No matter what industry you’re in, making sales and staying afloat is a constant challenge. Sales and marketing professionals know that the best way to keep the wheels turning is ensuring that you always have a steady stream of sales leads flowing into the system. Paying for effective list building tools is a great idea, it’s actually a great way to ensure you never run short of leads.
Preparing To Move Into The Big Time
The traditional way of hunting up sales leads involves a lot of person-to-person networking. While this technique remains perennially valid, it’s simply not something you can organize on a large scale without having effective list building tools. Your individual sales personnel should be working hard to gather leads individually, but they’ll need the support of a more powerful solution to reap the kind of lead harvest you’re looking for.
In order to get started on the right foot, make sure your sales techniques are ready for prime time. Your procedures should be well-documented and carefully vetted by a knowledgeable legal expert. You don’t want to launch into global sales and discover that you’re violating the laws that govern online marketing and telemarketing. Verifying the ethics and legality of your marketing work at the start of your campaign is always a good idea.
Cheap List Building Tools: Lead Sharing Tools
If you want access to large lead databases but your financial resources are tightly constrained, you should look into the new crop of list building tools that are built on a collaborative, lead-sharing model. Buying into these networks is fairly cheap, especially if you’re willing to share the leads generated by your own sales personnel.
Examples of popular lead sharing tools in use today include InfoUSA and Jigsaw. InfoUSA has a very robust database with a particularly strong roster of individual consumers (over 200 million), although it’s geared towards conventional marketing routes (mail and telephone) rather than online communication. Jigsaw is a tool put together by Salesforce that’s more Internet-oriented. It emphasizes the collaborative lead-sharing aspect of the program heavily. Both tools have extensive search options to help you zero in on specific lead demographics.
Enterprise Solutions: Curated Databases
When you need higher-quality leads in large numbers and you’re willing to pay for them, you have more powerful options available to you. Curated databases are maintained by their owners to ensure that they contain only useful, accurate, and up-to-date information. These leads often prove far more fruitful to your sales people; of course, that also means you can expect to pay more for them!
If you’re targeting B2B customers, Hoover’s (a Dun & Bradstreet product) is the marketing industry standard. With a wide range of pricing options and extensive contact information for millions of businesses, Hoover’s is an excellent way to reach out to commercial customers. If your focus is on individual consumers, you’ll probably have better results with a database like Sales Genie by Infogroup. With prices set geographically you can pay for leads on a national, regional, or state-by-state basis.
Take the time to assess your needs and resources carefully before you start paying for leads and list building tools. There is no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to buying sales leads. The examples presented here are just a small slice of the overall market for list building tools. Keep looking and you’ll find one that fits your company like a glove.