5 Ways To Build A Targeted B2B Business Contact List of Decision Makers & Influencers

Most companies accumulate a large number of contacts in their CRM database over a period of time and as marketing managers change the data keeps getting added but it also gets old, irrelevant and incorrect. The first and the cheapest thing to do is to cleanse your internal CRM data and throw out all duplicate and junk data, and engage a verification effort with the aim of only capturing and retaining titles with specific roles and responsibilities that match your requirements. If the titles are not within your requirements, simply remove that contacts from your CRM. Its not your target and it just shouldn't be in there polluting the data for your sales and marketing teams.

Easier said than done, I know. But if you leveage internal team or interns or most ideally a b2b lead generation firm that understand the importance of gathering role-based decision makers, then we can spend your budget wisely and upgrade your bloated useless CRM database into a good looking and well performing list of contacts that respond to your marketing and sales camapigns.

Once you have managed your CRM database cleansing to get it in order, focus all efforts on custom list building for identify decision making contacts for the specific roles and responsibilities that you are looking for, at your target accounts. Structure the list building effort across different target company lists based on revenue, employee count, geography or other aspects. Develop a target account list and work with expert B2B list building firms like ReadyContacts, Better, Catapult or others that have demonstrated success within your market segment. Ensure that you stress of getting contacts based on their roles and not any other parameter. Request for lists to be sent to you in batches. Review and check the quality of the lists. Rinse and repeat and build a program that add new target accounts with fully mapped out decision makers to your CRM database on a monthly basis. This is one strategy that will never fail you.

As most other b2b marketers, you probably spend part of your budget in driving inbound leads from search engines, pay per click campaigns and other sources. And most likely, you also lack a good inbound lead management system that allows your to truly unlock the potential opportunities that these leads represent. First and foremost is to create a streamlined lead management process for handling all inbound leads. DO NOT make the mistake of channeling all of them to your CRM system. That will lead to more problems. Create a lead management system that filters the inbound leads for junk data and removes them, checks for de-duplication and merges them, add missing data to ensure the lead data is complete and allows for your team to eye ball the leads and make changes before pushing clean, de-duped and completed contacts into your CRM system.

I am positive this is one process that will deliver a huge benefit to you, especially if you are getting a lot of inbound leads. It will also deliver way better ROI from your online ad spend and give you contacts who want to hear from you.

Trade shows are a big part of your marketing efforts. A huge asset from trade show participation is the list of business contacts that you get after the trade show who are (mostly) your key decision makers and influencers. However, a lot of companies loose track of trade show lists in a pile of files or they get lost amongst lots of lists uploads to the CRM system and are never leverage properly. The way to get the most out of conference leads is to first cleanse and enrich the leads data to add full contact information and email address. Use your internal team or an outsourced B2B lead generation firm to do this. Once you get the list in a clean format, do a "thank you" kind of email follow-up with all the leads with an attractive offer as well. Cleanse our all the emails that bounce and junk them. Once you get the opens and clicks data, you can be sure that the business contacts who clicked on your offer or links with the email are good prospects. Add just those or additionally those who opened the emails, to your CRM database. You may end up adding only a fraction of the list to your CRM, but it will be a qualified set of contacts who matter.

This is the final source of gathering relevant decision maker business contacts fast. However, they must go through the exact same cleansing and reachout process like the Conference lists above to be narrowed down to the truly useful names.