Data accuracy is an ongoing problem for any database. On average 2-3% of contact data changes every month. That becomes 24%-36% change in a year if not updated regularly. Email addresses that were valid last month could bounce this month because an employee left the company, changed positions, or any number of other reasons.

According to Simply Hired, inside sales job hiring has increased 55% since September 2010. And that is awesome, but it also means that the inside sales market has gotten more crowded. As the saying goes, it is better to be a big fish in a little pond than a small fish in a large pond. So how do you make sure you're still a big fish?

EMEA, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, may not be on your marketing radar, but it is on your competitions. In the first four months of this year we at Sales Inside Inc. have seen a growing demand for counts and quotes related to EMEA marketing databases, and we expect to see this trend continue throughout 2012. We aren't the only ones who have noticed this trend.  Simply Hired shows a 22% increase in EMEA marketing hiring.

1. Target Market Criteria: Choose the industry and sub-industry you are trying to target.  If you want to develop a marketing leads database  or business contact list for multiple industries, target them one by one. Do not attempt to cover all of them in one go.
2. Company Criteria: Define the broad criteria that will help you identify the companies within the chosen industry by revenue, geography, employee size, etc. Example: Software product companies with a revenue range of $100 - $500 million located in North America.
3.  Select Companies: Search, download, or copy and paste the list of companies from free internet resources like:
• http://www.manta.com/
• http://www.jigsaw.com/
• http://www.thomasnet.com/
• http://dir.yahoo.com/business_and_economy/directories/companies/
• http://www.google.com/Top/Business/
4. Define functional role: Identify in what division, or department, of the organization your target contact is likely to be located. Ex/ IT, Human Resource, Marketing, Manufacturing.
5. Level: Define what level of decision maker, user or influencer you intend to target. Like VP of Marketing, Director of IT, or CFO
6. Format: Make an excel format for data capture. Write all data attributes you want to capture like Name, Mailing address, Phone number, Email address etc. It is a good idea to check the import format of the CRM or any other marketing automation tool you are using. This will help you to easily import the marketing leads database or business contact list file to your CRM, contact management application, or email marketing platform. 
7. Start the internet based research in the following order of preference:
• Company website: See if the name of the contact is listed in the management team, "About Us", or "History" section of the website. Even if you do not get the contact, pick up any data attribute like phone number, mailing address, etc and populate it in the excel spreadsheet.
• Check http://www.linkedin.com/ by visiting the respective company information section
• Check http://www.jigsaw.com/. You need not have an account or pay to look up information. Capture whatever relevant information you can from the free look-up.
• Check any of your industry specific free resources
8. Refine the above search process as you go and note the time you are spending on the search. Try to limit it to around10-12 companies or contacts per hour. This will help you budget the time you need for building a marketing leads database or business contact list, and also avoid endless searches. You can now back calculate to see if you can do that individually or need more resources to build the business contact database. Example: 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.
9. Validate: The marketing leads database or business contact list you have made so far is very relevant to your business, but is not validated. Now you need to call the companies to verify that the contacts still work for that company, and that they are in the same role within the company. Remember, you are not selling and marketing at this stage, just verifying the accuracy and the relevance of the marketing leads database or business contact list.

Once you are satisfied with the overall quality of your marketing leads database or business contact list, you can then hand it over to you sales and or marketing team.

Are you washing someone else’s dirty linen? Are you cleansing someone else’s data?

You may not realize how important data cleansing and data hygiene are. Without proper data cleansing, however, you could end up like the London Olympics organizers who invited Keith Moon to play at the Symphony of Rock. While The Who are undoubtedly an iconic and timeless band, and would make a great addition to any event, the Olympic organizers should have checked their data before extending an invitation. If they had checked their data, they would have known Keith Moon died in 1978 and would never have made the mistake.

When running a sales leads generation program you want to provide your team with the best chance of creating sales. With a little bit of planning and these six steps, you can be well on your way to new sales.

When you are in the marketing for a database hygiene or database cleansing service company, it can be hard to know who to choose. According to Marketing Sherpa, 2.1% of contact data goes bad every month. This data degradation drastically affects the way you target your outbound marketing and sales activities. Use these 7 steps to help you choose the consultant that's right for your company so that your marketing and sales teams can bring in qualified leads.

Andrew Pitre, writing for the HubSpot Blog, recently wrote "25 Clever Ways to Grow Your Email Marketing List." Anyone who does email marketing knows how  important it is to update and expand your email marketing list as often as possible. Here are ten easy ways to do just that. (To see all 25 tips, click here)

Finding accurate Oracle customer list for business-to-business (B2B) marketing is a difficult task. Researching this information is an even more arduous endeavor. To solve this problem Sales Inside Inc. has compiled one of the most comprehensive Oracle Users Lists available.