Jigsaw is a clear innovative in the B2B business contact lists space. All outbound B2B marketing is completely dependent on the quality of the list and Jigsaw came up with an innovative idea that made it possible to buy contacts at a small price, buy lots of them on demand and with a fair bit of accuracy in terms of contact data update.

Having said that, there are clearly two separate camps. Some who clearly hate Jigsaw and some who clearly love it. Here are some reasons why one might not like Jigsaw:

• Jigsaw makes it possible for any person to find your business contact information and put it up on Jigsaw without your permission for all of the Jigsaw users and buyers to use it.
• TechCrunch has a whole slew of privacy related complaints that you can read about here.
• The quality sucks for a range of different verticals including government and manufacturing, which we have tried ourselves and have seen less than 30% accuracy.
• The core model allows a user to upload a contact and get a contact or equivalent points in exchange, which is cool but their TOS allows the company to then sell that contact to any number of customers without giving back anything to the end user who added the contact in the first place.

If you ask any sales person though, they love Jigsaw for a number of valid reasons:

• Jigsaw is the easiest way to get a whole bunch of contacts for any campaign in the shortest period of time with a certain level of accuracy.
• Its better than a lot of other so-called contact databases which are just not as deep-rooted or updated.
• The benefit of getting the contact email address and direct phone number is invaluable to say the least.
• Jigsaw is a great way for someone to quickly get a few names in the target organization at their key accounts to quickly get to their decision makers than having to struggle with door keepers who just won’t let them in.

I am sure there are more pros and cons and I’d love to hear your thoughts as well. I am split right now. I love their model to address this very large and fragmented market opportunity of business contact lists, but I think their model needs to evolve to address some of the downsides. I hope someone there is listening.

Over the past 18 months, we have received a number of inquiries from customers and prospects about building a list of their target accounts and decision makers for major accounts in India. The inbound leads that companies are receiving from India had gradually increased to a significant level as well over the past few years and the most important part is that a lot of these are genuine leads with interest and budget. One of my cousins’s startup that does caching and multicast stuff for large data transfers just opened up their Mumbai office after receiving inquires from a lot of digital cinema chains about their solution for movie theaters to transmit large movies from HQ to all theater locations. This is a real deal. India is fast emerging as a large market for technology products and services and global companies are starting to pay attention to it. You must too, especially if your products are a good fit for the fast growing domestic market in India.

I have seen most companies still not ready as yet, though. They are not sure of how to proceed in terms of marketing and selling in India. They don’t have an office there. They don’t understand the market and culture and they don’t know where to start. Its a genuine problem and one that will be solved in stages only. There is no easy answer. The opportunity is real though and hence we believe companies must take it seriously and start to put together a marketing plan for India.

Here are some of the first set of things you might want to consider to proactively cultivate and slowly build your marketing in India:

• If you are already getting inbound leads, then move quickly to put in place a comprehensive lead qualification process where every lead is called back within 24 hours or sooner to qualify their interest and move them along the process to put in the nurturing bucket or pass on to the field sales team.
• To understand the potential market opportunity, build a list of target accounts in the Indian market which qualify as your A list accounts. Gather all the account intelligence you can to understand these accounts.
• Next, identify your key decision makers and influencers at these target accounts. The hierarchy and titles in India are fairly different than the ones you will find in the US and getting used to those is important for lead scoring etc. at a later stage.
• Unless you have presence in India or Asia, it might be challenging to do all this yourself. The best option is to engage a local sales firm (There are few, if any, in India right now who understand how US sales and marketing works and how to adapt it to the Indian market. ReadyContacts is one of the few in the list building and profiling space that can service the Indian market with a local team, and there are few others who can do appointment setting as well.) who can do all this much better. If you can strike a performance-driven engagement model with them, then you can ensure a good ROI with your investment.
• Once you have a systematic lead followup process, a way to identify new target accounts and decision makers, and a local sales firm, then next step is to get a systematic lead nurturing process in place to reach out and cultivate relationships, follow-up interested leads instantly and repeat the process until you can transition the warm leads over to the field sales team.
• You can scale this process once you have consistent metrics that the process is able to deliver.

This is a basic market development process that I would recommend most technology companies to get up and ready as soon as possible, especially in these times of recession in the US. You might be surprised to see that the domestic market in India may not have slowed down so much and their technology requirements are still growing and budgeted.

Every marketer should be proud of his/her database. It’s not till you actully run into a situation where you wished you needed something more from your data that you actually realize that thiings would have been more efficient “if my data had this” or “if only my data didnt have that”. It’s a good practice to run through your marketing database from time to time and ask yourself if you are happy with what is in it or is there something that needs to be done.

We didn’t really want to do a “Cosmo” style self test but here is a very quick check with few of these questions you can ask yourself to know if you are happy with your marketing database and how we at ReadyContacts can help you with anything you need to make you happier with it. Check it out!

So are you happy with it? How did you fare?

Having checked out Mike Damphousse’s blog post Ethics & Wonder/Amazon’s Mechanical Turk/Kiva on his experience getting a data related task done through the new online marketplace, I had a chance to check it out myself and ponder what this means for us as a B2B Marketing Database Management company. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk has been making buzz waves among marketers among other professionals who have been exploring to see just how they can leverage this to get some of the more routine tasks done. Also getting them done at a very competitive cost by putting them on the listing for providers to bid.

Essentially an Odesk or Elance of task related work, Mechanical Turk is a market place for both providers and requesters of very process oriented tasks like researching, identifying, labeling, transcribing and data related tasks which need some amount of human intelligence as opposed to tasks that can be automated. With several willing providers who can work from the comfort of their homes a lot of these jobs can get done for a fiercely competitve price which even outsourcing companies wouldnt be able to match given their operating costs. Will this mean all marketing data related work is going to head towards this?

I’m not sure it will. A good part of what we do at ReadyContacts does involve that “human touch” simply because there is a difference in quality between automating that process and using human intelligence to get the results. For example we could simply build B2B decision maker lists by pulling records from an internal database and delivering them at a competitive price but we don’t. Our team calls into every target account and locates decision makers by asking others in the company for their specific job role rather than their job titles. Eventually a sales person will need to go through this step to identify if they are really talking to the right decision maker. Calling in to build a list is a lot more expensive but in the bigger picture, we deliver something that will save our customers time and help them get to their decision makers quicker. 

Similarly there are de-duplication applications available that will help you clean your CRM data and remove redundancy and help you lower costs as against hiring someone to do this. Will it work the same? Not entirely. For example, it would help remove two accounts titled “Citi Group” or two leads named “John Smith” but it wont know “Peoplesoft” is a part of “Oracle” or know if a certain company has been taken over, merged or a lead is no longer working in the same company. The same goes for email verification and appending. There is some human intelligence required in most of these tasks to do them better. Does this mean there wont be room for ReadyContacts and other B2B data companies?

Well Odesk and Elance have been doing millions of dollars worth of software development projects for the masses with very capable developers as far as India, Israel, Ukraine and Singapore sucessfully delivering projects. So I’m sure this can be replicated with Mechanical Turk for other tasks. However Odesk and Elance haven’t put larger software companies like Infosys out of work, its only opened a door to the masses as an affordable option to getting development support and Mechanical Turk should have the same effect. We’ll have to wait and watch.

Any readers with experiences having used Mechanical Turk for any of their projects?

Inspired by Matt McGee’s Twitter list on The Local Search Industry I thought it would be great to start putting together a list of our own on the B2B Marketing & Lead Generation “Twitterati” (The word that I just came up with for the who is who on Twitter). Twitter has been a great source of communication, networking and also keeping up with the latest reads and happenings from the B2B marketing circle so if you are looking to follow some interesting tweets in this space, here are some links for you in no particular order:

• Brian Carroll - CEO of InTouch Inc. & author of Lead Generation for the Complex Sale and the B2B Lead Generation Blog
• Craig Rosenberg - VP, Products & Services at Tippit Inc & author of The Funnelholic Blog
• Pam O’Neal - Buzzstream blogger, speaker, writer, social media, search marketing, SEO, viral/WOM and all things B2B marketing
• Jon Miller - VP Marketing and Co-Founder of marketing automation vendor Marketo
• Michael Rotkin - Owner/Seo Expert Internet Marketing Firm
• Perramond - Product Guy at InsideView
• Jan Davies - Marketing Experiments & Marketing Sherpa
• Mike Carroll - Sales Force Development Expert, Lead Generation Guru, Author, Speaker
• Jill Rowley - Eloqua
• Jen Horton - Passionate Consultant for Eloqua
• Mike Volpe - VP Mktg @HubSpot Inbound Marketing System
• Koen De Witte - CMO Bulldog Solutions
• Laura Ramos - Forrester Research & The Forrester Blog
• David Meerman Scott - Bestselling author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR
• Steve Gershik - Eloqua VP of Marketing Innovation, blogger, podcaster, social media dilettante.
• Todd Davison - President Bulldog Solutions Lead Generation Expert
• Ann Handley - Chief Content Officer of MarketingProfs
• Susan Getgood - Principal, Getgood Strategic Marketing
• Nick Rice - Nick Rice Marketing
• Kim Albee - Founder and President at Genoo
• John Jantsch - Digital technology coach and author of Duct Tape Marketing
• Marketing Sherpa - MarketingSherpa.com
• Mrktguy - Marketo
• Vaibhav Domkundwar - CEO & Founder ReadyContacts - B2B Marketing Database Management & Better Inc
• Ardath Albee - B2B Marketer, Strategist, Writer, Storyteller
• Hubspot - Hubspot Inbound Marketing System
• Leslie Proctor - Marketing Director for a B2B software company
• Rhonda Wunderlin - Director, Marketing and Training Services at Eloqua
• Andrew Spoeth - Enquiro’s director of marketing
• Jeff Woelker - Senior Digital Strategist at Slack Barshinger
• Neil Sequeira - Director of Client Operations ReadyContacts/Better Inc
• Carolyn Gardner - Director Customer Experience, Sitebrand.com
• Jason Stewart - Senior Manager, Demand Generation at Demandbase Inc
• Extraprise - CRM & Marketing Services company focusing on B2B marketing
• Rob Leavitt - President at Woodridge Marketing
• Maria Pergolino - Philadelphia Marketer twitting abt Inbound Marketing, CRM …
• Jill Konrath - Sales strategist, speaker & author. Selling To Big Companies Blog
• Dharmesh Shah - Author of OnStartups.com and Founder, HubSpot
• Jim Connolly - Global Small Businesses Marketing Expert & Author of Jim’s Marketing Blog
• Heather Paulsons - Paulson Management Group
• Mike Pilcher - B2B Sales and Marketing Pro & Author of ProSultative Selling
• Mike Carroll - Sales Force Development Expert, Lead Generation Guru, Author, Speaker
• Dave Jung - B2B Marketing Blogger 
• Loren McDonald - Vice President of Industry Relations, SilverPOP
• Chris Herbert - B2B Marketing Specialist
• Tonya Signa - Prospect Engagement Expert, Specializing in C-level Appt Setting
• Megan Heuer - Research Director at SiriusDecisions BtoB Sales and Marketing Advisors
• Kim Albee - Author of SalesXMarketing.com
• Steve Gershik - Eloqua VP of Marketing Innovation
• Laura Ramos - Forrester
• Torsten Preissler - European Technology Company Lead Gen Expert
• Maria Pergolino - The Inbound Marketer
• Todd Davison - President, Bulldog Solutions
• Bulldog Solutions - Lead Generation Solutions
• Paul Dunay - Global Director of Integrated Marketing BearingPoint Inc & Author of the Buzz Marketing for Technology Blog
• Jeff Cohen - Marketing Strategist, B2B Ad Agency Exec & Blogger 
• Mike Damphousse -  Founder, Green Leads, B2B Lead Gen and Demand Creation expert, Blogger

It’s intriguing how marketers are turning to explore new strategies to change their game plan during this time of recession and how blog posts and articles that address this topic are quickly gaining in popularity and demand. As Jon Miller “Sign Of The Times: Marketing In A Recession“ 

For the past two months, the number one post on my blog has been “7 Strategies for B2B Marketing during a Recession: The Definitive Guide“.  Originally published in June, what’s really dramatic is how quickly it’s ramped up since September when the crisis really took hold. Take a look at the Google Analytics report:

Put another way, that’s a 1,300% increase in searches, clicks, and page views on that topic in just seven weeks, and yet another way, each and every day more than 35 people are typing “marketing in a recession” into Google and clicking through to read that blog post.

Similarly other blog posts from marketers that tackled the subject right from the first signs of the banking crisis and discussed possible effects as well as solutions for business to business marketers have seen constant search traffic and even increases as teams are re-alligning their strategies to the current global economic conditions. Some of the other related good reads with helpful insight into this are:

• Don’t Cut Marketing In A Recession - Dianna Huff’s MarCom Writer Blog
• 4Ps Of B2B Marketing During Recession - Eddie Choi
• Should I Change My B2B Marketing Strategies During a Recession? - The OneIMS Blog
• Hiring A Lead Generation Team For Less Than One Persons Salary To Beat The Recession Blues - Neil Sequeira / The B2B Marketing Data Management Blog
• Dealing With The Downturn - Kate Maddox 
• When all are pulling back on marketing during recession: take advantage - LeadsExplorer Blog
• Marketing During Recession - Harish B’s Marketing Practices Blog
• Marketing Your Way Through a Recession - John Quelch of the Harvard Business School Blog
• Five Tips For Marketing In Recession - Glen Gow on the MarketingProfs Blog
• Marketing In A Recession - Seth Godin on his blog
• Should You Up Your Marketing During A Recession? - Jake Swearingen on BNET Intercom
• Strategies For Interactive Marketing In A Recession - Josh Bernoff of Forrester
• Marketing During a Recession? Get The Wind at Your Back. - Scott Clark
• Effective Online Marketing In A Recession - Adam Boydens

Business to business technology marketing has it’s own learning curve and comes with it’s own set of challenges. Likewise, the demands on having the right kind of marketing data for effectively selling specific technology based products and services also vary and a lot based on the nature of what you sell.  If you sell technology to a more generic market like a simple accounting software or document management software its perhaps more straightforward to source data suited to your campaigns simply by determining a market segment, target company size and perhaps revenue. Then ofcourse you need to locate a source for technology decision makers who are broadly responsible for accounting software or document management software. Purchasing a list of technology leads or subscribing to a database of IT decision makers should give you a decent source of potential leads for your CRM and you are good to go. However, when your product or service is depenedent on another technology generic lead sources are just not good enough and you need to be able to qualify your company and contact data much more thouroughly before its ready for your campaigns. With selling products dependent on another technology the market is not as obvious and its absolutely crucial to know whether what technology your target company is using before it can be added to your ecosystem of potential leads. If you’re not doing this, you’re trying to kill a fly with a gatling gun.

Qualification and lead account profiling is the solution to this challange and what does not qualify should not enter the lead pipeline or you will end up with a very inefficient marketing machine. For example, a company selling a salesforce.com appexchange application needs to qualify every target company in their system at the very least for “whether the company is using salesforce CRM”. Further lead profiling for the number of salesforce users in the company and other more specific questions will only improve the quality of the marketing data you are working with and provide you with more to base your approach and message off. Although there is more work involved in qualifying, profiling and building your marketing data more slowly and steadily,  having good data will pay off in the long run as you are building a more qualified base of potential customers rather than going after companies which may turn out to be dead ends.

We have worked with a company previously whose software testing tool is built for companies that use Java, a company whose application performance software works only in data centers that use EMC, a software services company who support only companies who develop in Microsoft .Net and database application company who needed to know if their target companies use Oracle. The common trend is their products depenend on the use of another technology and to build their marketing data they needed target lead profiling and qualification to build better marketing lists for their teams. It needs that extra time and effort but is it worth it? Absolutely!

There was a time when business visiting cards were the most valuable forms of contact information and having a rolodex with as many phone numbers and postal addresses meant you had all the data you need to do some serious selling. Times change. While contact address, contact phone number, contact name and contact title still make up most of the contact information a business to business marketer or sales person needs, its still incomplete without one of the most sought after pieces of business contact data needed today. Contact email. 

While it is one of the most important data fields for a contact record in anyones CRM, its also perhaps one of the most guarded bits of information which is well protected and not easily available. This probably explains why in so many organizational CRMs you will see a blank in the contact email field. The amount of marketing messages directed towards a business professionals email address as well as the stricter spam regulations has lead to companies as well as individuals being more cautious about their email addresses and also why several lead sources that are used to populate CRMs with contact information dont come with an email address.  

However if you have good customer data which you can’t make use of simply because its missing that crucial contact email, then its time to run your data through an email acquisition or email append process and enrich your data so its complete and ready to use whether for email campaigns or just good enough to communicate to an individual via email. Remember, your marketing and sales contact data is only valuable to your team when it is complete!

I was reading a very intriguing post by Andy Hasselwander titled “How To Model Events” which talks about predictive event detection marketing as an area of marketing which will see significant growth over the coming days and years. We already have a number of sales tools available which keeps a track on the news and happenings at certain companies and reports certain events like acquisitions, mergers, new product launches and so on which trigger off business opportunities for other companies who can supply them with what they need as a result of those events. Keeping a close tab on these events gives marketers an edge as they can respond quickly. The quicker you are to respond to an opportunity, the better your chances are of getting there before your competition. However, Andy’s thoughts are based around “What if you could predict an event based on data and know of a business opportunity before it actually happens”. How much would that impact your advantage as a b2b marketer?

It would be a great benefit! If you knew of business opportunities before they exist it would give you a big head start on planning how you can tap that opportunity and have things ready well before it even comes up. This can really take the concept of marketing intelligenece and b2b sales triggers to the next level altogether and use a combination of expert insights and previous data to predict business opportunity in the future to a fair degree of accuracy. Does it sound completely sci-fi? Absolutely not. Financial analysts are in the habbit of using past data and current trends to keep an eye out and predict events that may occur in the future which will have an impact on stocks or investments but as marketers, the view is often more short term and we tend to look at what is currently happening and pick up on those events that are more “now” than try to look ahead too far. After all the practice is to measure results and sales quarterly so perhaps its partly being used to focussing on existing opportunities. Nevertheless it will be really interesting to see how predictive event marketing gets incorporated into technology currently being used by marketers and how it will impact the way we work. This is one exciting thing to keep an eye on!   Its definitely part of the future of marketing.

The last 3-4 years have seen a lot of buzz around marketing automation tools and software as CRM technology also advance. Products such as Eloqua, Marketo, Soffront and Marketbright are just some of the names that come to mind when you talk about marketing automation software. I recently read a post which mentioned that most large enterprises over the last year have spent a significant portion of their budget and attention towards marketing automation and adding on marketing automation capabilities to their CRM to batch process activities like campaign management, lead scoring, nurturing, email campaigns and more. While many associate these wil larger marketing organizations and software for larger companies who handle larger volumes of data, this is not entirely an accurate view.

Here at ReadyContacts we have been using marketing automation tools simply because we are a smaller team of marketing and inside sales people and it just helps us do more with less. A combination of available software and internally developed automation tools helps us execute on everday tasks like assigning leads to the appropriate people, campaign setup and management, email campaigns, reports and follow ups a lot more efficiently. Running campaigns and lead nurturing for example become a lot more streamlined when you manage data using automation tools. Once you have identified which parts of your process you can use automation for and narrowed down on the best software for it you will find that you can do more with less. Isn’t that what its about?