Where do you get your leads and lists from?

By Jason Stewart  - July 3, 2007

Buying marketing lists and purchasing leads is painful.

Chief Marketer recently published an article by Ozgur Dogan called “Integrating New Data Sources to Grow Your Universe.” The line from the article that sticks in my head is “The plain and simple truth is that it is becoming harder to identify – and market to – only the best prospects.”

It goes on to discuss how marketers should expand the number of sources they use to compile lists or purchase leads from. Take a cue from the manufacturer who relies on a variety of sources for their raw materials, putting some diversification into their supply chain. If supplier X is temporarily out of something you can go to supplier Y – which may be a little bit pricier but at least production does not stop.

Let’s say you do subscribe to a data source or that you have one particular vendor for lists – after all, budgetary and time constraints may limit a marketer to rely on one data source. Is that one service going to fit all your needs? For example…does it have email addresses? Are they opt-in? What about specialized information, like ERP System or subscriptions to similar publications? How often do they refresh their data? If it is not a subscription, do they have minimum purchases? Are you going to be buying names you’ve already paid for? Or worse yet, are you going to buy names that are really not a fit for you just to fill that “minimum order?” When you email to those folks, that’s when you risk being labeled as a spammer.

Ultimately, B2B marketers should have a number of data sources they pull from, just as that manufacturer has numerous sources for raw materials. After all, these names and lists are the materials you start with while generating demand for your company’s goods or services, and it would be a mistake to be locked into one vendor after you have exhausted your options with them.

Back to that point about marketing to only the best prospects, though… list vendors that allow you to easily sift through their search parameters and play with filters more specific than SIC code or general department are very hard to find. As a result, your marketing campaigns are less effective because you are relying too much on “…emotions and gut feel…” rather than “…fact-based, systematic approaches that can be tested prior to implementation to yield the best results.”

You are buying names that don’t always fit your needs because you either have to (minimum purchase requirements lead you to purchase names just so you can "get your money's worth") or because you can’t avoid it (due to shoddy filters and poor database segmentation).

If you have the ability to filter through the raw data, the millions of names from reputable sources, and then break it down by the components that are truly interesting to you (department, title, level, industry and specific industry categories within a general “vertical market” and so on) to get that content you really and truly need in the quantities that fit your requirements – that is what is going to help your marketing become much more targeted and effective. Demandbase is working on a lead search engine like this, with data compiled from reputable sources that will give you better visibility into the leads you buy before you buy them.

Comments

[Nick]

Another way to make sure that a company is concentrating on the right prospects is to take a look at some of the demand generation solutions out there. Many of them track individual prospects and are able to give Sales a lot more information. I've heard from salespeople who say that they've become much more efficient with these solutions. Just my two cents.

Thanks