Posted by Joe Bennett on Sun, Aug 07, 2011 @ 02:50 PM
Since last couple of months we have noticed a significant surge in demand for ERP lists. The number of enquiries, deals closed and search volume on ERP lists related keyword suggests marketers in ERP consulting business are getting aggressive in their demand generation efforts. I think this is largely due to over all growth in this industry
Earlier this year, the research firm Gartner published a widely publicized industry report forecasting global increases in revenue generated from the sales of ERP software. According to TMCnet.com, the Gartner report predicted a 7.5 percent increase in sales with industry revenue to top $253.7 billion by the end of 2011.
This is great news for businesses that provide ERP implementation, integration, and application development consulting services. We have been working with the marketers from several such companies to help them identify and reach their target market by providing customized ERP users lists.
We understand that reaching the right contacts, especially in a $250 billion plus industry can be challenging. And we have been trying to align the segmentation of our databases in line with the key long-term interdependencies. Gartner specified globalization, implementation, modernization, socialization and verticalization as five long terms trends that affect the ERP market space. We have therefore created very granular search criteria to help our customers reach the right decision makers. We are now able to offer deeper segmentation by industry, title keyword, title level, revenue, employee size and application type, country or region. For Example, we have about 250,000 global contacts only from companies using Oracle ERP including all software’s like JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, E-business suite, fusion middleware etc. This database of Oracle customers can be further broken down by your choice of country or region like North America, Europe, and APAC & Middle East. Please checkout our large selection of ERP users list at http://salesinsideinc.com/services-details/erp-users-list/
All of these contacts come with a valid business email, phone and mailing address. When planning either your marketing campaigns or your sales lead generation strategies, consider purchasing lists that offer greater level of segmentation and accuracy. Sales Inside Inc, for example, offers you segmentation by ten different criteria with a deliverability guarantee. You can target your list selects and filter by:
On top of that these are not rental lists. In other words you can run as many campaigns as you like. Be it telemarketing, email or direct mail campaign.
Purchasing your marketing lists, rather than renting, also allows you ownership of the list, unlimited usage, providing you with the flexibility to utilize the list as the ever-changing world of ERP business turns to the next big thing on the horizon (or in the clouds).
References
http://www.tmcnet.com/channels/erp-software/articles/141374-sales-business-management-software-like-erp-increase-2011.htm#
Posted by Arvind Sehtia on Mon, May 30, 2011 @ 08:44 PM
B2B marketers often face this dilemma in the quest of a perfect list. How do you decide and where to start when it comes to finding that ideal business contact database? The search may not be as elusive as it seems if you map your list needs to what is available in the marketplace. Evaluate the following to determine what type of lists you need.
- Your target market: Size, Industry, Geography etc
- Personas of decision makers: Title based or Role Based?
- Type of marketing campaign: Telemarketing, Email marketing, direct mail or multi-channel?
- Available List resources: List Vendors, list brokers, in-house staff, list subscriptions, custom list providers etc
- Hygiene of existing databases: Relevance, accuracy, reach and depth.
- Speed to market
- Your appetite for new data: Volume and frequency of your list or data needs.
- Budget
Now let us evaluate some of the options available in the marketplace.
Buying the list: The business-to-business list industry has really matured in past few years. Customers can now choose from online subscription based list downloads, barter the contact lists; have a custom list emailed by a vendor specializing in niche industry specific databases etc.
Companies like Jigsaw, Hoovers, Dunn & Bradstreet, Zoom info, One Source, Info USA etc serve a generic list market, offering inexpensive lists. A few other companies like Demand base, Lead411, NetProspex, Harte-Hanks etc also offer similar business contacts databases with some extra services and specialization.
Most of the above companies encourage a subscription based pricing model. A few companies offer contact-trading option also. Once you sign up, you can search and do some degree of customization on the list you want to buy. In general it is a DIY (Do IT yourself) approach for small to mid size buyer. The sources of their data include crowd sourcing, Internet crawlers, public records, telephone directories and in some cases research. Most of the companies claim to have millions of records in their database and offer free replacement guarantee for bad or invalid contacts. The prices are tiered to volume and can range from $0.25/ record to $2.5 record.
Other sources of business to business list purchase include companies specializing in industry specific data like IT, Telecom, Retail, Software, Manufacturing, Non profit, Insurance etc. Database brokers are a good resource in case you are trying to buy a unique list or do not have time to deal with multiple vendors.
Though a lot of choices exist for North American business databases, there is a clear gap in the market for International business lists, especially from EMEA. Most B2B list providers located in foreign countries lack the sophistication that we are used to seeing in USA. Only a few specialized list companies within USA have robust business contact databases for European and Asia Pac markets.
At some point the B2B data industry becomes a little convoluted with instances of some of the list vendors buying data from each other or from same external source. This leads the B2B marketer to same data irrespective of the list provider and can pose a challenge in large list acquisitions. It is very important to de-dupe the data and identify net new unique contacts in the list.
Building a list: This approach is more suitable for highly targeted lead generation campaigns where you need to target very specific title based or role based contacts. Building a custom business list involves a lot of research and phone calls to identify the decision makers. You could build the list in-house or outsource to a list building company. Either way it is a time consuming and expensive exercise. The pricing in this case can range from $3 - $10/ contact depending the complexity of list and volume. In some cases I have also come across business lists being sold for up to $20/ contact. The high cost of list however can be justified by the high quality of leads it brings. We have seen about 40-50% higher response rates with phone verified, role based business lists.
In case you are not able to procure a list or need a role-based list for Europe, Asia Pac or South East Asia markets, building a list could be the only option. If you are using an outsourced vendor the price generally starts from $10/contact depending on the language and other complexities involved in list building. Language plays a key role. For example it is easier to build a custom list in popular languages like French and German rather than Dutch and Slovakia. We recently helped a customer build a role-based business contact email list from 13 different language regions including Europe and South East Asia. It is important to note that the EU privacy laws make it very challenging to obtain emails for the business contacts. The toughest markets are the Arabic speaking countries from Middle East as the telephony cost to those countries can exceed the resource cost.
Inbound marketing is another way of building business contact lists by way of pushing traffic to your website. Once the visitor arrives, you throw freebies like offers, white papers, e books, webinars, 15 day trial etc to sign up. The sign up form provides most of the information you need to further engage, nurture and convert the lead. The proponents of inbound marketing strongly advocate that it is the most reliable method and in fact there is no need to buy, rent and build lists from other sources. . No doubt it is a very effective method of lead generation but not for list building. It can take months or years to accumulate the critical mass i.e. size of the list required for market penetration. Besides it can be a very expensive if you add the cost of creating offers, SEO, Landing pages, CTA buttons, Keyword research, Blog, white papers etc. If you are anyway doing all these efforts, sure enjoy the leads you get but do not rely on it as the only way to build business contact list.
Renting a marketing list: List rental is a standard practice in direct mail marketing and email marketing world. In this case you never own the business list and in most cases do not even get to see the lists. Back in the days the list rental companies used to simply rent the databases and at best execute the marketing campaigns for you. Over a period of time the industry players have transformed their business model to offer guaranteed deliverability, click thru rates etc. Customers can easily negotiate for something like pay for performance or guaranteed lead. The rental list providers keep running the campaign till the target numbers of leads are achieved. The arrangement works fine with certain type of campaigns but the quality of leads can deteriorate over time. Renting business lists may be more suitable for organizations that do not have necessary marketing infrastructure or in-house staff to design, execute and monitor campaigns. Also keep in mind that since you do not control or monitor the campaign execution, there is a risk of going off target. The advantage however is that one does not need to incur expenses on maintaining the database.
Using your existing databases: You can sure leverage your existing business contacts databases if you have kept them up to date. Remember about 5-6 % data goes bad each month. So if you have not performed any maintenance on your lists in a year, chances are that about 70% of contact data is bad. The good news is that you can bring your data back to life by having a database company perform a hygiene check and then weed out bad data, append missing or new data, remove duplicates, run email validity tests and also map with USPS - NCOA database etc. Services like title-density and gap-analysis can further help you understand your data better and also help you decide if you need increase the depth and coverage of existing list or buy new business list.
Posted by Arvind Sehtia on Tue, May 03, 2011 @ 02:04 AM
If you prefer to do it yourself, here are nine steps for building a free B2B Marketing databases for your outbound marketing campaigns. You can use these customized databases for cold calling, direct mail and email marketing. A list of some free Internet resources for building such customized lists is given below at the end of this article.
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Identify Industry: Start by picking the industry and if possible, sub industry. If you want to cover multiple industries, approach them separately.
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Identify Companies: Define the broad criteria that will help you identify the companies within the chosen industry. You can segment by revenue, geography, employee size etc. Example: Software product companies with a revenue range of $100 - $500 million located in North America.
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Select Companies: Search, download or copy-paste the list of companies to a spreadsheet from free Internet resources given below.
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Identify Titles or Roles: Build a list of keywords that appear in the titles of your targets. If your decision makers are not easily identifiable by titles identify department your target contact is likely to be located like, IT, Human Resource, Marketing, Manufacturing etc. You may have to conduct a role based contact discovery instead of a title-based discovery.
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Identify Level: Define what level of decision maker, user or influencer you intend to target. Like manager, director, VP, C-Level etc
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Standardize spreadsheet Format: Write all data attributes you want to capture like Name, Mailing address, Phone number, Email address etc. in the header row. It is a good idea to check the import format of your CRM for easy import.
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Start the Internet research: Check out the company website, LinkedIn, Search engines, industry associations etc. Keep filling up your spreadsheet with any information you get on your prospects.
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Time: Refine the above search process and note the time you are spending on the research. Try to limit it to say something like 10-12 companies or contacts per hour. This will help you budget for the time you need for building the b2b marketing database for your outbound marketing campaigns. Calculate to see if you can do it individually or need more resources to build the marketing lists. Example: If your goal is to build a database of 1000 contacts and your research is producing 10 contacts per hour, you know you will need 100 hours of research.
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Validate: Start calling to verify the prospect list you just built. Most times front office or the assistant will be able to validate the information.
Free web resources for building the b2b marketing databases
Posted by Arvind Sehtia on Sun, Feb 13, 2011 @ 09:05 PM
I often find myself into a sales situation trying to answer this question directly or indirectly. Also, people want to know if outsourcing “Inside Sales” or “lead generation” really works. There is no one-size-fits-all answer and it depends on the specific situation. For example, outsourcing business functions like software development, customer service, legal services etc work for certain companies and others decide to keep it in house. I remember once reading about a Church outsourcing prayer services. I mean seriously!
I think the question in itself is very generic and open ended. The right question to ask should be, how beneficial is it to outsource “Inside Sales services” in your specific situation?
A friend of mine is VP of sales at a technology company that has 200 customers globally. They sell complex project execution management software to aviation, petrochemical, military and steel industries. This is a software company and has already outsourced most of their software development. So they clearly understand the benefits of outsourcing. However they will not outsource their ten people “Inside Sales” team. Why? Because each sale is very complex and has a very long sales cycle besides the high dollar value associated with the deal. The company obviously needs highly trained engineers for inside sales.
Not every situation is like that. In most situations “Inside Sales” tasks include straightforward cold calling, profiling, list development, identifying decision makers, research, appending and cleansing data, and appointments setting etc. A good outsourced “Inside Sales” company is generally very adept at these. If your sales are a volume game, the products and service are not very technical, your target market is not very brand conscious, and your sales cycle is not very long, it may be a good idea to consider some of the following benefits of outsourcing “Inside Sales”.
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Scale faster: Up or down. Spare yourself from the pain of hiring internal employee, posting job advertisements, screening resumes, interviewing, induction and training. You can tell the outsourced “Inside Sales” or “lead generation” company to add the desired number of resources from as soon as next week onwards or even reduce the head count depending on your contract with them.
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Focus on your core competencies: “Inside Sales” is a very involved affair. Someone has to constantly monitor and measure the resources, generate new ideas to create the pipeline, execute the lead generation campaigns. Focus on doing what you do best rather than counting the number of calls, contacts per hour, conversation rate, voice mails and where to get the list from for your new outbound campaign.
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On demand capacity: Even if you have an in house “Inside Sales “team, it is a good idea to have an outsourced “Inside Sales” company on your speed dial. Here is an example of the requests I have received from some of our customers
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One of our inside sales rep has resigned and we cannot afford to miss this quarter numbers. We need one resource for three months for telemarketing
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We are doing an expensive direct mail campaign and some one just discovered that our database does not have correct location addresses. We need some one to clean and append the data on immediate basis. Can you put three people on the job starting tomorrow?
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Reduce Overhead: Think of management, HR, administrative and infrastructure overhead you would be saving.
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Cost benefits: This one is a little tricky. Not all outsourcing companies may help you reduce direct costs at least in the short run. In case your goal is to accomplish significant cost saving, try offshore “Inside Sales” companies instead. You can easily achieve about 50% cost saving or have two resources in the same budget.
Photo credit: Vlima.com
Posted by Arvind Sehtia on Mon, Dec 20, 2010 @ 06:31 PM
Five tips for designing effective B2B lead generation Surveys:
We all know that Surveys are one of the great ways conducting market research in order to understand our customers and market behavior, characteristics, profile etc. Have you ever thought of using the Survey techniques for doing an exclusive lead generation? Try designing one short and simple survey to identify the pain points of your prospects and or customers with the following tips:
1.Describe your campaign target market carefully: You can define your target market using some of these qualifiers
a. Revenue 
b. Employee count
c. Industry
d. Geography.
Example: Target 150 companies with a revenue of $10-$100 million in the business of “software-as-a-service” located in mid western USA.
2. Respondents Selection: Define your contacts by Title or Role. Like VP or Director of Marketing, HR or IT. In some cases a functional role classification may be more appropriate for your product or service. So you can say like this, “the person responsible for email marketing in your company” or “ the person responsible for “ storage systems”. You should also clearly identify if the people you are targeting are Decision Makers, Influencers or Users of your product of service.
3. Survey Methodology: Choose between Telephonic or web surveys. 
Answer to some of these questions will help you choose between the two
a. Do you have any existing relationship with the respondents?
b. Do you have an established brand?
c. Do you have a database with contact information like phone numbers and email address of the respondents?
d.Will using your company name or brand bias the results?
For example if you answered yes to question a, b & c web surveys could work best for you. And if you answered No to Questions a, b and c telephonic surveys could be a better choice.
4. Survey questions:
a. Type of questions: Avoid open ended questions and rather design your questions with aided answers like multiple choice or “Yes” or “No” responses.
b. Number of questions: Try to limit your questions to no more than eight on a Telephonic survey. If using a web form, measure how much time it takes to complete one survey. Try to limit it to 5 minutes. In both cases Telephonic and Web inform your respondents in the beginning that it will not take more than say five minutes of their precious time.
c. Solicitation: Avoid or rephrase any questions that sound like a sales pitch or make the respondent believe they may be followed up with sales calls. On the contrary try to identify the pain points that your product and service can alleviate
d.Reporting and Analytics: Visualize how would you like the survey results to be presented in a report format. Can the responses be summarized and presented in graphs, bar or pie diagrams etc.
5. In-House Vs Outsource: Estimate how many resources and time will it take to administer the survey campaign. Consider if you have the resources and tools to do it in-house. For example if you have the databases with contact information of the respondents and also have an email/ web platform to administer the survey you can easily design and run the survey yourself. However keep in mind that sometimes the respondents need to be followed up and motivated to take the surveys. In case you do not have the databases or resources you can hire an external market research or a telemarketing firm that has an experience conducting such B2B lead generation.
The point: If designed smartly, even a small survey campaign can generate highly qualified exclusive leads for your business.
Thanks