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Marketing’s objective is to reach out to prospects and nurture them to build a pipeline of warm contacts who can be further developed into opportunities. Outbound marketing including email marketing, direct mail and telemarketing form the foundation of marketing’s reach out program and the urge, rightly so, is to reach out to as many contacts as possible. Traditionally outbound marketing has, unfortunately, been all about volume, more contacts, more email, more direct mail and more telemarketing. There is a fundamental problem with this and that starts with the urge to build a bigger and bigger list of contacts to market to. The rest of the “mores” are build on top of this, which further magnifies the problem. When you are looking to go after more contacts, you tend to define your “target decision makers and influencers” very broadly so you end up with a list of contacts that is a random mixture of your core buyers and everyone else. The more specific and deep rooted your buyer, greater the chance that your list will have less of them and more of the other non-target contacts. So when you feed this list to the downstream processes of email marketing, direct mail and telemarketing, all hell breaks loose. Email campaigns show a dismal response rate and the response that you get end up being far from qualified. Direct mail reaches the wrong people and goes into the trash can while you wait. Telemarketing reps get hung up on and they loose the confidence in the list. And if your marketing leads from such a campaign flow to inside sales or sales, then you get a heavy push back from sales to not send them leads that are a waste of their time. Garbage IN, Garbage OUT is the result. In most situations, its not that 100% of the leads are garbage so you still tend to believe in the strategy which leads to more similar campaigns. The most important thing is to realize that a “more” strategy without a laser focus will not yield the results you can be proud of. Try a chance. Go for less. Go for focus. Go for smaller campaigns. Test and refine and you will see the results. At ReadyContacts, we are HUGE believers of “less is more” and all out data solutions are enablers for implementing such a strategy.