The Great Guns Marketing Blog

How do I build a prospect list??

This is the 4^th blog in our series of the 12 blogs of Christmas. In the 2^nd of this series we looked at maintaining a good and accurate prospect list. In this blog we’re going to look at how to build that prospect list from scratch.

Well, one of the many prospect list providers is a good place to start. Like most things in life, though, you need to have an idea of what you’re looking for before you start searching.

You will find that there are limits to what is available and what you can search for. The more specific you are with the people you want to target, the more difficult it will be to get hold of a list, and the more expensive it will be. For instance if you want to know which companies in the UK have an Avaya IP500 telephone system to more than 30 extensions, that’s going to be expensive, if you can find it and if it is accurate and up to date.

There are over 3 million businesses in the UK (assuming you want to target the UK) including limited companies, PLC’s and LLP’s, sole traders and partnerships. Of those, it is reasonable to expect to create a list of, say, 10,000 – 12,000 prospects that it is worth having a meaningful conversation with about the benefits of your product or service. Clearly that number will vary considerably depending on the size of your company, who you want to target, and so on.

You need to define the sort of companies you want to target, in what industries, in what geographies, etc. You also want to decide who, by job title, you want to target within those companies.

You will find that you can search for prospects by various factors such as company turnover, employee numbers, number of sites, etc. So you’ll need to use these types of parameters to search for the prospect you want to target.

Have a chat to some of the list providers and they can give you more detail on what’s available and how to approach the task of buying a list. Once you decide what you want, expect to pay something like 20 pence a record for company name, address, telephone number and decision maker name. Talk to companies like Corpdata and Marketingfile.com and they can give you a good steer.

Have a great marketing and selling day!

It’s that time of year again – we’re heading into the summer and in the B2B world, things start to slow down a little – particularly in August when everyone heads off to sunnier climes!

That’s not to say that at Great Guns Marketing we down tools and head for the park – quite the opposite in fact. We have been working really hard over the last few months to develop our services so our clients can use this quieter period to focus on the areas that they are usually too busy to deal with. And one of those is the perennial problem of data cleansing.

As we all know, successful sales and marketing lead generation requires an accurate and well profiled database. With B2B data decaying faster than consumer data, at 30% a year compared with 7% with B2C, if you let your database degrade then you are wasting at least a third of your annual sales and marketing budget by targeting out of date contacts. And with the economic climate bringing an increase in restructures and redundancies, your prospect database is at risk of becoming obsolete at an even faster rate.

However, not all B2B service providers realise the importance of maintaining, profiling and building their contact databases and those that do quite often don’t have the resources in place to undertake this ongoing task. But it’s critical that companies recognise the value that up-to-date data delivers to sales and marketing efforts.

A well-maintained database will ensure reduced waste by eliminating duplicates and poor-quality addresses, ensuring companies focus their efforts on ‘live’ contacts. In addition, an enhanced database will offer alternative routes to communicate – for example if you don’t hold email addresses for contacts then why not undertake some telemarketing to gather this critical data, after all, email marketing is a relatively quick and cost effective way to interact with prospects and customers.

Overall, cleansing and building your database should be something that companies get into a routine of doing regularly. To be in with any chance of generating leads, it’s essential that the people on your records are the right contacts, to save you wasting valuable time and of course, money.

Fortunately our clients are starting to recognise the benefits of data cleansing and are working closely with us to get their database up to scratch, but there are still far too many companies out there losing opportunities by the minute because of something as simple to rectify as bad data.