Step 2: Select and Target
Your Cold-Calling List
Once you’ve defined your target audience, the next step is to create a targeted list of contact and demographic information for your potential customers. This list should provide you with their phone number, job title, and any useful information about the company and where they work.
As I mentioned in Chapter 11, for cold calling, you need to buy a contact list. You don’t have the option to rent one. The reason is simple: With cold calling, there’s no way for a list owner to enforce the “one-time-only” use agreement that you normally agree to when renting a mailing list for e-mail or direct mail marketing. Once you have a list of phone numbers, technically you can call the people on that list as many times as you wish. In fact, you may have to call a contact more than once, especially if you get the contact’s voice-mail on the first call. List owners know this, so with cold calling, they only offer lists for purchase, not for rent.
To buy a list, you should contact a list owner that specializes in creating contact lists for cold calling. These companies will build a list for you based on the information you provide about your target demographics. See Chapter 11 for information on how to pick a reliable list owner.
IMPROVING YOUR LIST
Once you have purchased an initial list, your goal should be to improve it before you start making calls. Even if you buy a list from a reliable list owner, you still need to research the names on it and verify the accuracy of the contact information. Even the best contact list will often have some dud names and other inaccuracies. (I’ll talk about how to handle these shortly.) Also, although a contact list will give you the names and phone numbers of people in your target demographic, it won’t give you much more information. You will still need to do research to find additional data about the people you are calling.
You want to make your contact list as accurate and as far-reaching as possible. By researching your contact names, you can expand the list to include additional people at your target companies who might have a need for your products or services. You can also cut names from the list if you think certain people might not be the right ones to contact (e.g., the person has moved on to another position, left the company, etc.). But you want to find out as much context as you can about the people on your contact list, beyond just their name and phone number.
You can research and improve your contact list in several ways. First, you should decide who will handle the research. You can, of course, do the research yourself if you have the resources. But this type of research is time-consuming, and it may tie up your lead-generation staff if you ask them to handle all the research themselves.
You also have the option to use third-party organizations to verify names and research contacts on a list. A number of offshore companies in India will do this research for you, for pennies on the dollar. Or you can use online crowd-sourcing tools such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (available from Amazon Web Services) to outsource this research to hundreds of part-time individuals. If you can reduce the number of dud names on your contact list by 20%, then it’s certainly worth spending a little money to have someone research and verify your contacts for you.
USING LINKEDIN
Whether you improve your contact list yourself or assign the research to a third-party company, it will help you to know some tools that you can use for this type of research. Even if you let an outside company handle the verifying of names on your list, it may help your lead-generation team to do a bit of personal research on the contacts before they make the calls.
LinkedIn is one of several online business tools that have emerged just within the past few years that allow you to research your potential customers. LinkedIn gives you a full profile of your contact, with information supplied by the contacts themselves. Because your contacts edit their own profiles, LinkedIn offers some of the most accurate, up-to-date information about who is in which position at your target company. (Note: Some LinkedIn users employ privacy settings to block information from appearing on their profiles.)
You can research each contact on LinkedIn to make sure you will be talking to the right person at a target company. You want to make sure your contacts are people who have a need for your products or services, and who have the power to buy from you. Even if a contact on your list is not the right person to call, the chances are that they have a close connection with the right person through their LinkedIn profile.
For example, say you decide that regional sales directors are the best people to talk to about your products or services at a target company. A certain name, John Swanson, is listed on your initial contact list as the regional director of sales for the company’s Northeast region. But when you check John Swanson’s LinkedIn profile, you find out he has moved on to another division of the company.
However, John Swanson is probably still connected on LinkedIn to other regional sales directors at his company. You can find their names (including, probably, the name of the new regional sales director for the Northeast) by looking through John Swanson’s list of LinkedIn connections or by looking in the “People Who Viewed This Profile Also Viewed . . .” section of links on the side of the profile page. You can view the LinkedIn profiles of other regional sales directors at the company, get a sense of their background, and add them to your contact list.
Using LinkedIn, you can also learn about any relationship that you might have with a potential contact. For example, you might notice that you have a shared LinkedIn connection with a certain regional sales director—let’s say, Sarah Kinzer—at the contact company. Maybe Gary Cattell, a sales manager at another company—someone you’ve met at a conference and with whom you have a LinkedIn connection—is also connected to Sarah Kinzer via LinkedIn.
You might ask Gary Cattell to introduce you to Sarah Kinzer through a LinkedIn introduction. This can help you to get a foot in the door with Sarah Kinzer, so that she might be more willing to listen to your pitch about your products or services when you call her. You will often get better responses from contacts when they’ve received a warm introduction to you from a colleague than if you make your own cold introduction.
OTHER ONLINE RESEARCH TOOLS
In addition to LinkedIn, other data-enhanced services are available that will allow you to get more information about a potential client than just their standard demographics. Gist (www.gist.com) is an online service (owned by Blackberry) that provides social customer relationship management (CRM) and contact management. If you subscribe to Gist, you can search for and get regular updates about the social media activities of your business contacts and potential customers.
For example, you can type in the job title of a target customer and their company in the search engine on Gist (e.g., “Chief Marketing Officer—Dell”). You’ll get a profile of that person that might include their blog address, Twitter feed, and any relevant articles they’ve written, or in which they’ve been quoted. Using rich data like this can help you to make a connection with persons when you cold-call them.
On a Gist search report, you might see a news article that says your contact recently accepted an award for helping to make their company more energy efficient. If your company specializes in “green” technology, you can customize your cold call introduction to tell your contact about how your products or services work to help companies increase their energy efficiency. You can make a connection with your contact on the initial call by talking about a subject that you know the person is passionate about.
USING E-MAIL AND OTHER RESEARCH METHODS
Another online research tool that you can use to check the accuracy of your list is Xobni (www.xobni.com), which is now owned by Blackberry. The name Xobni (pronounced zob-nee) is “Inbox” spelled backward. Xobni offers e-mail applications that can be attached to Microsoft Outlook or Gmail, or to the address book of your Blackberry, iPhone, or Android. These applications let you search or navigate e-mail archives to find the e-mail addresses of people on your contact list.
If you have the e-mail addresses of contact names on your list, you can use e-mail to check the accuracy of the list as well. For example, you might send out an e-mail marketing blast to your contacts on the list and discount any names that bounce back. You can also prioritize anyone who opened the e-mail and clicked through as likely interested buyers. Companies such as Eloqua and Marketo offer marketing automation tools to help you automate this process.
Other ways of improving the accuracy of your contact list are very simple. For example, you can go to the website of any company on your list to confirm basic contact information. While you’re at the website, you can search for any context information about a contact name on your list.
CREDITING YOUR LIST
Even with your research to verify the contacts, chances are that a number of dud names will still be on your list. The person you call will have left the company, been fired, moved to another position, etc. A general rule of thumb is, even on a good list that matches your target criteria, one out of every three names will be a dud. If you buy a list with 1,000 names, for example, between 300 and 350 of those names will turn out to be duds. List owners use time-based methods to acquire contact information for people at various companies, so the list you buy may have contact records that are up to a year old.
Fortunately, it’s a standard practice for most list owners to offer a make-good to credit their clients for dud names. As you verify the data on your list or make the calls, keep careful track of bad or inaccurate contact names, and ask the list owner for a refund on those names. (See Chapter 11 for more information about the make-good process.)
You’ll be surprised how variable pricing is for contact lists used for cold calling. Since purchased lists are often less accurate, they are usually less expensive. With contact lists, the value and the risk of the list are usually pre-assessed and factored into the price.