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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Having worked with companies in the telecommunications and messaging technology space we’ve also understood the importance of being able to build very focussed role based lists of telecom decision makers within their target accounts as a source for leads. While in larger organizations there can be a more disticnt telecom department headed by a ‘Vice President, Telecommunications’, in other organizations the role of telecom management, messaging and communications may be the role of an IT Director or Infrastructure Manager depeneding on the type of organization. Selling communications technology in to larger companies can be especially cumbersome unless you have identified the right decision maker which can be that one person in a thousand who can really understand your offering and evaluate what it can offer his/her organization. 

The exact nature of your product or service can make a big difference to the best contacts to reach out to as well. For example the decision maker for a telecom expense management product, a mobile messaging application and a VOIP based calling solution can well be three different people within the same organization. This is all the more reason a role based approach towards identifying your buyers plays an important role in selling successfuly into your target accounts. 

Another aspect to building lists for the telecom vertical is for most offereings, qualification and profiling of each account plays an important role. Knowing the number of users or understanding the potential size of each account can be instrumental in qualifying whether the account is worth going after or not and can save a lot of time and resources if they have been qualified at an earlier stage.

While lead generation through websites, events and other channels are great sources for leads within this segment, when it comes to aggressively going after specific accounts you have on your list, role based decision maker list building is the way to go! 

This is an interesting excerpt from DemandGenReport’s interview of Charlene Li about her bestseller, Groundswell.

DGR: You provided a lot of great real-world examples of how companies are using social media to tap into the power of their customers. What are the differences between a B2C social media presence versus the opportunities for B2B marketers.

Li: B2B marketers often think they are marketing to companies – they aren’t. They are marketing to people at companies. In that way, B2B marketing in the groundswell looks a lot like B2C marketing, just at a smaller scale. In fact, I believe that B2B marketers have an advantage in the groundswell – the people you are trying to reach are inclined to have a relationship with you because they want to be listened to, be supported, and embraced because they see a direct correlation and benefit back to their businesses.

This caught my attention because it is something I come across everyday as I speak with CEOs, VPs and Directors of Marketing at technology companies. Most marketers don’t get the fact that they HAVE TO market to people and not to companies. I’d say the “people” part is something that needs to be expanded and understood further. B2B marketers have to spend a lot of time understanding the roles and responsibilities of the “people” who buy their products to fully comprehend how they think and what might excite them. At ReadyContacts, we try to preach this everyday to everyone we speak with because “knowing the people who buy your products” is a key starting point to start targeted sales & marketing 2.0 efforts which are more about conversation, personalization and nurturing rather than cold calling, push marketing and mass mailings.

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.

When you are selling into mid-sized and large organizations, most likely you have multiple business contacts within your target account who drive, influence and take decisions. Depending on the industry vertical as well as the way your target accounts are organized, it is possible to have varied business contacts who take part in the decision making process. For example, if you are selling a web security product in the Education, Banking and Health care markets, you will find that the types and roles of contacts who drive the final decision in each of these verticals are varied. Understanding the web of contacts that drive and influence decisions for your product is critical for your sales and marketing success. Before you embark on expensive email, direct mail and telemarketing campaigns, the first order of business must be to acquire all business contacts at your target accounts who are expected to take part in the overall decision making process.

It is also critical to understand how every industry vertical may be different before defining who are your target contacts in each of the verticals. We recommend that you identify these by the roles and responsibilities they hold so that you get the right set of contacts to start with. Missing the mark on this critical foundational piece can lead to failure of all subsequent sales & marketing campaigns. Focus on understanding your decision makers and define them well for every vertical. Then simply build out a list of such role-specific decision makers and influencers to create your core CRM database of business contacts who you care about the most. Getting this right is crucial and its important to use the right team internally or outsource list building to the right vendors who gets it.

Fail on the core list and you will just see more failures in your sales & marketing campaigns. The list is at the heart of your sales machine, and its success or failure.