  However off the shelf databases were not exclusively tailored keeping in mind your business and more often than not, whats ideal for one company may not be as great a fit for another though it may work.

Marketing data solutions partners work with the company to understand specific data requirements and work towards building and maintaing the company database on an on-going basis. Rather than selling data that has been gathered before, it involves understanding what marketing or sales need and coming up with specific solutions to meet an organizations marketing database requirements. Data requirements can be specifc and changing depending for what they are needed. For example, if a data storage solutions company needed new data for a back-up and recovery product campaign, the contacts needed would revolve around those responsible for IT risk management, data center and others responsible for back-up and recovery systems. The account information that would be useful to know for such a campaign could include account profiling questions on what is the target account currently using to address risk of data loss and other questions which would help the sales process. A marketing database solution partner would work towards understanding this need and build the data accordingly. If the requirement was for another product, the data needed to be supplied would change accordingly.

So depending on what kind of support you are looking for when it comes to managing your marketing data (whether its a short term immediate requirement or an on going need for data management) remember to look out for which category the vendor you are evaluating falls in. In the long run a partner who understands your needs, contanstly learns with your organization and takes away part of the overheads that comes with marketing data management is a long term solution. Anything else is a quick fix to a temporary data need.  Are your current data providers giving you exactly the kind of data and support you need?

I’ts an important question to reflect on before giving a go-ahead on any email marketing campaign. Personally, I hate spam as much every other person out there, I like the concept of using purely opt in lists or double opt in lists to run email campaigns but practically I also know not everyone can build perfect opt in or permission based lists and rely solely on them. I am not against email marketing on custom built targeted email lists just as I’m not completely opposed to cold calling and believe they can both be effective “if done right“.  I also realized I just made a rather bold move defending the use of non-optin lists to send out emails to companies as a marketing strategy and I just set myself up for a lot of flak for making this statement. But before we go straight to the comments section below think about this question. How do you perceive spam and when do you consider an email spam?

When I get an email which is completely irrelevant to what I do, who I am and  what I may be interested in, it’s no longer email to me…its spam.

• I am a B2B marketer (at least when I am in the office and at work I am) 
• I generate leads, look for new ways to drive more customers towards our business and manage marketing projects (its what I do)
• I am interested in anything that helps me become a better marketer, helps me drive more customers, helps the business serve customers better (is some of what interests me)

If I get an email from an unknown company and an unknown person with an email on “Join Us For The IT Security Systems Configuration Training Seminar” that is SPAM simply because its irrelvant to me and I could not care less about that IT Security training seminar as a marketing manager. Similarly drawing the parallel to cold calling, I would be more than a little annoyed being called and invited to attend a conference on improving manufacturing processes or called by someone selling an accounting software solution. On the other hand, if I received an email again from an unknown company and an unknown person introducing on “Introducing our new instant landing page creation software for lead gen managers” I dont look at it as spam.  Even if  I’m not interested in buying it, the way I look at it is ‘it was addressed to the right person in our company’. It’s within my area of responsibility to evaluate such an application and its within my subject of interest as a B2B marketer. Similarly, I’m glad to talk to someone who cold called looking to see if our compnay was interested in a listing on their new B2B Marketing online directory even if at the end of the call we decide not to or that we are not interested at this point. It’s still within my area of responsibility and still related to my area of interest. 

In the first case I would say if the company had sent their email to someone responsible for our IT security, their email would have at least been read if not replied to. By sending it out to the marketing manager it was treated as spam. So is it spam when you dont know the sender or the senders company and you haven’t said you would like to receive an email from them? Or is it spam when even someone you have allowed to email you sends you something that is completely out of your sphere of interest? If you blocked out every new business contact that you have never heard of before from connecting with you through any channel… could you be missing out on some great opportunities? 

I still believe in trying to generate the best possible opt in and permission based lists and doing everything possible to get more opt in email addresses and build a strong internal list. I also believe that its not blasphemous to run an email campaign on a very well built target list where you know the person is the right person to connect with and if its done right. What would you define as spam? Whats not considered spam? Is knowing the sender and providing permission the only criteria or is there more to it?

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

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

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

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

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

Companies like Cisco, Microsoft and Avaya know a thing or two about building business to business channel and parter marketing programs that contribute to a big slice of their revenue pie. Partner management and channel marketing programs especially within larger companies are very specialized and intricate organizations within business and have numerous staff looking into different roles and responsibilities whether it’s lead generation program management for channel partners, lead and referral management, partner training management or partner acquisition and channel marketing development. To expand the partner network it’s important to have an ongoing marketing and sales process within the channel marketing organization to constantly identify new channel partners along with the right decision makers and connect with them to explore a partnership opportunity just as any other marketing and sales team work together to close direct customers.

While starting a new partner program or expanding a channel marketing program:

• Identify a criteria which will help you qualify which vendors are a good fit to represent your brand or products
• Build a list of possible partners and vendors that would represent your business well
• Research and profile the vendors with details such as size, sales team strength, possible competitors they already represent etc
• Locate the highest level or final decision maker responsible for marketing or business development within the vendor company as a secondary contact
• Locate the decision maker who is directly responsible for managing partners and executing channel sales for programs for partners  within the company as the primary contact
• Gather contact information like direct phone numbers, email addresses and postal addresses so that the database is suited to email, phone or direct marketing.

Decision makers directly responsible for working with partners to execute their programs make a good primary contact to connect with discuss and gather more information on how they execute these programs for other partners, what kind of sucess have they had and also to start discussing your company’s own program. The key marketing or development head presumably the final decision maker can be a secondary contact though still instrumental when discussing the terms, margins, incentvies and closing partners. 

Eventually every partner network has performing and non performing partners and that continuous process to connect with and engage more partners and channels to your network is crucial in helping you build your program into a revenue machine for the business.

Paid online advertising to spread the word about your company or product is a significant online marketing strategy. Depending on the size of the company or nature of products and solutions the company is looking to drive traffic for, using Google Ad-words or vertical specific ad sales networks are the quickest solutions to getting an online advertising campaign started for the business. Vertical specific ad networks such as Federated Media, Adbrite, Adify and others enable companies to find and distribute their advertisements across numerous networks to focussed online audiences and cater to a number of verticals from travel, food to technology. What if you want to build your own network and connect with some very niche or specific sites? What if you want to link your product or services to these sites and have a special agreement with them?

Building your own ad network for either advertising on a pay per click model or even simply connecting with some prominent sites within your industry or network needs a marketing + sales approach. Once the online publications or sites within the vertical where you’d like to drive traffic from are identified, the next critical step is locating the decision makers for these websites who need to be approached along with contact details such as email addresses and phone numbers. Building this list of the sites you want links from and the key decision makers for those sites is half the battle. From there onwards, it’s about connecting with those who are in charge of advertising and links on the sites through well crafted email messages and followed up by personal calls to put across the proposal you have for either an advertising on their site or perhaps a mutual exchange of links.

This could be a very effective strategy for niche businesses and products such as bio-technology, renewable energy solutions or various others where carrying out an ongoing effort to reach out to popular sites in the area and working out how to partner with them along the way is a sensible investment. Does your company network with others in your vertical? What is your game plan for building a network within your vertical?

The US healthcare pharmaceuticals market is valued at several hundred billion dollars. It’s little wonder that it’s one of the top segments in the sights of a large number of b2b companies eyeing a slice of that pie. When it comes to building a database of healthcare leads and decision makers a custom list building approach is perhaps one of the best sources and well worth the time or money you invest in building it. Depending on the organization within which you need decision makers whether its IT, finance, accounting, compliance or administration, role based lists are a lot more reliable and accurate. Some of the larger company databases may not have the level or type of contacts needed and although ready lists can be purchased or rented, accuracy would depend on how recently they were built and unless these lists can be sampled. When the products or services are more niche and require very specific decision makers engaged in the sales process then aside from generating inbound leads and inquiries for the offering, building role based lists is ideal. For example if the decision maker is the person responsible for diagnostics technology in the lab or the person responsible for emergency response systems and software, it’s unlikely they can be found on most directories or ready lists.

To build a role based list, use a telephone based process of calling into to prospective accounts and asking for decision makers by role rather than asking for someone in a specific job title. For example, if the product being sold is a tissue imaging solution for diagnostics, navigating through the diagnostics lab and identifying the person responsible for imaging is a lot more productive than asking for the IT Director or having the name of  the CIO and asking inside sales to connect with him/her. The phone based process is time intensive and slower than buying a list of more general  higher level contacts but the value of having a database of accurate direct decision makers which sales and marketing can connect with quickly is well worth the effort and extremely valuable while going after the healthcare segment.

In a market like healthcare and pharmaceuticals where high quality marketing data isn’t always readily available off the shelf, try building your own. Starting with the right person may help you get that piece of the pie before someone else does.

Targeting large companies always requires going that extra mile in terms of preparing the pre sales data and sales intelligence which includes knowing the right set of decision makers. When it comes to these larger accounts knowing just one or two high level decision makers is barely enough to crack into them and get discussions moving. The same applies to going after the larger accounts while selling software or technology products or services.  It’s important to know a number of decision makers at different levels including Manager, Director and Vice President / C-Level to be able to connect with the right level to get a foot into the account. 

From our experience in lead list building within this segment, we know information technology or software organization within large companies like the fortune 500 are vast and often spread across different locations. One of the biggest challenges in the process to engage these larger companies is simply connecting with the right person. Simply purchasing or buying a list of  ”Vice Presidents of IT” is not necessarily the right place to start and a lot of time can be spent after hitting a dead end in simply trying to locate the right person. C-Level or VP-level contacts in IT could be responsible for a wide variety of areas and thats where the extra step of identifying a contact’s role and responsibility along with their job title can spell all the difference. For example, a fortune company may have 50 VP’s of IT across 10 locations. If your looking to sell an SAP integration solution, then you need to ask for or locate only the VPs of IT who are responsible for SAP engineering within the company.  Similarly if you are looking to sell a firewall solution, then you need the decision makers within IT or IT Security who are responsible for firewall security as other contacts are likely to be dead ends. 

Another factor of selling into technology or software organizations which stands out (those of you who have been selling into IT will have seen this) is that decision makers within this organization are often hard to connect with over the phone or email and its often a battle of trying different times and multiple emails to actually connect with them. Very often after connecting, inside sales persons are referred to or asked to try another level or another decision maker to continue talks, so its important to have as many decision makers at different levels as possible before getting started to improve the odds of connecting quicker. Connecting with deep rooted decison makers like managers who often work more directly with the technology involved is a great starting point, are more open to dialog and are a valuable source for first hand information even if they are not the final decision makers. It’s always good to have a mix of deep rooted contacts as well as the higher level or final decision makers. So when it comes to selling software or technology and building lists of decision makers at larger accounts:

• Build as much sales intelligence as possible on each account before going after them
• Locate contacts across different locations of the company, the technology organization can be wide spread
• Identify contacts based on their exact roles and responsibilities keeping in mind the technology area you are offering. Going completely by job titles is not always the best way to go about it unless the software or technology is more generic in nature
• Locate contacts at different levels of the technology organization including deeper level management and higher level executives to have a wider range of contact points

To sum it up, when you need to get into the technology organization of a major account, start with the right person. The rest will follow.