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.

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.

This is a true story behind whoiswhere and the journey Assia has been on personally and professionally.  And it all started last century.

“I immigrated from Russia to NZ with my husband and three children in 1996. After working at IBM for 5 years, we decided to start our own communications company. Our goal was to help businesses with branding, and marketing their products and services. And we did this successfully for a few years.

Then one day a client of ours needed to send a direct mail campaign to companies with 20+ staff in the Wellington CBD. So off we went to the leading supplier of business data at the time asking for a list of businesses with 20+ staff in Wellington CBD. First, they said the minimum purchase is 1,000 records, which I thought was a good start for our client. Then they said 1,000 records with 20+ staff would cover the entire Lower North Island, from Wellington all the way up to Taupo.

Oh?!! And it also included every branch which had 20+staff in it. I was shocked.

Since there was no other option, we took this list of 1,000 and after removing companies outside of Wellington region we were left with only 500 prospects to work with. I thought it was better to have something than nothing, and if they’re the leaders in this field they must know what they’re doing. What a mistake that was!

Later that year I discovered Kompass and bought it for the same client. I did this thinking it would be a perfect fit since they cover companies with 20+ staff and have a whopping 15,000 records in their database (which seemed like a huge jump from the 1,000 in the entire Lower North Island)!

This victory was short-lived however, as I discovered there were only 400 in Wellington. What was really strange though is that only 100 of the businesses I had already purchased were found in Kompass. So in actual fact there were a total of 900 businesses in Wellington with 20+ staff, and yet both of these companies had around 50% of the market.

This was really frustrating and disappointing for me. Because if neither of these companies had proper data, where am I meant to get it?! I went through a number of options trying to find a solution to my problem:

·        NZ Post and Yellow pages were not able to segment by number of staff

·        Google search was hugely time consuming (and at the time not very effective)

·        Chamber of Commerce only has a list of members, which represents some unclear part of the business community, because not every large business was a member by default as it had been in the past

·        Other business list suppliers either didn’t covering all industries or only concentrated on Auckland data

So that’s how in 2005 I made the decision to throw my hat into the ring and start my own business data company.

We decided we would do things differently to everyone else:

·        we would cover the entire market,

·        we would grow to every regional centre and beyond over time

·        we would start by walking down every street and writing down ‘who is where’

·        we would verify data on the phone three times a year

·        we will use the power of internet research to get more information

·        and we will create new innovative campaigns to further sharpen target market selection where necessary

So that’s exactly what we did and that’s why our business data is called whoiswhere. Because it is, quite simply, who is where.

If you ask me again where do we get our data? My answer is, off the street. That is why we specialise in businesses based in commercial premises with a small exception of tradesmen and consultants who traditionally work from home. Yes, in doing so we do not have all NZ companies, but we sure have the bulk of those who are actively participating in the market place.

Since 2005 we grew and grew and now have over 200,000 businesses in whoiswhere. There were heaps of lessons learned along the way and I might share some of them one day. The two most important lessons are:

Lesson #1. Data is changing all the time and the next minute after it has been verified, there is a huge change. And it will change again! So, the only salvation really is to establish a robust process for data verification and stick to it.

Lesson #2. No amount of technology can fully accomplish data gathering and data verification as well as a human can. That’s why 12 years later we still walk the streets, make phone calls and use the internet as a source of data.

We also take a great deal of care to keep our list updated, up to every 45 days for larger businesses that change more often.

Now you might think – where the heck does Kompass come into all of this??

Well at the start of 2017 we were fortunate enough to be selected as the new data supplier and distributor for Kompass International in both New Zealand and Australia. Kompass International, with headquarters in Paris, spent 2016 reviewing every data supplier across the board and had chosen to change them where the quality or quantity of data was sub-par. Kompass chose whoiswhere out of all the business data companies in NZ to work with as they recognised our data as the best on the market.

We delivered the first batch of data into Kompass mid-2017, another delivery was made in September and now there is a tiny slice left to go which will be uploaded by the end of this year. As it stands, Kompass NZ has 27,000 of NZ businesses mostly with 9+ staff uploaded. We are currently working on the final 3,000 companies for NZ and our first delivery of Australian data will be in November 2017.

Reviewing our numbers against Statistics NZ we now know that it represents 74.9% of all NZ companies 9+ staff.

In 2018 we will keep all of NZ Kompass data up to date, and grow our Australian database up to 30,000-40,000 businesses.”

Street walking and calling on businesses is not for the faint hearted. Yet it has proven to be an excellent learning possibility for many. Over the years we have had many people working with us as a stepping stone to returning back to employment or as a lifestyle choice, because most of our team is working from the comfort of their NZ home. Engaging overseas callers has proven unfavourable by NZ businesses, so we only use mature NZ voices.

Unlike many data companies, we are a marketing implementation company. That is why our view and understanding of data is very different from many. I will be delighted to talk to you when you have a challenge making sense of your B2B target market, struggle with your own old list or even if you are just starting in business and need a bit of guidance. Just get in touch or ask questions in the comments below.

Our team knows a lot about NZ businesses and recently we’ve developed a number of solutions based on our observations about the key needs many businesses crave. We are currently in the process of combining all these solutions under one roof.

Watch this space for further news!

Assia Salikhova,

Managing Director, E-ideas Limited

Co-Founder, whoiswhere™

The post Why whoiswhere? appeared first on whoiswhere.

Question 1: Where does your data come from?

Any quality data provider should be able to easily tell you where they get their data from. Answers may vary but a good provider has proactively collected the data specifically for the database. By doing this the provider is able to give some guarantee of the completeness and quality of their data. Since having a legitimate data source is the foundation for a quality database, this is a key question to ask.

For example, the data we use in our whoiswhere database has originally been collected, quite literally, by walking down the street and writing down who is where. Now as you can imagine, walking the streets is a pain in the neck. But it does mean have confidence in our data source.

Answers that don’t inspire confidence are: we’ve taken it from a public directory, because sadly those are not maintained very well. Worst of all you don’t want some nonsense response that doesn’t clearly answer your question!

So the next time you want business data to embrace a new target market, reach everyone in a particular industry or simply want to clean your data – discover where their data is coming from and make sure you work with experts in the field.

Question 2: How often is it updated?

The responses vary from daily to annually. The reality is daily updates do not mean up-to-date data, unless data verification is carried out on a continuous basis. Even then, claiming daily changes is somewhat misleading because all the information is never checked daily. See more about this in the next question.

So what about an annual or bi-annual check? This is simply not enough. The rate of change is such that even three times a year data verification adopted by us, is not sufficient for certain pockets of the market. In some cases verification on the phone every 45 days is necessary.

Question 3: How accurate is your data?

Many boast about up-to-date data, but rarely do they disclose what steps they take to achieve it. Lets face it, when you deal with hundreds of thousands of records it’s truly impossible to keep them all 100% up-to-date on a daily basis. Simply because companies may close literally overnight, people leave business, or even die, businesses move unexpectedly or at short notice.

So even when someone on our team checks company details on the phone, 5 minutes after the phone conversation, a major change in company details may occur, and it will take sometimes months before this change will get on to the website or will become public knowledge.

Of course you might believe in the power of the internet and the possibility of on-going crawling through websites to check and update information. There are three main reasons why this approach is only half-helpful. These three reasons are not widely known, even though they are somewhat obvious:

1. In New Zealand, for example, at least 35% companies do not have a website – nothing to crawl!
2. Website information does not get updated on a regular basis. In fact our phone research shows that 37% of company information we can find online turns out to be incorrect.
3. Vital company contact details and names of owners/executives are not readily available. This includes companies with no contact details except a standard contact us form, companies that are not registered and have no names of owners on their website. The number of these is on the rise and according to our conservative estimate over 60% of websites do not have names of owners or any contact details at all.

Discover at what length we are going to ensure accuracy of data – as far as we know very few companies take data maintenance this seriously.

When you find a company which owns their B2B data, is able to explain how data is collected and maintained, and update it all on a regular basis – be rest assured you are on to a winner – that’s the company to work with.

The post How to Choose a Good B2B Data Provider appeared first on whoiswhere.