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.  

If your organization is selling into the Fortune 500 companies and the leads you generate through online and other inbound channels are not enough to fill the lead pipeline thats probably because the Fortune 500 companies have turned a bit cautious in the down economy and active buying or exploring buying options in this phase would be lower than ususal. When the companies are not coming after you, the best response is go after them and sell proactively.

Having access to a lead database like the Active Contacts Fortune 500 Lead Database can be a great source of leads for cold calling, tele prospecting or other outbound campaigns. Supplementing the lead funnel with leads from a database subsciption could give you that additional push into cracking some of those larger deals in the Fortune 500 and help expand the flow into the lead funnel.

So if the fortune 500 is  where you have your sales sights set, then having a look at the ActiveContacts database is a must to explore.  

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!

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!

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.   

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.

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.

 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