Calling List Revisited: Opening Up New Opportunities
April 10th, 2012 Posted in B2B sales lead generation
by: Jan Loyola
When you have run out of b2b sales leads, what do you do to generate more?
Purchasing a pre-defined calling list is not quite a good idea specially when you’ve already purchased one in the past. Chances are likely that the “new” calling list you will purchase will have 50%-70% of similar contact information with the previous calling list you bought.
So what do you do then? Do you set up a radical new marketing strategy to generate leads? This is a great idea, but you will likely need to spend hundreds of dollars for this. You might argue, “But I can market my products and services through Facebook and Twitter at a much cheaper price! Yes, you are absolutely correct. But remember that with inbound marketing strategies, particularly concerning social media, you would have to wait a considerable length of time before you will see any progress. Does your current financial state have the patience for that? This might generally be a good idea, but it doesn’t keep your sales people occupied enough.
What you can do is to pull out your previously purchased calling list from the drawer or server or wherever you are hiding it. Have one of your more meticulous employees go through the list and validate the data in it. She should check if the all the information for each company in that list is still applicable or up to date.
When you deal in a business to business industry, there are a lot of changes that could happen in a corporate setting that are highly beneficial to you, and you should always be informed of any changes that could happen. By validating your existing calling list or company contact information database, you can find out when companies change their corporate lineup. When the people in decision making positions change, so does their view of your product, service or company. If the previous decision maker perceived an aspect of your product, service or company as somewhat inimical or he simply believes it is of no consequence to his company and declined to do business with you, a new decision maker might have a different view and may want to try out your product or business. There is an attitude about new decision makers where they tend to countermand the decisions of previous executives who held their current post. Perhaps it is an act of defiance or something else, but this is highly profitable for your business.
Not only is customer data validation effective for keeping your contact information database updated, it provides you with a chance to get another shot at the business opportunity that got away.
