|
| Recent
Articles |
Are Customer Satisfaction Guarantees Realistic?
Customer satisfaction and loyalty to a product is very important in any company, be it a company that is consumer oriented or a company that sells to other businesses, but is a customer satisfaction guarantee really realistic in business? What some companies do...
How Do You Value Your Customers
We all talk about how much we value our customers-they're the lifeblood of any business. This month, I don't want to talk about how much we value our customers, but rather how we value them. Just how do you attribute a monetary value to each of...
Effective Customer Communication
Organizations are open dynamic systems for transforming resource inputs into saleable outputs (goods & services). They are created to provide useful products and services that satisfy the needs of customers and provide...
Your Customers Aren't Targets
I heard a great radio ad about radio advertising, which included the following: Your customers aren't targets, they're your friends and neighbors. They want to be talked with, not shot at. Too often businesses think of customers only as markets, audiences, and targets.
Branding Your Customers
Branding your business is simply giving the public and your customers an image of your company. By knowing how your company is perceived by the rest of the world, you can use your image to instill trust, loyalty, and stability within your customers. When you think...
Vendor Relationship Management (VRM)
This post continues where this one, which gives a bit of background on VRM, leaves off.
In a December, 2006 SuitWatch piece in LinuxJournal, Doc Searls writes that there are a number of parts of VRM, which include Data Independence - "Individuals needs to own and...
Google Customer Feedback Form For Ranking WebSites
As I was doing my regular (track orders) reports I've clicked through a URL to see our company's Order Thank you page (the one customers see when they hit SUBMIT at the end of their order process). To my surprise what I saw was a little visual line of text on the bottom of...
|
 |
|
|
04.02.07
Building The Lists For B2B Lead Generation Programs
 By Brian Carroll
Would you buy this business card? Maybe... maybe not. When you buy a list of names, you are basically buying business cards on a list. But there is no such thing as buying the perfect list, especially if you have a complex sale.
 Companies don't buy; people do. The goal of a well-developed lead generation strategy, therefore, is to evolve relationships between people through dialogue that positions your marketing effort as a conversation (not a compaign) to identify, initiate and nurture productive selling situations.
Let's say you want to invite, via e-mail, a specific group of individuals in your database to a webinar or webcast. Or perhaps you'd like to do a targeted, direct-mail campaign to a group of people on behalf of their salesperson. Could you do it with confidence? Most of the time, I've found the answer is "no."
The goal is not to try to get the biggest list possible, but instead build the most relevant list possible based your ideal customer profile.
The best list is one that you have diligently created and rigorously maintained over time with excellence. So where should you start?
I have found marketers often overlook the lists and data they already have in search of new contacts rather than building upon relevant conversations.
I recommend you start by collecting all of your existing in-house marketing lists into one place. These are lists that you may already have on hand, from sources such as:
•
Sales team - key accounts and collected business cards
•
Strategic partner or pooled lists (cooperative opt-in)
•
Inbound phone, email and web inquiries
•
Past events - trade show, webinar, and seminar
attendees
•
Newsletter subscribers
•
Marketing campaigns, such as direct mail or teleprospecting lists
•
Past customers
Note: Bring your database administrator in on the list build project as early as possible. You will most certainly need their expertise in massaging and de-duping the data.
Marketing and sales can also work together to build a list from inactive accounts in your sales team's CRM data and business cards from industry conferences and networking events.
Utilizing existing in-house lists is the best place to start building your framework. Once the in-house lists are collected and combined, they can be evaluated for compliance with your ideal customer profile (target market). You'll find at this point that that your list needs further enhancement.
At InTouch, we recommend that clients acquire a basic list that has the main attributes of their ideal customer profile and overlay that with their internally compiled data. Then use additional third party list sources to fill in missing companies and contacts.
There are many external list sources available, and each has its benefits and drawbacks. When buying data from an external source, you need to consider the following:
Continue reading this article.
About
the Author:
Brian Carroll is the CEO of InTouch Inc. InTouch is a 50-person company focused on delivering effective lead generation solutions for "the complex sale."
Brian authors the very interesting B2B Lead Generation Blog which focuses on B2B lead generation, sales leads, and marketing for the complex sale.
|
|
