Fun Fact: You sales intelligence to acquire a new client than to retain an existing one!
It must also be mentioned herein that howsoever important customer retention may be, getting new clients is a clear indicator of the growth of an organization.
Needless to say, companies are willing to go the extra mile to get more clients without having to drill a hole in their pockets. If you wish to make optimum use of your customer acquisition budget, then it is essential for your sales and marketing teams to reach out to a targeted audience. In order to achieve this feat, your first line of action is creating a B2B contact database that serves this purpose. Ideally, the perfect B2B contact database must contain accurate and up-to-date information on the clients that can be nurtured as leads.
Read on to know everything about the B2B contact database and how you can create one that benefits your business.
What is a B2B Contact Database? Why are they Important?
In today’s world, companies reach out and market their products or services remotely; that is, through phone and emails. Hence, it is essential to maintain a B2B contact database that makes such data readily accessible.
Typically, it will contain B2B contact information like:
- Company name
- Email address
- Phone number
- Physical address or geography
- Social media handles
- Core industry
- Company size, and more!
If you are contacting a key figure belonging to an organization, the B2B contact information may also reflect data attributes like their designation, department, seniority, etc.
Given that it is a goldmine of possible prospects, you can identify businesses that seek the product or service you offer. As a result, you can follow a targeted approach and save up on your time, money, and efforts, that you would have otherwise expended on a wild goose chase.
Further, depending on this information, your marketing team can segment the prospects and tailor their campaigns to fit the target company’s requirements, work culture, and demographics.
Thus, in a nutshell, a B2B contact database can improve your chances of identifying prospects, nurturing leads, and converting them into buyers!
READ NOW: How to Build Your B2B Contact List With Emails & Direct Dials
Steps to Create your B2B Contact List
For those who are new to building a B2B contact list, here is a step-by-step guide on how to get started:
a. Know Your Ideal Buyer and Total Addressable Market
Before you start collecting your B2B contact information, it is crucial to outline an ideal customer profile first. Profiling your ideal buyer ensures your marketing team is directing their efforts towards interacting with leads that actually have a need for your product or service, and hence, are more likely to convert.
To draft a buyer persona, you need to ask the following questions to your sales team:
- Which industrial sector should the company operate in?
- Where should the company be located?
- What should be the average size of the company? (in terms of employees and revenue)
- Whom should you approach?
- What are the common challenges your solution can resolve?
- What makes your service or product stand out from the competitors?
- What are the key performance indicators (KPI) used to measure goals?
- By when do the results start to show?
- How should the company make the payments?
The more questions you ask, the clearer your idea will be in terms of common characteristics that define the ideal buyer.
In addition to identifying the ideal buyer, you also need to get an overview of the ’Total Addressable Market,’ or TAM. TAM is the total market demand for the product or service that you offer. It can be indicated as an amount corresponding to the maximum revenue estimates for the business. It gives a realistic idea of how many customers your company can reach through various sales and marketing channels.
Keeping the ’Ideal Buyer Persona’ and ’Total Addressable Market’ in mind, your company, can now work towards identifying and profiling target companies and decision-makers.
TAM CALCULATOR: CALCULATE YOUR TOTAL ADDRESSABLE MARKET (TAM) NOW
b. Collect B2B Contact Data Through Various Channels
Here’s the most grueling part of creating a B2B contact list - combing through the internet for accurate details. When it comes to digging up information, you may have to do anything and everything - right from visiting company websites to reading their interviews!
Here are a few ways to get you started:
1. Use LinkedIn to Build Your Contact List
LinkedIn enjoys a user base of over 660 million users spread across 200 countries and territories. It is one of the leading platforms for developing and nurturing B2B relationships. It comes equipped with the ’LinkedIn Sales Navigator.’ With its wide range of tools, the ’LinkedIn Sales Navigator’ helps to filter in companies that fit your ideal customer profile and TAM. Furthermore, in addition to saving prospect profiles, you can segment the leads and sort them by priority too!
You can also use LinkedIn for:
- Setting smart triggers on lead accounts
- ‘View similar’ leads and prospects
- Spot warm leads through ‘TeamLink’
- Filter leads and prospects through Sales Spotlight
- Send ‘InMail’ to connect with prospects
2. Events and Conferences
Before the influx of the digital realm, events, seminars, and conferences were the go-to methods for B2B networking and meeting new prospects. While LinkedIn continues to be the most preferred channel to connect with other businesses, scouting for prospects at events and conferences carries an old-school charm that is built on the reliability of the method. The mayhem of an industry-related event makes for fertile ground for making in-person connections with prospects. With a robust game-plan, you can convert any trade-show, seminar, event, or conference into an opportunity for scoring high-quality prospects.
3. Inbound Lead Generation
Inbound lead generation depends on your ability to generate relevant and thought-provoking content. Through this cost-effective method, you can capture the visitor’s contact details in exchange for the information you disseminate. Pairing inbound lead generation with a smart and personalized call to action button could almost double the submissions in your B2B contact database. Regardless of the various strategies your company may employ, inbound lead generation is a must as an add-on to your list building activities.
However, it is important to highlight here that inbound lead generation through opt-ins is not only slow but is also prone to user-generated errors, which may be deliberate or otherwise.
4. B2B Contact Database Provider
Involving a B2B contact database provider can simplify the process of building the B2B contact list. A genuine B2B contact database provider will share a list of verified email addresses and direct-dial phone numbers of all the companies featuring in your target market. The pricing for these services depends on the quantity of data required, type of data, and status of data.
However, care must be taken to choose a reliable B2B contact database provider as the quality of information may suffer. Before you settle on a B2B contact database provider, you must verify the legitimacy of the business by checking their LinkedIn profile and googling their reviews. Further, you can also gain insights into their method of collecting B2B contact data and request for a sample to test the accuracy and quality of this list before investing in them.
c. Maintaining the Integrity of B2B Contact Data
The final step in terms of building a B2B contact list involves analyzing the shortlisted companies and narrowing down the list even more. This gives you the time to know everything there is about the prospects that have made it to the final prospect list. You can map out any recent triggers or events that may call for your product or services, or determine the main decision-makers to whom you should pitch your product or services. Studying the prospects beforehand also allows for segmentation, prioritization, and formulation of personalized marketing tactics.
That’s not all! You also need to validate the B2B contact information periodically.
READ NOW: 5 Effective Types of B2B Market Segmentation Strategies
Sadly, the B2B contact list you acquire is not constant. In fact, nearly 30% of contact data decays on a yearly basis. Hence, merely collecting and validating data attributes is not enough; the B2B contact information has to be updated. Several data attributes can change at any given time. The company may change its mandate, or your contact individual may switch jobs to another company - the list of possible changes is endless. As a good practice, the B2B contact data must be reviewed and validated every 90 days.
In order to validate data, you need to schedule an outreach program for the said email IDs and telephone numbers while sticking to a short and precise script. A handful of lead qualifying questions will do an excellent job of understanding where the buyer currently stands.
Does Manual Scavenging for Contacts Sound Like a Lot? Clodura.AI to the Rescue!
When you put the above-listed steps in perspective, you will realize that manually building your own B2B contact database from scratch costs dearly in terms of time, resources, and campaign performance. Collecting data across various channels and constantly validating this information may take forever! Plus, in the current dog eat dog world, time is money, and no business would want to miss out on pivotal life-changing opportunities.
In such a situation, Clodura is your magic solution that hits the right balance between acquiring high-quality data in a timely manner.
Using Clodura.AI for B2B Contact List Building
Clodura is an AI-powered solution to automate and accelerate your lead generation to sales meeting journey. It ensures you spend less time finding companies, decision-makers, drafting emails or making calls, and more time selling! It is a one-stop, holistic platform that caters to all your B2B contact data management while also handling the sales engagement aspect.
With Clodura, you can access:
- Comprehensive Data of more than 200 million contacts from over 20 million companies, with 90 million+ direct dials
- 95% accuracy powered by Clodura’s AI-powered engine which scrubs and removes any obsolete data and keeps the B2B contact list fresh always
- Real-time intelligence which covers over 25 customizable buying signal alerts so that you never miss out on an opportunity
- Tech Stack install base of about 15,000 products sorted into different categories such as CRM, ERP, CMS, Hosting, Advertising, Marketing, etc.
- Automated sales sequences that are triggered at the aptest time for sales prospecting. Now book more meetings and participate in more interactions.
- Conference attendee data, which allows you to prep in advance before attending a conference. The Conference Attendee Tracker displays the RSVP attendee list of any conference, laying the groundwork for maximizing the returns on your investment for any future events.
In a nutshell, Clodura simplifies how you find and connect with decision-makers, book meetings with them, and finalize purchases! So whether you are a newbie or an expert, Clodura will share relevant insights to boost your revenue!
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In Conclusion
If you are looking for a recipe for success, then an accurate & targeted B2B contact database is what you need. While the manual building of a B2B contact list may prove to be a cost-effective option, it can put undue stress on your time, resources & campaign performance. If you wish to avail of the services of a B2B contact database provider, you need to continuously verify the accuracy of every record and list to ensure a successful sales & marketing outreach. Bad data can choke up your sales & marketing performance and negatively impact the domain reputation. An automated B2B data & engagement platform like Clodura. AI can be the best bet to find companies, contacts, emails, direct dials, and sales intelligence in real-time and generate more meetings with your team.
