Over the years I’ve worked on a wide range of marketing campaigns for our clients and without fail each and every campaign represents a new and unique challenge to the team. We love it! One thing I’ve found is that rarely, if ever, can we apply the same template to each project and expect any kind of consistency across the board.
Don’t get me wrong, there are some similarities in the way we launch our campaigns. For example, this could be anything from the amount of dials we put into a C-level titles to the scripts we use when reaching out to Director/Manager level titles. The problem is that our post campaign analysis rarely provides us a consistent reason behind our success or failure….except for one.
The only overwhelmingly consistent theme that I’ve seen in the post campaign analysis always rests on the data.
I know I’ve blogged about this in the past, so I’m beating a dead horse here, but campaigns are only as good as the quality of the list you’re calling into. In my humble opinion, everything starts and ends with your list.
I’m often amazed at the lack of effort I’ve seen put into scrubbing lists before their plopped down in front of the inside team for calling. It’s usually the dirty work that marketing and sales teams don’t want to put the effort into. They hope in some way the data can clean itself when the inside team begins calling into it. The problem with that approach is that it dramatically slows the sales process. Based on our research, an opportunity that exists within a target account takes on average 2-3 weeks longer to convert over to sales if you’re not doing the data cleansing on the front end of the process.
For those of you tasked with needing good quality names to feed your inside team or marketing campaigns, you most likely have come to the realization long ago that no list vendor is perfect. If anyone is aware of a vendor that offers lists under a 30% bounce rate and doesn’t cost me $5 bucks a name please let me know.
Don’t get me wrong, lists have come a long way since the tech boom days of the late nineties when there were virtually no options out there other than Hoovers. Nowadays there seems to be plenty to choose from, but it can be very difficult to decipher between the decent ones and vendors you shouldn’t waste your marketing dollars on.
For my next blog I’ll give you the straight dope from what I’ve seen on the B-2-B list vendors I’ve run into over the last decade.
