Acquiring a List for B2B Sales and Marketing

Thinking about kicking off a new sales and marketing campaign? Here's a quick-start guide to grabbing a list of prospects to start targeting. 

Who is your ideal customer? 

First things first - everyone is not a potential customer. Figure out what industries make the most sense to target and go after those first. Don't say, "We could work with any industry!" If sales is finding a needle in a haystack, figure out how to make the haystack smaller. 

Identify trends in your best customer companies and use these to build a profile for ideal customers. Look for things like employee count, annual revenue, industry, and geography. All of this information can be found using a quick web search or a free tool like ReferenceUSA. 

Do you need email addresses? 

Depending on what you're looking to accomplish, it may be necessary to invest in purchasing email addresses along with other prospect company information. These usually come at a premium and can be hit-or-miss in accuracy. Be sure you do your homework and investigate what sort of guarantees you can get before providing payment information. 

Provide the criteria you identified in Step 1 and acquire your list 

If you don't need email addresses, for instance if you are conducting a phone-based sales campaign or a mailer of some sort, you can actually acquire the same database that InfoUSA sells for free using a resource called ReferenceUSA. Check with your local library to see if a library card gets you access to this database. 

If you do need email addresses, shop around and find the best price. Some common list providers are Hoovers, InfoUSA, and DiscoverOrg. A web search will probably show you 20 more, but they're all working with more-or-less the same information. 

Scrub for internal contacts 

Before making any phone calls or sending any emails, be sure your do a once-over on the list you acquired to make sure there aren't any current customers or Do-Not-Call requesters in the list. If someone has previously asked you not to call them, you can get leveled a hefty fine if you call them again.

5 Reasons That Even The Best Inbound Marketing Fails

The last several years have given way to a monumental movement in the sales and marketing world called "Inbound Marketing." In short, this movement circles around creating excellent digital content, position yourself as thought-leaders in your industry, and establishing a broad enough internet presence that your prospective buyers find your name first when they're looking to buy, and then reach out to you. 

Inbound refers to the source of the leads. Inbound leads are prospective buyers reaching out to you, providing contact information, and requesting a follow-up of some kind (as opposed to outbound leads, which are sourced by reaching out to prospective buyers yourself and establishing a relationship with them). 

Companies of all sizes, across every industry, are boosting their marketing budgets in order to develop a strong inbound marketing strategy. Many of them do such a great job that it fails to create sales. Why? 

Inbound leads aren't followed up with quickly enough 

Oftentimes buyers who reach out through web forms and other inbound marketing tools are doing so with multiple companies at a time. For example, when a company is looking for a quote on a widget, they may open 5 different web pages and submit inquiries to 5 different companies all within a 2-minute period of time. The vast majority of these contracts are won by the company that reacts the quickest. 

Best Practice: Respond to inbound leads with 5-minutes, while your prospective buyer is still thinking about you.  

Inbound leads aren't followed up with often enough 

Let's use the example of leads that come in on any given week. The sales team arrives on Monday and is excited to have fresh new leads from the weekend to start off the week. They make a phone call and send an email to every lead on Monday. Then they come back in on Tuesday and send another email or leave another voicemail with everyone they haven't heard back from yet. By Wednesday, there are new leads in from Monday and Tuesday that are warmer, so the weekend / early-Monday leads stop getting followed up on, except for the occasional call to a particularly juicy looking lead. 

Best Practice: Reach out to inbound leads at least twice within the first 24 hours, and then twice a day (phone call or email) every day for at least the next two weeks. We've got an entire blog dedicated to the ideal lead follow-up cadence here. 

Inbound leads go dormant 

After two days of follow-up, sales teams have moved on to fresher leads, as mentioned above. Suddenly there are perfectly good leads that have gone dormant. You never know who submitted a form because their boss asked them to before they left on vacation. They just need a week and some R&R and they'll be back to the office and back in buying mode.  

Best Practice: Keep leads from going dormant by shooting them and email or leaving them a personal voicemail every week or so after the first two weeks.  

Sales gets spoiled and becomes lazy 

Maybe six months ago you had a team of wolves. They hunted like crazy, were competitive, and never missed their numbers.  Now you have a handful of whiners who are mad at marketing for not sending them better leads. What happened? Inbound marketing worked so well that the sales team sat at their desks and took orders, all the time enjoying a constant rain of commissions. They lost their edge, and now they get mad if a slow week comes around where the leads are fewer, smaller, or less-qualified. 

Best Practice: Move sales and marketing to the same room and hold joint sales-huddles every week where sales reports on progress-to-goal for both inbound and outbound sales goals. 

Marketing gets jealous of sales commissions 

Your rockstar Marketing Manager has built you an inbound marketing empire, and has sat patiently, graciously accepting the obligatory 8=10% annual raise while the sales team has cleaned up on commissions from sales that resulted from inbound leads. After all, that's the way the world works; Marketing is salary, Sales is commissioned. Now they may be seeking new opportunities, in which case everyone loses. 

Best Practice: Restructure commission for both sales and marketing, ensuring alignment between both departments and with established sales goals. 

How To Get Past Gatekeepers

There are a lot of articles about getting past gatekeepers on sites like SalesBuzz.com, InsideSales.com, and others. Sometimes, though, these articles start by saying that cold-calling is dead and if you're even getting to gatekeepers instead of direct dials, you're doing something wrong. 

While inbound marketing and sales enablement is the best way to get warm, qualified leads with decision-maker name and number, if you're not having people raise their hand, you still have to go find sales somehow, and in order to do that, you'll need to pull a list, write a script, and make some phone calls.

Cold-calling isn't dead when it's the only way you have to get in front of potential buyers quickly, and in order to help you do that, here are some hacks to get around gatekeepers, or at least to leverage your conversation with them to help with future marketing. 

The Cordial Ask

"Hi, my name's Timothy, calling with Incept. May I please speak with Jim Smith?" 

(This doesn't work - keep reading) 

The "I'm an old friend" Play

"Hey, it's Timothy, is Jim in?" 

The No-Nonsense Ask 

"Yes, Jim, please." 

If you don't have a name, you may be able to find one using some internet hacks. If nothing else, you may be able to swap out the name for the title in the examples above (Example, "Yes, head of sales, please."). However, if that's the case, you should be trying to capture as much information as you can from the gatekeeper before you're transferred. Here are some examples of how to do that: 

Asking for the name first

"Hi, I was looking for the head of your sales department. Do you know who that'd be?" 

Asking for the name last

"Hi, I was looking for the head of your sales department." 

"One moment and I'll transfer you." 

"Thanks, and before you transfer me, who are you connecting me with?" 

Push for the email address

*Continued from examples 1 & 2* 

GK: "That's Jim." 

"Perfect, and what's Jim's email address?" -OR- "Great, and is Jim's email address [made.up@emailaddress.com]?" 

"Yep, that's it." -OR- "No, it's [correct@emailaddress.com]" 

"Thanks, I'll wait to be transferred." 

Now, those are ideal situations, and we all know that more often, gatekeepers are less enthusiastic about transferring you to their higher-ups or giving out their information. Here are some examples of ways that top-performing sales reps navigate around a gatekeeper who says something like, "And is he expecting your call?" Or "And what's this call regarding?": 

Be urgent

Come up with a one-liner that sounds critical enough that you'll get transferred: 

"I need to talk to him about his sales goals for the year and didn't want him to miss them because of something crazy happening." 

- OR - 

"I wanted to see if he had heard about what happened over at [Competitor Company]. It's pretty crazy." (Just be ready to talk about this briefly if Jim calls you out on it.) "Yeah, I had mentioned that [Competitor Company] is using an outsourcer to set appointments for their outside sales team and it's boosting their sales numbers.") 

Be vague

Have a one-liner ready that is unspecific enough, but honest, that will sound relevant enough to get your transferred. 

"I had a sales question for him." 

- OR - 

"I wanted to touch base about a sales project." 

Redirect and collaborate

A gatekeeper's primary job is to not transfer calls to their higher-ups. If you are able to shift their mindset from gatekeeping to problem-solving, suddenly you're on the same team working together. 

"I was told Jim was the right person to talk to about a sales project, but I could be wrong. Would he be the best person to talk to about boosting sales, or is there someone else in your office that would be better to touch base with?" 

- OR - 

"At my office here, even though Timothy is the Business Development Manager, Sam would be the better person to talk to about a sales related project. Who's the "Sam" at your office?" 

Whatever you do, be honest. It's never okay to be untruthful when navigating around a gatekeeper - it creates a bad impression and starts the relationship off on a poor note, and in the business of sales, relationships matter. 

How To Boost Sales At A Manufacturing Company

The story of the rust belt in Ohio is resonant of the manufacturing industry across the country these days: Succession plans have happened, are happening, or will happen soon, and with that comes a flux in sales and marketing that could make or break the company. 

As you plan out your growth goals, here are some steps we recommend to make sure you exceed those goals in the most efficient, strategic manner. 

Stabilize and Grow Current Customers 

Segment the customer base for your core product

Even if you boast a vast range of capabilities, you probably have one or two applications that you do best, are most profitable, or you just prefer to focus on. This first step is where you document and analyze buying trends for those customers who fit within this application.

A customer segmentation campaign, generally in the form of a phone or electronic survey, is designed to help you see what your best buyers look like, why they buy from you and not your competitors, why they switch suppliers, etc. Customer segmentation usually results in between 2 and 10 (or more) segments of your current customer base that allows you to craft sales tactics specific to each type of buyer. 

Craft and execute sales tactics for each segment

For each segment it's important to develop a unique tactic that not only guarantees your customers continue to buy from you, but also provides opportunities to upsell and cross-sell existing customers.

For example, for your most loyal customers, we'll call them segment 1 out of 4, you may only need to send them a thank you note to cement the relationship. For your hit and miss or low volume customers (segment 4 of 4), you need to work on stabilizing them. This could take the form of a series of phone calls targeted specifically at educating them on your other capabilities or applications in effort to upsell or cross-sell them. The goal here is to get 1-product customers to buy another product. 

Reactivate Lapsed Customers 

Retrieve old customer data 

Whether it means breaking into that old filing cabinet that you've lost the key to, or pulling a report from your ERP, compile data for lapsed customers. The definition of 'lapsed' varies. For simplicity, let's go with customers who haven't made a purchase in over a year.  

Execute sales tactics planned from customer segmentation 

Chances are, the majority of your lapsed customers will fall into one of the buckets you created using your current customer segmentation exercise. Using the same or similar sales tactics, reach out to these lapsed customers and tell them thanks, say you miss them, and maybe offer them something special if they place an order. From here, make sure you stay in front of them and take advantage of any upsell opportunities that come along. 

Acquire New Customers Using a Look-Alike Campaign 

Build an ideal customer profile 

Using your learnings from Customer Segmentation, identify trends in Segment 1 (best customers) companies and use these to build a profile for ideal customers. Look for things like employee count, annual revenue, industry, and geography. All of this information is available in a national database like Hoover's or ReferenceUSA. 

Create a list of ideal prospective customers using this profile 

By creating an ideal customer profile, it allows you to have all the criteria you need in order to acquire a list of 'Look-Alike' companies.

Use a multi-channel, multi-touch prospecting approach 

Put together a smart cadence of touchpoints across several channels to start targeting these companies. Recommended approaches include phone calls, personal email, LinkedIn interactions, and ongoing email blasts with relevant content and updates from your company. 

Develop an Inbound Marketing Strategy 

Create relevant digital content 

Whether it's videos highlighting your company, how-to's that overview your capabilities, or simple blog posts like this, start generating great content that is relevant to your current and prospective customers.  

Position yourself as thought-leaders in the industry 

Companies that are doing this successfully are maintaining a steady drip of smart, relevant content, not only through email campaigns or newsletters, but in contributions to industry publications, speaking engagements, and webinar curation. Become the guru that people enjoy reading, listening to, or seeing speak about the applications of your capabilities or the implications on the industry. 

Develop a web-presence that makes it easy for your buyers to find you 

If you haven't already, go centralize and align your social media and web presence. This includes your LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. The most successful companies are also leveraging Instagram and YouTube, as well as SnapChat. Make sure you have them all synced and updated with congruent messaging and branding across all platforms. These should all serve as a funnel, driving followers back to your company web site.  

Keep your following engaged with ongoing content 

Now that you've started, don't stop. Keep creating content, generating brand awareness, educating your prospect universe, and making it easy for them to get ahold of you when they need you.

What To Expect In Your Daily Feedback Email

When you sign up for InceptGrows, you subscribe to a fractional inside sales representative or, Account Growth Specialist (AGS), as we call them here. This means we dedicated one high-caliber sales rep to your account who is responsible for conducting sales-related tasks for you every day for a specified portion of their day.  

At the end of every day, you will receive an email summarizing the day's results. Here's what to expect in that email: 

Key-Performance Indicators

The first thing you'll see are totals of whatever KPI's we agreed were most important for your program. Generally, these include Dials, Right-Party Contacts, and Leads. It will look like this: 

The first number is the total number of calls that were placed that day. If your AGS placed multiple calls to the same company in an attempt to navigate a phone tree or reach a different decision-maker, this number will reflect the number of individual dials. 

The second number is Right-Party Contacts, or RPCs. This is the number of how many conversations your AGS had with the person they were trying to reach, most likely a decision maker. Possible outcomes for these conversations include Lead, Not Interested, Not now, or Requested Information. 

The third number is the number of Leads generated that day. This is defined during your set-up and onboarding process prior to making calls. For more information, please see this article on how to define a lead. 

Feedback from the Market

The second section in your daily feedback email is a summary of the day's conversations and feedback from the market. This includes a summary of any leads scheduled, as well as any qualitative feedback discovered during conversations with prospective customers. 

Be sure to read this section carefully, as there may be questions in here from that your sales rep asks in order to improve their output. 

Plan for Tomorrow

The final section is the overview of tomorrow's plan. This is where your sales rep will tell you what they'll do differently tomorrow based on their learnings today. 

This may also include decisions that your AGS makes, depending on the level of autonomy you've agreed they have. Be on the lookout in this section for language like, "Unless I hear otherwise from you…" as that indicates that they've made an adjustment and will proceed without confirmation.  

Frequently Asked Questions About Daily Feedback Emails

"Do I need to respond every day?" 

Absolutely not. We know you're busy, which is why we designed the email how we did. We do ask that you peruse it in its entirety each day in case there are direct questions from your sales rep. This process is designed to be a real-time progress check, and we can only improve if you provide the feedback necessary to do so. 

"Who are all of these people copied?" 

The people in the "To:" field are you and your team, which you probably figured out already. The other names in the "CC:" field InceptGrows management team, as well as Incept's executive leadership team. We include everyone so that you know just how important it is to us that your program is successful. Our whole team is invested in making our partnership a win for everyone. 

"Do I need to Reply All when I respond?" 

It depends. If you are replying to your sales rep with a personal message like, "Thanks, Suzy. Have a great weekend!" we're okay with you replying just to your Account Growth Specialist. If, however, you have responses to questions, feedback on the day's results, or other input relevant to the partnership, we ask that you click Reply All so that everyone here has visibility and can respond accordingly.