Donato Diorio
Good list building affects all aspects of business, including the funnel and pipeline. Collecting the names, titles, emails, phone numbers, and social data, creates that holistic record. However, building a quality, accurate, and targeted list requires planning. Here are the strategies to implement in 2015 for a strong year.
Understand Your Audience
Before you can start building a list, you must know your target audience. Who do you sell to? Even more, knowing your target means understanding their biggest challenges. According to Debbie Madden, CEO of Stride, “Consider your target as a group of people who share specific needs and reference each other.”
Determine Multiple Points Of Contact
A common mistake with list building and outreach is targeting a single point of contact. For example, if you pull lists of salespeople because that’s your prospect, you may be leaving out other important prospects such as that salesperson’s boss, bosses or colleagues. A two or three-prong sales outreach approach enables you to reach out to your direct prospect, the VP of Sales, the VP of Marketing, the COO, and so on.
Establish A Methodology
The best way to build targeted lists that are holistic, clean, and complete is to establish a list building methodology. List generation is an ongoing strategy because data is ever changing. Therefore, it’s not a one-time event.
Ensure Accurate List Data
Data ages 3 percent to 5 percent a month, therefore, if you’re buying lists or pulling data from bad sources, and that data source has not been updated in a year, for instance, then you’re buying data that’s pretty old. That means duplicates, incorrect titles and phone numbers, and even missing information, such as lack of emails or social data.
Work With A List Building Vendor
Your list vendor must put the power of list generation in your hands. Forget digging through irrelevant information. Target your specific niche markets. Your vendor’s technology should scour the Internet and find companies that match your specific parameters. Today’s web research technology can index millions of websites across the Internet – including B2B social media, case studies, press releases, job postings, and much more. The result is a fresh, accurate list of companies and contacts using specific B2B technology products.
Bonus: The Future Of List Building
With great technology and great data, the future of list building is bright. It lends itself to a self-service model, where user can pull data and build lists from all sources on their own. There’s also the opportunity for smarter segmentation, and accessing data as you need it, versus relying on traditional vendors providing horribly outdated information.
Greater specialization in different areas and entire industries enable us to do more with list strategy than ever before.
The only way to do the best job is to first dream about the possibilities. In a perfect world, what lists would you have? If you want to segment your target list in an ideal way, where would you start? Start big and great lists will follow.
Get started with great list building with this free ebook.
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