I love Ramen! This popular Japanese soup has become my favorite weekend indulgent. Whether home cooked or ordered from some resto, I make it a point that my Ramen has all the special ingredients in it: salted pork, soup, topping and the most important is the original flavorful Chinese style Ramen noodles.
A B2B industry is 99% data driven. Like Ramen noodles, Data is the main component of an operational workflow that fuels dynamic breakthroughs in the business but at the same time poses a highly critical effect on production based on its quality – completeness and accuracy. So if you’re cooking up a lead generation program, make sure you have the best main ingredient in it – a targeted list.
When outsourcing a lead generation campaign, you and your lead generation provider should be directed to the same goal: to find new customers and grow the business, and there’s no better way to achieve that than having the best candidates of customers in your business list.
Grab some important call to actions below in getting a targeted list with the help of an outsourced lead generation company:
Dedupe
Data deduplication is a process of data compression technique to eliminate duplicates.
If you have your own list to use for the lead generation campaign but isn’t enough to suffice the required number of contacts to complete it, have it deduped with the lead generation provider’s mined data to get an all-unique contacts database.
Do the same with recurrent campaigns. The list used from previous month’s campaign may contain recyclable contacts like Follow ups and Not Availables. Have your lead gen company filter the recyclables and dedupe the old and the new lists before the next month’s campaign commences.
Keep an eye not only on the total count of contacts deduped but also double check on the target criteria filtered like industry type, company size, number of employees, SIC codes, ZIP codes and annual revenue.
Related: The Hidden Gems of the Web: Where Can You Get a Good B2B Lead List?
Profile
Data profiling is a process of segmenting customers based on demographical and psychological statistics.
Your lead generation provider must do data profiling concurrent with the daily calling. During the call with a decision maker, the agent must grab the opportunity to dish out important information like business requirement, purchase timeline, service type, current economic status etc. to help you understand your customer’s buying behavior and at the same time leverage on time and tools used in the process to expedite results.
Related: A Need For Customer Profiling In Reaching Much Targeted Audience
Note that a well profiled list will have a domino effect on your lead generation program – it will increase the number of contactable prospects in the database and from which more qualified leads will be generated that are highly closable.
Verify
Data verification is a procedure used to check/correct invalid contact information.
It never hurts to ask. Is the agent talking to the right person? Will the brochures and email communications go to the right email address? Is there a need to call the company trunk line when you can directly call the target on his direct line? These deficiencies occur and will waste much call time when contact information are not properly verified.
Have the caller continuously validate each information to achieve data accuracy which will maximize the calling time in generating leads instead of getting passed from one gatekeeper to another.
Online search can also be a good data-gathering practice. However, the web is a broad geography with an overwhelming amount of information and not all are reputable. One has to be keen in searching for the right and correct information that is qualified to completely build a targeted list, otherwise all your marketing efforts will be thrown to waste.
Make it a habit to Dedupe, Profile and Verify contact information at each campaign period. Note that quality data list should have at least 70% list score, completeness and accuracy, to produce the most number of qualified, highly closable leads.
I won’t settle for anything less than my savory Ramen noodle soup, neither I would for a targeted list in my lead generation program.