We’re coming to the end of a tumultuous 2020. If you’ve managed to survive it then now is a good time to start planning your marketing for the final months of the year and 2021. It’s now more important than ever before to be in front of your prospects and clients with the right messaging. However if you haven’t cleaned your marketing list (aka your contacts list) for a while you are going to have trouble getting in front of them. Therefore you will waste your time and/or your marketing budget because of the following 5 reasons:
- Inaccurate targeting & segmentation
You cannot sell something to someone who has no need for your products and services. It’s as simple as that. Managing to ‘push’ a sale over the line is an antiquated way to approach sales. Most people these days don’t like this style of sales and it’s easier than ever to just ignore your email or phone call.
With proper targeting and segmentation of your marketing list, you’ll be able to laser-target offers that are super specific to the exact people you communicate with. It’s much easier to sell if your offer matches the needs of your prospect.
If you don’t want to go in-depth into segmentation, then at the very least you should have a list of companies that are definitely within your target market. This way your marketing messages will be heard by people who actually will need your products. They will be more likely to listen to whatever you have to say, and become a customer. - Demotivating your sales team
Sales people have short patience for things that don’t work. One thing they really hate is having a list which is full of disconnected numbers, closed businesses, and businesses that aren’t appropriate to what they can offer.
Your team will see this as a waste of their time. They’ll likely use it to start off with but over time it’s use will fade and they will turn to other sources of data. The reason you don’t want this happening is that your sales team is full of skilled individuals able to sell. You don’t want them spending time on manual data search and entry when you can avoid this as a relatively low cost.
Or they may begrudgingly use the marketing list provided, but they will become highly unmotivated in the process and likely to find any excuse under the sun to do anything else they can. - Potential waste by medium
If you end up doing a direct mail campaign, or calling campaign, you will waste your resources if you have a marketing list that is a few years old. Companies move, change numbers, and close, every single day. Can you imagine what kind of changes would have occurred since the last time your list was cleaned?
Count up how much it costs you to send one letter, or to do one phone call. Include everything – the meetings with your team to decide what to say and offer, the cost to design everything, the cost to print, the cost to create an automated follow up sequence, the time spent on all of this. Then divide this by the number of companies in your list.
Imagine if 10% of your list is outdated, how much money did you just waste? What if it’s 20%? Or worse 40%.
Every change that stops you from reaching the company will mean the marketing dollars you spend on them are wasted. 5-10% is considered an industry standard of what is likely to be outdated at any given point in time. For lists that aren’t maintained, this is likely even higher. - A negative impact on future sales
As your list ages, the effectiveness of it reduces. As mentioned previously, companies close, move, change owners etc. Over time what happens is your list has more and more of these companies that aren’t active or can no longer be reached.
This in turn means each time you use your list for any kind of marketing, not only will you waste a good % of the budget, the results will be lower and lower. So if you feel that your list isn’t getting the types of results it used to – this could be a very good explanation of what is happening. - Conflict within your sales teams
Sales people need quality leads to work on. When a business fails to deliver quality leads, sales performance drops pretty fast. If you give your sales people poor quality leads, they will often just stop using the leads given to them completely.
If your sales people are good, they will end up researching each business online before approaching them. To make sure they’re still in business, and also to try to gleam some kind of insight from their website. This is a total waste of their time as you can quite easily purchase a list that is current, up to date, and within the range of your target market.
In a worst-case scenario, a poor list can be a perfect excuse for sales to stop selling. They have a perfect scape goat – the list! In the very worst cases a bad list can end up spoiling perfectly good performing sales teams by changing their behaviour and introducing a toxic sales culture that becomes very difficult to fix.
Where do we come in? whoiswhere business data
We are specialists in using and supplying data for marketing. Since 2007 we’ve been working on collecting and updating data about businesses in NZ. Today we offer access to data about 200,000+ businesses nationwide, and through our association with Kompass International to another 38,000,000+ businesses worldwide.
Most important to our success is our data collection process, we are a quality data provider and this means we follow very strict rules in our processes. This ensures you are using the very best quality data which in turn provides you with better long-term sales results for your business.
If you’re ready to stop wasting your sales and marketing resources using an old list, get in touch with us today and we can breathe new life into your list.
For more information on how we can help you refresh your data, please contact us 04 977 7877 or artem@whoiswhere.co.nz
