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.

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. 

When it comes to complex b2b sales and selling a product or service that is so specific in nature that you need to identify an equally specific role within your target organization the options you have before you to source such leads are narrowed down. Most company and contact databases have general contacts which are not role specific. Most vendors who sell b2b lists build these based on titles or departments and will need to be carefully filtered to get what you need. Depending on your product there maybe some niche conference or event lists which may be able to provide you with relevant decision makers but they may few and far between which makes relying on them for a steady supply of leads unpredictable. This is where building tailored business contact lists for such specific roles one of the best options.

In the past we have helped locate roles as specific as engineering decision makers responsible for testing durability of servers used in military installations and tough environments. Managers responsible for storage of R&D engineering data and decision makers who are responsible for analytical software used to predict trends in the market for financial investment organizations. The common trend in all of these is that they are very specific roles in nature and possibly the only ones who can really evaluate the value of the specific offering being pitched to them. The only way to accurately locate these specific decision makers is by connecting within the company and asking around within the right department for the person closest fit to the role. It can be highly time consuming while actually building out the list as tracing specific people within an organization is never easy but can be highly time saving when a salesperson has a direct contact he can connect with and pitch the offering to directly. So if your product is complicated or you need to reach a very specific person within a very specific role, customized lists are your best bet.

The ever so popular scenario in so many businesses today. Marketing teams doing their best to source as many contacts and sales leads to pass on to the sales team only to find the sales team unhappy with the business contacts they are getting and the cycle just continues. Acquiring business contacts and lead lists from various sources to upload them into the company CRM so that sales people can use this data is not an easy task but has to be done to keep supplying fresh business contacts for sales teams to pursue. In the end these efforts will only be effective if the sales folks who have to make use of these contacts are satisfied with them. So just what do they look for in a contact list? Well if I were selling and received a list of business contacts here are a few things I would like to see in them:

• I would like to pick a business contact, pick up the phone & dial the phone knowing well that I am reaching someone in the right role who knows exactly what I’m talking about when I speak to him/her and wont say “you’ve got the wrong person and thats not really my area”
• I would like to have complete contact information for that person so that I can call, email or send something via snail mail for the person handy without having to spend my time digging it up
• I would like to have a direct number or extension for the contact wherever possible so I can by pass gatekeepers and connect with them quicker
• I would like to know that if I post something to the contact at the address provided it will go to the right place and not to a location which may belong to the same company but not where the contact is located
• I would like to know that when I call a contact that he does in fact exist in the company and hasn’t left the organization last year which is often the case with older data that has been on the shelf for a while

A business contact may not necessarily be a qualified lead and sales folks don’t always expect this but a well built list where extra care has been taken to insure you have a correct and verified contact to connect with in your target accounts can make life a lot easier on them and more importantly a lot more effective in a shorter time as against working with poor quality contact lists and data. Invest your resources in a better source of business contacts and keep your sales team happy.

Finding very specific role based contacts at deeper levels within an organization structure can be critical to connecting with the right people for your sales. While you can start building a list of higher level contacts like CIO’s, CTO’s and some of the top VP level contacts using ready lead databases like Hoovers, Onesource and ActiveContacts, purchasing ready lists from vendors or using search engines to dig them up building a list of help desk contacts who are responsible for issues regarding email security is a lot more specific in nature and needs a completely different approach.

Research using search engines and most databases wont turn out great results for such specific contacts at this level. Calling into the target account and navigating via phone till you find the right person by role will ensure you have a much stronger list. To find these help desk contacts who look after email security:

• Call into the company and connect to the CIO’s office and ask to be connected to the IT help desk or the person in charge of the IT help desk
• Using reference contacts which you get from the Admin to the CIO or the CIO’s assistant who generally know the IT organization structure very well find your way to the IT help desk or a more general contact within the IT department
• Once you’re connected to someone at the IT help desk ask for the person within the help desk who is generally responsible for handling issues related specifically to email security. If you can’t connect to anyone at the help desk but can manage to speak to someone within IT who may know the right person to contact for any issues related to email security, possibly at the It help desk.
• Once you have the persons name and role confirmed you can check back with the CIO’s office for any specific details like an email address which you can use to get in touch with the contact

In depth contacts like this can provide you with great leverage in the sales and make a good starting point for any sales person but there are no easy short cuts to building a great b2b lead list of operational level business contacts. If you need to get to the root of this, you have to dig deep!