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

Autoresponder is a killer application in the B2C world. B2C marketers like online retailers have long used autoresponders to engage customers, bring them back, drive sales and increase the value of every customer on an ongoing basis. Some of the tricks that work really well include:

• Send follow-up emails at regular intervals within 21-30 days after the transaction with a logical sequence of order confirmaiton, thank you, new promotions and so on.
• Send a follow-up email every time a shopping cart is abandoned with a few items in it
• Personalize recommendations based on the user’s transactions in the past
• Do not send the follow-up emails from a transaction beyond the 30 day period

As I was reading a related case study earlier this morning, I couldn’t help thinking about how an autoresponder strategy is completely missing or broken in B2B - lead nurturing is the closest to autoresponders, I know but its just no where close to the level of sophistication in B2C. At ReadyContacts, we build a lot of targeted business contact lists, profiles and qualify inbound leads, so I can extrapolate and predict how few B2B marketers are doing systematic lead nurturing today. Here are some ideas to think about:

• Apply the autoresponder strategy to every inbound lead and every website visitor that can be identified
• Follow-up within minutes of the activity with an email
• Trigger an alert to the sales person for that account or geography suggesting it might be a good time to call the lead
• Personalize the reachout based on where the lead came from, what pages on the website did the lead read, and if the lead downloaded any documents. This data must be handy and communicated to everyone involved instantly.
• Schedule a combination of email and phone follow-up loops within 7 days of the activity only.
• If relevant, end the loop with a direct mail trigger which can sit on the lead’s desk as a reminder.
• Then add the lead to your CRM database for reachout via other scheduled initiatives.

These are just a few ideas. I am sure there are a ton more that are common place in B2C that we can learn form. Add your thoughts in the comments and share your B2B autoresponder stories.

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!

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

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

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

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

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!  

Just the other day we had a call from a potential customer who had a business contact list requirement and called to inquire about how we could help build one for him. The discussion went well and then hit the brakes when he discovered custom role based list building would cost more per lead delivered as compared to buying a single contact from an existing database such as Jigsaw.com or even purchasing a pre packaged contact list. The turning point was a question that hit him right away which was “why should I pay a premium for a custom business contact when I can pay less per contact by purchasing a large list instead?”

There is a difference. When you purchase a list of business contacts you are buying a list that was created based on some criteria and though the costs are lower, you are relying on the fact that some percentage of those contacts will be the right decision makers to receive your marketing message or sales call.  In a custom role based list building effort every account is called into individually and the best decision maker for your message is locatedensuring that you are targeting the right person within your target account. In this respect, short of qualifications based on asking qualifying questions, these contacts are more qualified as leads compared to ready lists or databases and yield higher returns. 

Lets say a company has a CRM software which they need to pitch to potential customers. A custom role based list building service would identify decision makers or key executives within IT who overlook CRM requirements for the company and hence you know you are reaching out to the right person. It takes away part of the ‘trial and error’ aspect associated with a title based list where although the titles maybe along the lines of your potential decision maker, a lot of time and energy may end up being wasted on trying to connect with the wrong decision makers. So while purchased lists and contact databases like Jigsaw are great sources of title based contacts and probably better for a bigger source of volume raw leads, the role based list building option would be worth the premium if you are going for a more focussed, more qualified set of leads where “what the decision maker is responsible for” is important. In our experience, its well worth the premium and the ROI should speak for itself.

If you ask any business to business sales person ‘what is the one problem you face more than anything else and would like to find a solution to?’, they will say hitting voicemail box and spending minutes or even hours without actually getting to speak to a decision maker. In fact we resigned to the fact that the only way to get around this is to have more business contacts and make more calls while keeping your fingers crossed that the decision maker will pick up. I’ve been there myself and its a helpless feeling knowing that if there was a way to get to talk to more decision makers in a day, you would have much better results. So when I learned about a solution developed to tackle exactly this while reading Aaron Ross’ blog post “connectandsell 100x roi in generating pipeline!?” I was thrilled thinking “finally a solution to the voicemail box problem!”

Cold calling is an indispensable part of selling and the biggest impact to its productivity is the low availability of decision makers on the phone and spending a lot of precious selling time simply attempting to connect with them. By filtering out voicemail boxes and connecting sales people directly with decision makers using an innovative system, this is exactly what ConnectAndSell have addressed and solved so that your productivity shoots up and you could get more connected calls delivered through every hour than you would if you had to sift through large business contact lists.

One of the reasons we advocated using customized role based business contact lists for cold calling is the ability to have direct contact numbers and extentions for each of the decision makers located so that you can navigate through departments and gatekeepers and maximize your connectivity with decision makers. The downside is that you can still hit a voicemail. I would imagine building a robust, custom business contacts target list and combining it with a solution like ConnectAndSell would help step up the results from cold calling or teleprospecting by more than 100%. It’s worth checking out!

Marketing and lead generation is one of those roles where no matter how much you do every day, it always feels that you could have done a little bit more if you had extra hands to work with. Perhaps you have a great email campaign planned out and if only you had someone to help you with list building for a bigger list of target decision makers. Maybe a whitepaper download campaign just went well and you would love to have another done within the month if only you had someone to help you keep up with lead qualification for all the inbound leads generated.  What if you could focus more time on generating more leads while someone else could profile existing leads and deliver clear business opportunties to the sales people? So you need some help and the obvious solution is to hire so that you have that extra capacity but there are things to consider and questions to ask yourself such as:

• Do you need the extra capacity in the long run or is it just a need you feel now because you have short term plans which need that extra effort?
• Will it be worth the time, expense and effort required to have a new team member on board, get ramped up and wait for your investment to start bearing fruit?
• Is adding the head count really giving your team more capacity and efficiency or will it be an overhead in terms of management time and other resources?

There are those who will argue that outsourcing parts of your business to business lead generation activity is not recommended since marketing is a core part of the organization and should not be outsourced but I would differ there. Outsourcing your entire marketing and sales perhaps, but then again not many would do that. Leveraging services like we provide at ReadyContacts.com can actually augment your own internal efforts and help you build that lean mean marketing machine. Once you have identified what parts of the process you could use those additional hands on, give it a run and in time your existing marketing team will be able to step up their productivity without having to augment it with additional head count. Especially with a per performance pricing model or delivery based pricing, you will really find a very clear ROI for your costs and you should be able to get a lot more done for considerably less than an additional employees monthly salary and expenses. So if you are looking for those extra hands and still stay lean. Think about it!