Salesforce.com Customer Database

 

Our Salesforce.com customers database with decision maker contacts just finished getting an overhaul with a complete verification check to update and weed out any business contact data which is no longer active. The process which has kept the ActiveContacts data team busy over the last few weeks is finally complete and contact information for a few thousand of decison makers within almost 1000 Salesforce.com customer companies were checked for quality and updated to the online database.

 

There will be further updates on the number of companies within the database as we work to improve on this SFDC customer list. We aim to continue adding to this database to help appexchange partners and companies which develop Salesforce.com applications which need a reliable customer list of companies using salesforce.com with decision makers they can reach out to for their sales and marketing. We will have more updates on this soon but for those who have been looking for salesforce.com customers, the ActiveContacts SFDC Database is fresh!

 

 


Telephone Directories

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.

 

On the flipside when you are sitting infront of your computer and your internet connection gives up on you, you can still rely on finding help by flipping through the few thousand pages of one of those directories so you may not want to throw them out just yet.
 


Salesforce.com Companies:Who is Your Decision Maker

 The rise of Salesforce.com as the CRM of choice amongst tens of thousands of companies also triggered the market for salesforce add on applications for salesforce automation, document management, analytics, security and a lot more. With over 800 such applications which can switch your salesforce.com capabilites to nitrous oxide mode, its given companies that use salesforce.com a plethora of applications to choose from but at the same time with that many applications, several companies wouldn’t be completely aware of all these options. This is where the marketing and sales teams for these companies face their challenges and compete for a piece of that SFDC pie.

Whatever the application and fuction of the product they have to sell, there are two factors that every appexchange product marketing team needs to start with:

  1. A list or databse of Salesforce.com Customers
  2. Identified decision makers or business contacts within those accounts who are involved with SFDC
The first point is really the key qualifier for any company selling a salesforce related product or service into a company. If the company is using Salesforce.com within the company or some part of their operations then it becomes a target account. The second requirement is where it can really change from company to company depending on the nature of your product. While most companies target the head of sales and marketing or the person responsible for sales operations, depending on the nature of the product, the right decision maker can differ. For example a company that sells a security application for SFDC users, the key decision maker or influencer may be within IT Security or a more technical contact. If the product is about document control, the decision maker maybe from the compliance side.
So while the best contacts to have are those who work directly with the salesforce application within the company, the best decision maker for your product will depend on what has worked best for your product and may need that extra effort locate. Once you have your target companies and decision makers in place, the rest will fall into place.