Thats right, 51,800 companies ranging from fortune 500 giants to small startup businesses, that show many customers Salesforce.com has according to their latest press release dated 5th January 2009. Thats not a customer base, that is a market!

The database management software company Ingres was their latest large addition to the impressive list of Salesforce customers which just seems to keep expanding rapidly. This base of 51,800 companies is a fantastic market segment for several technology companies who have products and offerings specifically built as solutions for existing Salesforce customers and keeping a tab on which is the latest company to turn to the Salesforce CRM is essential and spot early opportunities. A perfect example of this scenario is how Intacct was selected to integrate in this deal to help with financials, Vtrenz for the marketing automation needs and Xactly for sales compensation as add ons.

With such a wide market base for AppExchange and Force.com applications, building strong marketing data on Salesforce.com users and gathering account intelligence on them can effectively give you an edge while exploring opportunities and requirements in this market. Building this kind of a database is a long and painful process with the need to gather intelligence on each potential account as well as locating suitable decision makers. Over the course of the next year ActiveContacts will look at expanding the number of Salesforce using target accounts within the SFDC database and provide marketers updated data on this every expanding market. It may not be anywhere close to 51,800 for now but every lead counts!

The last year was a tough one on most companies starting with the banking crisis, the financial downturn and then the entire world economy falling to pieces. While B2C markets reached all time lows, B2B marketers were not spared either but towards the end of the year a lot of the conversations changed from “we are all doomed!” to “what do we have to do to pick up sales and how do we generate more leads?”. The goals were quite clear. Number of leads generated have to increase. Budgets wont be increased so the cost per lead has to come down. 

ROI has become the keyword and investing in quality leads at a lower cost is what it’s all about. While inbound lead generation has become a very strong sustainable approach for a lot of B2B marketers to grow their lead databases, supplementing them with traditional lead sources such as conference lists, business contact lists and company database subscriptions will remain just as important to build the volume of leads in the lead generation funnel. Having access to a fresh supply of quality leads especially at the start of a selling cycle is extremely valuable in being able to qualify and engage more sales ready leads through the year. However high volumes and low costs are not worth much if means you are compromising on quality of data and leads. Eventually its the quality of your leads and business contact databses that will bring you the results so thats the key requirement to insist on when you source new leads.

As you kick off your customer acquisition this year, make sure you are working with a fresh lead database which is relevent, focussed and most importantly, high quality.  

We are now in the last phases of our quarterly overhaul for the colleges universities vertical business database and we should have the freshly updated version of the Active Contacts EDU database ready for our customers within the next working week. As with other business to business verticals, the education vertical also sees some amount of churn and its crucial for us to verify our business contact data periodically and make sure our data reflects these changes and our customers have access to quality business leads within this vertical and not dead ends.

While the latest version of the EDU database will see a drop of approximately 400 previous contacts, you can be rest assured that the omission of these contacts will give you higher accuracy on your email campaigns or tele marketing campaigns targeted towards the education market. Over the next phase, our team will work towards updating the decision makers within these colleges and universities to enrich the data with replacements for those who are no longer working in the roles that were vaccated in this round of cleansing and you can look forward to seeing the EDU database as comprehensive as it has been. Keep checking ActiveContacts.net for more updates!

The news of the fall of Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers & Merrill Lynch was a shock to everyone. Then there was the news flash that AIG was next in line for collapse. It’s almost impossible to imagine that these are some of the massive giants from Fortune 500 that are amongst the biggest buyers for just about everything b2b businesses have to offer. Would anyone have even suspected a year ago that it was even remotely possible that some of these names would not even feature anywhere on the Fortune 500 list the next time its published?

We were certainly taken by surprise. As part of maintaining an up to date database of technology decision maker business contacts in the Fortune 500 companies to provide technology companies with business to business leads, we keep an eye on the Fortune 500 rankings to note changes in rankings and update new companies that have made it to the list. While there are updates from the past few years, this year seems to be one where we can expect to see some surprising changes in the rankings. With the domino effect of the crisis on the global economy we can definitely expect to see some names leave the Fortune 500 list while other large companies who will be hard hit will slip down the ranks possibly by several places and be replaced by others. Needless to say the Fortune 500 list may never look the same as we remember it. Only time will tell.   

We now have work well underway on an Active Contacts IT Security Contacts Database and hope to have it launched in the next month weeks. We will be working heads down over the coming weeks to develop this data which should provide IT Security marketers with very valuable security decision maker contacts across the top companies in the USA and Canada with quality of the data being our key objective.  

Whether its ani-virus solutions, intrusion detection technology, authentication, identity management, firewall solutions or email security, the demand for IT Security in large companies is growing and on going as they are constantly on the look out to strengthen security around their information networks, However from the marketing perspective, for companies to get their security offerings in front of these large companies they need to have a strong database of the right business contacts within these companies who are directly responsible for IT Security responsibilities and are the right target decision makers within them. Although IT Security conference lists, whitepaper downloads are common sources of generatng leads having access to a range of security decision makers within target companies can be invaluable support all year round for marketers and sales persons looking for IT Security Leads.

Stay tuned for more updates on this as we continue to roll out the IT Security contacts database!

After ages, today I saw someone refer to the good old telephone directory to find the contact details for a phone company and it had me pondering what it would be like if we still had to use that to locate business contacts for b2b marketing campaigns. The only reason he was using the directory was because the internet connection was down and he couldn’t check google to find a customer care number. 

If finding that wasn’t painful enough, I started thinking about how using a company database like active contacts to find your decision makers would have been different from using ‘Ye ol’ telephone directory’ and although I dont know how useful this may be, here is why we dont use them anymore:

•  Searching for a company or a person in a telephone directory is a pain and thats putting it mildly
• If an online database is the model of mobility where you can access data from anywhere, a telephone directory is the opposite. Dont believe it? Try carrying one around while traveling.
• Telephone and business directories gave you a name and a phone number and at the most an address. Thats very little information if you compare it to the likes of Activecontacts.net, Hoovers.com, InfoUSA.com and other databases.
• Telephone business directories can’t integrate with your salesforce.com CRM or be downloaded into a csv format to use with your campaign management software.

Anybody who has experience selling technology into IT organizations of large companies within the Fortune 500 companies will tell you that IT or technology decision makers within these companies are amongst the most difficult professionals to reach especially on the phone. If navigating through the fortune companies and finding someone within the IT department was not already hard enough, business contacts within the IT organization are usually away from their desk, busy and not the most likely people to pick up the phone on your first attempt to call them. Many a salesperson has had stressful days trying to get to someone within these companies to pitch their offering and its tough to break into large companies unless you have a good number of contact points within them to start off with.

Having a few options for business contacts within these companies will give you a better chance at being able to connect within these IT departments and get started with the process of selling into them. We built the ActiveContacts Fortune 500 IT Business Contacts Database keeping in mind that if you have quick access to a range of contacts within each of these accounts it provides more options or doorways into the technology departments of the F500. So whether you build your own database, use a custom business contact list service or subscribe to a database like F500 IT Database always have your contacts ready before you start selling and those voice mails and dead ends won’t seem as bad.

B2B contact lists and databases are just like perishable products. Each of them has its shelf life and as they sit the quality of that database is bound to deteriorate. Contacts may have left their positions at companies or moved within them and sometimes entire company offices may have shifted locations or undergone some changes. Often by the time these lists or databases are ready to be used in a campaign they are no longer as effective as they were. There is not much that can be done to stop lead lists and customer databases deteriorating with time but here are a few tips for your lists:

-While buying a ready list always inquire how old the list is and when was the data acquired or last verified. If its more than 6 months old you may want to look elsewhere.

-Inquire about the source or the process by which the list was built to understand what exactly you are paying for and how useful it will be in light of your campaign requirements.

-If you have a database which has been sitting for longer than a few months its advisable to invest in some data verification or cleansing services before actually running a campaign off it. This will ensure better results.

-Remember as a thumb rule larger databases of contacts may mean more leads but also means they are a lot harder to maintain in terms of quality and may not always be the best bang for your buck.

-Check the contents and type of contacts to ensure what you are getting are the contacts or leads you need and don’t go only by numbers of contacts. Unless those contacts are relevant to your sales, they are just contacts and not leads.

So the next time you are evaluating a lead list or purchasing a contact database remember to check the expiry date.