Your marketing managers and sales directors likely buy sales and marketing lists. They may be doing it by generating lists in tools like ZoomInfo or 6th Sense, or they may be purchasing them from vendors or even in the gig economy. Lists are a primary tool in every sales and marketing team’s tool kit. In fact, they are a vital one.
The quality of the prospects in your CRM is only as good as the prospects you have therein. This is where things can go sideways due to lists.
Most often, we see three issues that pull down the overall value of the prospects in a CRM. When it comes to lists loaded onto your CRM, these are:
- Lists for mass email marketing.
- Nothing is done with the lists.
- Prospects are not good enough quality to be there.
In any case, it’s important to remember that revenue reflects the quality of the prospects and data in your CRM.
If you’re selling business-to-business with the idea of blasting emails to new companies, this will yield very little in terms of results. We sometimes see companies that have 5-10 person sales teams buying lists with 1000s of leads in them every month.
Why? One salesperson dedicated to outbound calls with a 3-touch point sales cadence will be busy with 10-20 new prospects added to the CRM daily for them to target. That is 250-500 prospects per month per salesperson.
You don’t need to buy lists with thousands of prospects each month. You need to buy high-quality lists from which your salespeople can sell.
What is the most important word in the previous sentence? Quality. This may very well be where you have gone wrong with lists in the past.
When it comes to lists, it’s important to remember:
- Insights and intent data are never the most current.
- Lists that marketing generates and keeps for a month only to then pass down to sales won’t be the most current.
- Lists from insights tools often have a high percentage of scraped emails in the mix that can lead to other problems, like your domain being labeled as spam.
- An immense amount of time is wasted when following up bunk prospects.
Inaccuracies in data can also mean your salespeople are following up with companies that may not even be a prime target for your service (size/budget).
The more current the data, the better. Why buy 1000s of prospects that, as each day passes, degrade in value and that your sales team has no way to follow up with anyway? Instead, you should consider:
- The best thing to do is spend more and buy higher quality lists with fewer prospects in them.
- Having an aggressive cadence for the follow-up of those prospects.
- Auxiliary efforts to increase list conversions while also reaching out directly via LinkedIn.
Time wasted following up difficult and/or unqualified prospects, let alone prospects who aren’t at the budget level for where you want to be, is a great way to reduce your overall revenue and MRR if you live in an MRR-based world. This is one way to ensure an overall quality level in terms of the prospects in your CRM and have tighter controls over your sales team’s process.
For more information on buying sales lists or sales enablement, visit www.gopulsion.io