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! 

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.

Telemarketing campaigns are an inherent part of B2B sales and despite some of the difficulties associated with it, it remains one of the most important tools for sales and lead generation for companies everywhere. An effectively executed telemarketing campaign always starts off with an effectively build business contact lists. You’ll often find companies tweaking their sales pitches, adjusting their opening lines, working out objection handling, timing their calling hours and running analytics on results but the target list used was randomly put together from a bunch of different sources or downloaded from an online business contacts database which may not have been ideal for their telemarketing campaign.

An ideal list of contacts for telemarketers should:

• Have the names of direct decision makers to save the sales persons time and connect to the right person
• Contacts that have been identified by roles, not title so the sales person need not spend time finding out if they are talking to the right person
• Should have a direct extension or one-hop number to avoid having to pass through gatekeepers on every attempt to reach the contact
• An email address at hand should it be better to contact the decision maker via email before or after a call
• An alternate contact in a similar capacity should the primary contact be unreachable over a number of attempts
• Any additional information at hand either about the contact or the company which could be useful to know before actually speaking to them

Whether you use a business contacts and sales list building service or build your own customized database remembering these few essential requirements during the list building process will go a long way in making your telemarketing campaign more effective.

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.

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.