Chapter 5
Uncovering Contact Information
By now, you have all of the information you could possibly need to build highly targeted lists of potential buyers. You have potential targets at all levels within the companies—ideal customer profiles (ICPs), both top-down and bottom-up. You have company names, job titles, and other attributes. The only thing you're missing now is your potential targets' contact information, which is a very important piece of the puzzle.
Remove Duplicates Early On
Before you start gathering contact information, you should build up a number of lists from sources across the Internet, using the tactics from previous chapters in this book. Once you have these lists, it's likely you will have a handful of duplicates. Don't waste time or resources gathering e-mail addresses for the same people multiple times. Instead, quickly remove duplicates from your lists.
My favorite way to remove duplicates from my lists is to use Google Sheets. It recently released new add-ons that you can install easily from Google Sheets in the Google Chrome store. Just click Add-ons in the navigation bar, where File and Edit are, and find the add-on called Remove Duplicates. Once you have that add-on, put all of the sheets together on a master sheet. Then open Remove Duplicates, and run the program to delete duplicate cells.
If your lists are already segmented and you want to keep them separate, create a master sheet and run the program, but don't allow it to delete duplicate cells. Instead, ask the program to highlight the duplicate and the original cells in green, and then manually delete duplicates from one of the lists.
You also may want to check your current customer relationship management (CRM) system for accounts that you're already talking to. The process for doing this is different with all CRM systems, but you can usually pull a report, add it to the document, and remove duplicates (both from the original and from your CRM system). You won't need to find the e-mail addresses if you already have them, so it should save you some time and money.
All of these minor, trainable tasks are perfect assignments for a virtual assistant to handle. I'll get to that shortly.
Now you're ready to generate contact information. There's no secret way to do this. An e-mail address is number one. If you can get a direct phone number, that's good, too.
Toofr
Toofr is the best tool I've seen for finding business e-mail addresses and building a massive list of potential contacts, as long as you have a first name, a last name, and a domain name. Toofr can verify or find thousands of e-mails at a time. Just upload the CSV (comma separated values) file, and then retrieve the export file. This is important for lowering the bounce rate of e-mails that you send, which can set off spam triggers and mess up the effectiveness of your e-mail campaigns.
For example, let's say my goal is to contact the vice president (VP) of marketing at 200 target companies that have just closed Series B round of funding and are on CrunchBase. I can scrape the company information (first name, last name, domain) into a CSV file using the tools from earlier in this book and upload that neatly organized CSV file directly into Toofr. The final result should be a CSV file with verified e-mail addresses alongside the information I imported. The data comes from multiple sources and is usually double- or triple-verified, so it's quite accurate.
ZoomInfo
ZoomInfo is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company that sells access to its database of information about businesspeople and companies to sales, marketing, and recruiting professionals. ZoomInfo has made a big comeback in my book. I used to think databases had some of the stalest leads because it was harder for them to stay up to date, but ZoomInfo is a whole new product with some of the most accurate contact information, especially direct dials.
Prospect.io
Prospect.io allows you to pull all contact information directly from Web pages. It's another way to scrape as much data from the Web as possible. All you do is type in a domain using the full URL (www.___.com) and click Go. It will pull all contact information from across the site as the internal crawler searches page by page. Prospect.io also has a bulk upload tool and an application program interface (API) for those requiring multiple domain look-ups.
Pulling Contact Information Directly from LinkedIn
SalesLoft
SalesLoft, a sales development software company, is great for prospecting directly from LinkedIn, which means you have a target individual in mind and need his or her full contact information. I find that using SalesLoft is most helpful when I have a company name and a job title but I don't know the name of the person I'm looking for. By using LinkedIn's new Sales Navigator, I can now easily search LinkedIn for these contacts and simply export them using the SalesLoft Chrome extension. SalesLoft will show me my lists of exports and, by their best guess, the full contact information for my exported leads. SalesLoft's data is usually very accurate.
If all you have is a company name and a job title, searching can still be done a bit manually, but that's what you have virtual assistants for.
SalesLoft is getting away from this area of the business, but their services still work well.
Capture (by RingLead)
Capture is a wonderful new tool from RingLead that allows you to go to any site or social profile and pull data from it using a Chrome browser extension.
For example, you can visit a company's Team page and scrape all team members' names. This allows you to get their contact information and import it directly into Salesforce. The extension allows you to do this from websites, social media profiles, job listing sites, spreadsheets, Twitter lists, Google searches, and more.
Capture can even be used within Salesforce to keep existing data up to date or with existing external databases to update incomplete or stale data.
Datanyze also has a plug-in for this. Check out Ecquire, too. Velocify recently released a competing product in the space as well.
E-mail Verification and Enrichment
Once you've built massive e-mail lists from various data sources, be sure to do the following:
- Make sure the e-mails are verified and don't bounce back. High bounce rates can lead to blacklisted domains, which will send your e-mails to the recipients' spam folder. Bad e-mail addresses will also throw off your e-mail optimization efforts and ruin your conversion pipeline.
- Enrich the data you have so that you get a full lead profile that you can work with. This gives you a quick and easy way to turn an e-mail address into a full profile on the person.
BriteVerify
BriteVerify is a data verification service that can be used to verify data such as e-mail addresses, phone numbers, and mailing addresses. It is extremely simple and easy to use. Its service allows you to verify e-mails one-by-one or to upload lists to verify multiple e-mails all at once.
Its API is the best part. It allows you to connect your CRM, point of sales (POS) software, Web forms, or mobile applications so that any e-mail that comes in is automatically verified as soon as it enters your system.
Also check out Kickbox.io, which is another e-mail address verification service.
Clearbit
Clearbit is an easy-to-use enrichment tool with an API that you can pass a lead through, and it will tell you everything you need to know about that lead. You can pass numerous domain names or e-mail addresses through the API, and Clearbit will fill out a full profile based on that information.
Clearbit released a very good Google Docs plug-in that allows you to build lists right into the document without leaving your Google-based world.
Clearbit is a really good way to clean up new data, fill in the blanks, or keep data clean.
Figure 5.1 Data Enrichment
Whatever you do, don't skimp on making sure your data is clean and up to date. Sending e-mails to incorrect or expired e-mail addresses is worse than sending no e-mails. You can land your domain in spam folders, or worse, you can be locked out of your e-mail account by your e-mail provider.