The New Business Dingo

Typically the first step for any new business person looking to embark on a new target category begins with the development of a prospect list or group of companies and brands.

The accuracy of this data may be the make or break of your efforts, so do the research and test the data from any supplier or source before incorporating into your new business CRM application.

There are a variety of great information resources, both free and subscriptions based that can help you build-out a robust foundation for new business efforts.

The buzz at the moment is to utilize Social sites - like Facebook (www.facebook.com) and LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com), which do provide an ability to search, network, get introduced and find contacts within your industry and interest areas, but lack accuracy as the basis of the social media model relies so heavily on individuals keeping their profiles up-to-date.

We’ve reviewed data and leads from Aggregation sites such as ZoomInfo (www.zoominfo) and InfoUSA (www.infousa.com), they have huge amounts of information on both consumers and businesses across most industries and geographic locations. One of the issues we discovered for agency new business revolved around accuracy simply due to the millions of records and recent marketplace turmoil.

A couple of the larger Contact Trading sites allow you to buy or trade business contacts. The initial costs are relatively low for finding specific contact information for a handful of prospects, and you can submit your own to trade 1-to-1. Jigsaw (www.jigsaw.com) or NetProspex (www.netprospex.com) are just a couple of the larger and more established sites. You’ll find that both have a couple of drawbacks shared with other social and aggregation sites; primarily the lack of oversight in confirming uploaded contacts. Users can voluntarily flag contacts that are incorrect, but I’ve rarely seen this be effective – who has the time?

We’ve explored Mega sites like Hoovers (www.Hoovers.com), but have really had issues getting accurate email addresses and specific marketing contacts (which we really need for agency new business). There are simply millions of companies listed in Hoovers and Dunn & Bradstreet databases and they’re great for financial info, management bios and company structure.

The data that’s driven the greatest success in new business for our agencies has come from purchasing directly from Boutique sites like The List (www.thelistinc.com). They focus specifically on marketing contacts and decision makers at companies and brands that are in the crosshairs of our clients (companies that spend >$500,000 per year in media). One of the best attributes fro our purposes of new business, is the fact that they have a majority of the email addresses we’re looking for to undertake highly targeted messaging campaigns.

We also need to know their existing agency relationships, people by location and of course recent news articles that may influence or impact upon their marketing services relationships, like the hire of a new CMO. Of course there’s no guarantee that they’ll have every contact you’ll need, but we’ve found that in most cases it’s close, and we’re able to probe and research that contact for other decision makers.

A good rule of thumb, build your database to be highly targeted, as accurate as possible and be sure to ‘refresh’ it constantly.

If you use a service like The List, be sure to go ‘back-to-the-well’ each quarter to keep your data fresh. You can use a program like DigDB (http://www.digdb.com) to help dedupe (remove duplicates) old against new contacts. They have a free 15-day trial, and the yearly license is relatively cheap.

Given the state of the economy, and the turnover in marketing departments each week, it’s really just best practice to refresh to keep your outreach as efficient as possible.

Good luck on the hunt!

The New Business Dingo