When you are operating B2B sales team, you have to reach out to as many in your target market as possible. Often the market is quite small. It could be as little as 300 companies, 700 companies or just 1,000.

 

What do you think? I believe you can’t afford to miss 40% of businesses that could be perfect clients simply because they did not register on LinkedIn. Do you agree?

 

So where can you go for a list of quality b2b contact details?

 

You can go ahead and read all about the key New Zealand B2B data players in this complimentary report.

The post What is whoiswhere? appeared first on whoiswhere.

1. 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.
   
   
2. 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.
   
   
3. 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.
   
   
4. 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.
   
   
5. 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

The post 5 Reasons Why Now is the Right Time to Refresh Your Sales and Marketing List appeared first on whoiswhere.

Before getting a new list, it’s a great idea to understand what you already have by doing a data analysis. Because if you’ve been in business for more than five minutes you probably have a list. Some list, maybe a list of your customers, maybe a pile of business cards from networking events. Whatever the case is, you have something at hand.

Data Analysis is a process which helps you to get an understanding of who your customers are and recognise your market share, so you can make better decisions for the future.

What exactly does your list represent?

Let’s face it – your current list might be a bit eclectic, especially after you’ve been in business for a few years, or maybe a few decades.

And if you don’t know anything about this list other than the fact that it’s come from various sources, it’s not very helpful. You might not even have customers separated from prospects for example.

What if you could know the size, the industry and the type of clients buying from you most? Having this understanding of your clients will make a difference for your next outbound activities.

Why does size matter?

When in business, you either offer something that can be used by almost anyone, like computers, stationery, cleaning services or products, accounting services etc.

Or you could be offering something highly specialised like baking equipment or CNC machines.

While for the latter it’s pretty obvious your market is limited by the potential users, like only bakeries for baking equipment and engineering manufacturers for CNC machines, even in the mass market there may be companies in a particular industry or of a particular size that are more likely to become your customers based on the quality of your product, pricing, location and other factors.

Becoming inquisitive and curious about who your current contacts/customers are will help you to find more prospects which are like your current customers. The results might surprise you.

For example you might discover that your mass market product is mostly bought by slightly larger companies and you are missing smaller businesses (could be an indication of perception you only sell to large businesses).

Or you could discover that baking equipment is also purchased by colleges and tertiary educators for training purposes.

What else can you do?

So after your data analysis is completed, this is where the fun begins because now you can actually map and compare your “kingdom” with the “universe” of all businesses within your reach. It might be locally or nationwide or maybe even globally – depends on what your business goals are.

Bottom line: when you know what you own and who you are in touch with, you can compare your list with everyone else who fits the same criteria (location, industries, number of staff).

The ultimate benefit of this comparison is to gain an understanding of your market potential.

Imagine if you are servicing 10% of the market – you can aim to double, can’t you?

What if you are servicing 57% of the market – there is some room for growth but not much, and you definitely cannot double this market, right?

Being able to compare your list with the market list (which whoiswhere can offer), you can develop a much better sales and marketing strategy. Being armed with facts and figures your growth strategy becomes more realistic, hence, more achievable.

Get in touch with us on enquiries@whoiswhere.co.nz or 04 977 7877 if you’d like a hand analysing you list.

The post Why it’s Important to Analyse Your Data appeared first on whoiswhere.

These are the people or businesses you have chosen to target, because

• your product or service is designed for them

• you know your products and services will provide value to their business

Even when you have a product or service that has wide appeal, you will still benefit from creating a persona of your best clients.

Here is an example of good find if you supply stationary, because then you can figure our that an office-based company uses more paper and pens than a manufacturing business.

Another example is if you are in importer, you can decide to bring products that are created for a particular industry.

This is how simple really it is to find out who will be a better target.

It is very important to take time in defining and refining your target market.

Because the more accurately you can define your target audience/market, the less money you’ll spend marketing to unsuitable companies, and therefore the better your results will be.

The post Successful B2B Marketing Starts From Understanding Your Target Market appeared first on whoiswhere.

When you first start your business there are a number of decisions you have to make. The first of course is what the business will sell in terms of products and services. Second is who you’ll sell your products and services to. A lot of companies get this step wrong, and go on to create businesses which don’t have a market. Or perhaps they do have a market, but it’s positioned incorrectly. In either case, this is a fundamental step in any businesses journey and is called identifying your target market or market sizing.

From our perspective, we are masters in sizing a market. Why? Because each time we provide a list of businesses, the conversation starts with “Who are you trying to target?”. So, after over a decade of helping businesses answer this question, we think we’re pretty good at it. To the point where we can often suggest markets that you may not have considered.

Over the years we’ve noticed that when we ask this question, businesses tend to answer it in the same manner. And that’s to say, barring a few exceptions, they don’t really know who their target market is. There’s nothing wrong with this; nothing to be ashamed of. Usually a business was started a good number of years prior and any memory of any target market is long forgotten.

Having said that, knowing who your target market is, and how many of them there are, is kind of a crucial part of running a business! If you don’t know your target market you will never be in control of your business. This is because you’ll always be at the mercy of the market to find your business.

The reality of modern business is that you can’t allow the market to find you. Most markets are crowded. And if you’re doing something new, then most people won’t think to look for you in the first place. A much better way of doing business, is having a way to find your market yourself. And the simplest way of doing this, is a good old-fashioned list of your target market. Commonly called a list of prospects. This is exactly what we can help you with – we have over 180,000 businesses nationwide and as mentioned above, consider ourselves pretty good at sizing a market.

Now that I’ve plugged our services, let’s get into how you can easily size your market!

If you’ve ever sized a consumer market, I’m going to have to ask you to leave all of that at this paragraph. I’m afraid when it comes to sizing a business market you won’t have the luxury consumer markets offer. Business spending data simply isn’t captured well enough to use demographics data. In addition, it probably wouldn’t be particularly useful. When you’re sizing a market, it doesn’t really matter what the person in the business likes or dislikes. Right now, all you’re trying to find out is how many companies you can target with your gadget or gizmo.

We like to size the market using three criteria.

1. Location

First is location – pretty self-explanatory really. Depending on your business you might want to target by area, city, suburb, or even street. The great thing is our data allows you to be very granular. Want to target every odd numbered building in Ponsonby? DONE. What about every business on Level 3 in the Auckland CBD? Piece of cake. What I’m trying to say is you can go really granular with our data. On the other hand, you may want to expand your search if you have a very niche product.

• Industry

Second is industry – what does your target market produce and sell? This is probably the hardest section. And the reason it’s difficult is because the ANZSIC industry classification system used in NZ and Australia isn’t always intuitive. For example, would you consider a printing company to be a manufacturer? ANZSIC would. What about a corner Bakery? ANZSIC would.

The other stumbling block is limiting your industries too much. You really need to think of what industries could use my product/service. Even if it’s just a section of the company that would use it. Our team of data experts is well trained in this area and can really add some value.

• Size of the Business

And last is the size of the company. Because in NZ we don’t have any legal reason to report revenue, we usually can’t use revenue as a gauge for company size. Instead we use a proxy of number of staff. Number of staff tends to be a pretty solid indicator of size of the company, as long as you keep in mind the type of industry you’re targeting.

One hot tip we have for size is to really understand that in NZ most companies are small. We classify anything between 5 and 50 employees as a medium sized business. And 50+ is really where the large businesses market starts. As a contrast, a 50-staff strong business in Europe could be considered a small family business. So, when we say NZ is a small market, we really do mean it. There are just over 2,200 businesses with 100+ employees.

And that is how you size a market. Simple enough. So, what is missing?

The number of course! And this is a bit of a sticky point. I should probably apologise. I’ve made you read 907 words as of now only for you to find out that you won’t be able to get a final number. You see businesses aren’t counted very well in NZ. Government agencies do a fairly mediocre job of it. They may have some list but wouldn’t be able to help with the size or industries.

And so, businesses must rely on list providers such as ourselves for their market sizing. The reason we excel at this compared to other companies is we simply have more data than they do. We’re on a never-ending quest to have a full list of businesses in NZ. And even though this is an unachievable goal we persevere!

You’re now armed with all the information required to size the business – if you’d like a hand please don’t hesitate to get in touch. Either myself or another of our data experts will be glad to assist you.

Artem Axenov

Operations Manager

E-ideas Limited

The post Data Basics: Identifying your target market appeared first on whoiswhere.

When someone comes and enquired about a list of companies, we often start off with asking three questions:

1. What location would you like to target?
2. What industries would you like to target?
3. How large are the businesses you would like to target?

Now for this last question, at whoiswhere we use the number of staff as a proxy. The reason for this is because in NZ there isn’t a legal requirement to report revenue as in some other countries. So while we do have financial data for some companies, for the vast majority we’re in the dark.

This is where the number of staff comes in as a shining beacon of hope to gauge the size of a business. The number of staff can be used as a proxy to estimate turnover of a business based on their industry. Reputable data providers in NZ will be recording the number of staff per business specifically for this purpose.

Have more questions about number of staff? Chat to one of our data experts today, call us on 04 977 7877.

The post Data Basics: Why staff # is important appeared first on whoiswhere.

It may come as a shock to you that this often happens, all because the data you have is out of date. We’ve come up with 11 distinct ways that an up-to-date list of your prospects can stretch your marketing dollar further by cutting down on the waste.

1. Save on mailing costs

You’ll save money on mailing costs. Having accurate data means you don’t end up sending mail to businesses that have closed or moved. If your data is properly formatted, you also get the benefit of reduced bulk rates with NZ Post.

2. Save on cost of telemarketing

Have you ever paid for a list that had disconnected phone numbers? These phone numbers are not only a waste of your marketing budget, but they also waste your time dialling them. Verification by phone is a large part of our business, which is why we frequently double check phone numbers. And this is why you can be assured our lists have few, if any, disconnected phone numbers.

3. Save time spent trying to find correct business details

Finding the details of a business online is easy, right? But what about a thousand? Is it the best use of your marketing dollar? We dare you to collect data to the same quality as ours at a lower cost. One of the advantages of buying whoishwhere data is you don’t have to buy the whole record. So if you only need the phone number, that’s all we’ll charge you for. We want to help, so talk to us about your campaign and what you’d like to achieve.

4. Save embarrassment by not calling on people who have left the company

It may seem harmless to ask for someone who has already left the company. But you never know what the circumstances of their departure may have been. It may bring up unpleasant memories and cost you their business. So what is the end result of such a call? At best you have gotten off on the wrong foot, and at worst you’ve wasted the money spent contacting them and buying inaccurate data.

5. Save money with proper targeting

If someone doesn’t want something, you’ll never be able to sell it to them. So why would you even try? whoiswhere has more targeting options than you can shake a stick at! You can define a list to include only those businesses that are in your target market. This is called segmentation of the market, but we can also help with granularity of the segmentation.

For example we worked with a telecommunications company where they wanted records for all the businesses in buildings with existing customers. Their cost to connect up more businesses in an existing business was lower so they naturally preferred to target this way. This type of very tight targeting can bring in extraordinary results when done correctly and our team is very good at just that.

6. Save money by knowing how large your target market is

Often we will add anywhere from 8-43% to a clients’ existing prospects list. This can really be the difference between break-even and profit. The size of whoiswhere is the reason we can confidently say that. The simple fact is no one else in the country has as much data as we do, so no one is able to enrich your list as much as we can. It’s that simple.

7. Save Money on Online Research

Let’s say you’ve already got the business details for a prospect, but they didn’t come with an email or contact name. What can you do? Find the right person online? Good luck trying to do that. Many businesses, and most likely even you, do not list the names and emails of key decision makers. And these days it’s not that easy to get through to the right person just by calling reception.

Especially if you’re trying to sell them something they genuinely may need. Some people act as if their own company isn’t trying to sell things too and just reject any type of sales call.

Fortunately we have a contact name for most businesses, and often quite a few. So if it’s CEO’s or Marketing managers you’re after, we can help. And you can get on doing what you do best, and not wasting time running around looking for a name.

8. Helps you understand your customer base better

Do you sell mostly to 1-5 staff sized businesses? Are the majority of your customers in the CBD? How much do you really know about your customers? Accurate data allows you to know this more. And this knowledge gives you the ability to create powerful advertising.

Niche advertisements isn’t the domain of the big firms anymore. All you need to do is understand the value proposition to your chosen niches and tweak the advertising a little bit. Then with the power of online advertising, you’re rolling with the big boys.

9. Help make better marketing decisions

How can you make better marketing decisions? By being better informed. And what better way to be better informed than to have accurate data on hand? When you make choices based on data, your marketing dollar is more effectively used.

For instance if you’re selling to businesses why would you advertise on the radio? Well this is what one of our clients was considering doing. Instead we created a direct marketing campaign that reached exactly the people he needed to rather than using a scatter gun approach via radio.

10. More sophisticated analysis

Having a vast range of targeting options means you are able to delve deeper into the minds of your customer before, during, and after your campaign. You’ll be able to tell what type of business is engaging with your campaign through every step of it. And if needed adjust to get other businesses on board. Or choose to run another campaign to a different subset.

11. Allows to deliver a more relevant message

Target specific industries with specific offers. Which leads to higher take-up rates and therefore more money in your pocket. But if you don’t have accurate data this is impossible to do. At the very best you will send the wrong messages to people, burning through leads.

We find that data changes at a rapid rate, anywhere from .5-2% per week. Compounded this can be a massive change over a 12 month period. And if you’ve grown your list organically, it’s likely to be missing information, and won’t have the full picture of the market.

In any case, we can help. You can read about how we keep our data accurate and current. And when you’re ready, reach out with your requirements. We’ll be glad to support you with quality data that drives results.

The post 11 Ways Accurate Data Stretches Your Marketing Dollar Further appeared first on whoiswhere.

This may sound like a shock to many, so let me explain, because it’s actually quite a simple idea that you probably practice yourself. Let’s get straight to the point.

Every dollar left in the business and used to purchase equipment, advertising, business/marketing advice, legal help, pay your staff etc, is technically an investment. Isn’t it? So as a business owner you have control over where to invest your money between all the areas which might need extra cash. Balancing which part of the business to invest in is an art and a science in its own right. Your accountant and your board of directors will be able to help with this.

This article is about something more important, which is better illustrated with an example.

Imagine you want to purchase (or rather, invest in) new equipment. You go to the market and review your options, then make a decision based on many factors.

What if you later decide you need two pieces of equipment? After all the hard work you did choosing your last machine, chances are you will get a second one from the same place without being anywhere near as diligent as the first time round.

And that’s understandable, why would you get both pieces of equipment from two different brands? Most of the time it makes no sense. Two different brands, means two different types of equipment, your people have to be trained twice, you have to deal with two lots of support personnel, you also might end up paying more for servicing two machines by two different companies. In one word: extra overheads which are impossible to justify in most cases.

Same goes for computers, software, etc.

What about business advise? Consultancy, coaching, marketing, etc.

It used to be in vogue to have your marketing taken care of by five different companies. You’d have someone for your website, someone for SEO, a third for digital, another for content, and a final one who did your strategy before everyone else came on the scene.

This may sound like you’re getting the best of every individuals skillsets. But the reality is far from this. It’s a case of you can have every piece optimised but the final product fails to deliver results.

If you look at this as diversifying your investment – i.e. choosing to not put all your eggs in one basket, then you will get the following very poor and rather costly results:

• New or existing brand is not applied or not even used on the new shiny website, even the colour scheme could be different
• Website message differs from Adwords, because the keywords analysis was not taken into consideration at all during website creation
• Website content has no correlation to SEO and keywords analysis because the copywriter didn’t consider this
• Sales script is way different from website message and from product description in the brochure
• Ad hoc advertising in calendars or in print is completely different from the brand, website and social media
• And social media paints the business as a completely different entity
• Lastly the marketing strategy, especially when done by an outside consultant, is suggesting something completely different again, which is often ignored and not implemented because it’s been forgotten, was too costly or not important enough to be done.

It’s unlikely that a company would have all of the above going on at once, but it does happen. Often times there are at least a couple of the above in every business.

This is an observation only and a sad one at that because in an attempt to avoid jacks-of-all-trades, businesses end up working with highly specialised professionals who aren’t always able to act holistically with respect to everyone else. Business owners have a choice with how to deal with this:

1. Either stay strong and use one document, a marketing strategy, as the foundation for everything that will get done by other specialists
2. Do business as usual, spread their eggs in many baskets and settle for a varied and sometimes inconsistent representation of their company in different channels
3. Find a generalist with ideas and values aligned with their own, choose to keep all their eggs in one basket for the sake of consistent representation of the company, a consistent message, and well-orchestrated marketing effort. Then reap the rewards which only a consistent message can deliver.

Maybe I’m preaching to the converted, but that’s not what we witness on a daily basis.

We ourselves aren’t perfect at doing this, but we understand the challenge and are working to be better every time we do marketing for ourselves. We are working on a new message about us.

This message will be based on the fact that we are generalists representing holistic, action-oriented marketing fundamentals. Which are handpicked for each company based on their current position. Yes, we cover all of the below and actually more to ensure your company has a consistent voice, consistent representation, and the same tested powerful message.

1. Target
2. Connect
3. Follow Up
4. Support Sale

If you want to learn more, book in a no obligation consult with one of our specialists.

The post Where to Put All Your Eggs into One Basket to Skyrocket Your Business appeared first on whoiswhere.

Creating and nurturing relationships can be a pleasure or a chore. But one thing is certain: growing your business relationships is one of the keys to achieving business success.

1. Keep in touch

This is as basic it gets – relationships become stronger when you stay in touch. Surprisingly, the rapid growth of technology has made the situation worse. Do you recall times when salespeople used to send follow up thank you cards for years after major purchases? Nowadays many don’t even stay in touch via email.

Standing out from the crowd becomes remarkably simple: keep in touch, even if it’s only via a bi-weekly email.

2. Add value

Another text book step not followed often enough. Every business has a lot to share with others. Way too often we forget that things that are simple for us internally could be big news and a real revelation for others, adding value to their business, knowledge, perhaps even changing lives.

So while you’re keeping in touch above, make sure to add value by creating content that shares your insider business knowledge where appropriate.

3. Proactively make new contacts

Having good relationships with your suppliers and customers is great, but this really isn’t enough. Because when you want to grow your business you have to step up and find ways to meet new people and build new relationships, without necessarily for the purpose of making a quick sale.

While there are many ways to meet business people, the two most common ones are networking and a direct approach through mail, phone, email, or social media (LinkedIn). I personally believe in the human touch and a personal introduction on the phone seems to be the most human and respectful way to start a business relationship. Creating a habit of contacting just 5 new business owners a day is all but guaranteed to make your business a success.

This is because sooner or later you’ll connect with someone who needs your service today. And for everyone else – they will know you and your business. If you follow the first step and keep in touch with them, then when the time is right they will remember you and come to you.

Following these three steps will ensure you keep your current list of contacts connected, engage new prospects with valuable content, and create a long-term strategy for adding new relationships to your network.

Every business owner is capable of doing the above three steps, they are simple, straightforward and easy to execute. The only thing stopping you now is time, and if you find yourself short on time – you can buy some of our time to do it for you. If you’re interested, reach out and we can do all of the above and more for you.

The post 3 Basic Steps to Secure and Grow Your Business Relationships appeared first on whoiswhere.

When you’re wanting to run a cold email marketing campaign, it might seem obvious to only want to email to personal emails. The logic is very basic here – a personal email goes to a specific person. However the not so obvious thing is that a lot of smaller businesses don’t have personal emails.

The reality on the market in NZ is that because so many businesses are small and have less than 5 staff, it’s very common for a generic email address to be used by the owner. In many businesses with 5 staff or less, a generic email is used as the main business email. And as the vast majority of companies in NZ have 5 or less staff. So we are faced with a world where role-based emails must be used for marketing purposes.

This isn’t to say that every small company uses a role-based email as the main email. It’s simply pointing out the fact that there is a large percentage where this is the case. And it’s a percentage that is simply too big to discount.

Unfortunately companies like Mailchimp have chosen to take a hard stance against these types of email addresses. Mailchimp will reject any email you try to import if it’s a generic or role-based one, and that gets very frustrating if you have clients who may have been purchasing for years from you using an info@ email. Fortunately not all companies are so short-sighted and there are other email marketing programs which will let you add in generic emails for your campaigns.

So the next time you consider purchasing an email list, reconsider discounting role-based emails. And if you’re not quite sure where to begin – drop us a line or give us a call. We’re in a privileged spot to see what companies are doing and what is working. And we’re happy to share this knowledge with you before you plow money into emails that might not even work for you.

The post Data MythBusters: Role-Based Generic Emails in the New Zealand Market appeared first on whoiswhere.