Best Buy

 

Another quick update from the ActiveContacts.net as we continue to update the business contacts data in the Fortune 500 database. This time is good news to companies who are looking to sell technology into Best Buy Compnay Inc. 10 new IT decision makers and executives have been added to the existing 26 to bring the total up to 36 verified IT decision makers within Best Buy.

 

Among the new updates are titles like Director, Computer Operations, MIS Project Leader, Director of Internet Services, Director of Architecture and Senior Manager, Business & Information Systems  among others. So if you are looking for technology executives in Best Buy. You now know where to find them!

 

 


Are You Looking For Education Leads

Generating education leads in universities and colleges is a specialized space and yet there are several technology and non technology based organizations that sell into the higher education verticals. While selling into educational organizations as with most other verticals, having the right decision maker for your offering plays a big role in how effectively you are able to dig into this market. 

Developing the right leads within the universities and colleges often will involve more direct marketing, email marketing and telemarketing to supplement the other efforts and it often starts with having a good list of decision makers within these institutes. This is exactly what we kept in mind while developing the Active Contacts Education Contacts Database which currently has just over 20,000 leads at about 2000 universities and K-12 schools. Each of these contacts has the essential contact details such as email id’s and postal addresses which constantly run through a verification process to maintain the quality of the database. 

So if you are a b2b marketer and its education leads that you are looking for. This should be the resource you were looking for.

 


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.
 


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 Lead Databases Check the Expiry Date

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.