What is whoiswhere™?
Where Does whoiswhere™ B2B Data Come From?
If you believe that a business list can be solely originated from LinkedIn, I challenge you to rethink this assumption.
I bet you have been in touch with a new breed of young digital marketers who provide a service of searching LinkedIn and collecting details about people in your target market. Then offer you this b2b contact list as a list of sales leads.
While there is nothing wrong with this approach of building a list of your target market using one source, there is a sound reason why it’s not a solution for me, and possibly you, because:
- Not every executive, every business owner, or every other significant market player has a LinkedIn profile. If you think people without a profile are an insignificant minority, in NZ and Australia we found that 40-50% of senior executives do not have a profile at all.
- On top of this, many top execs and business owners of any size of business are too busy running their everyday life and business. So, they rarely visit LinkedIn, and often don’t update their profile when they are in between jobs. Sometimes for months or even years.
Of course, there are hundreds of people who keep their profiles up-to-date and are easy to connect with. Sadly, for B2B companies there often aren’t enough of these active profiles in their target market, especially in New Zealand where a lot of people are still getting accustomed to the use of LinkedIn.
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.
In this report, you will discover the pros and cons of different B2B data providers in New Zealand and the merits of investing in a database on oppose to the organic growth of your list. In the end, it will empower you to choose the best B2B data supplier for your needs.
This research is provided by whoiswhere™, New Zealand’s largest verified business database since 2005.
What is whoiswhere™?
whoiswhere™ is New Zealand’s leading B2B database with over 200,000 business locations nationwide. Every day we call 100s of businesses to meticulously check their information so you can focus on sales prospecting instead of worrying about who to contact.
Imagine having access to high-quality information about businesses based on commercial premises. You can use B2B data for research, sales and direct marketing purposes. It doesn’t matter if you have a product or service, as long as the end user is businesses.
whoiswhere™ offers the most verified B2B data set in NZ because our data is phone verified every 121 days. It allows you to understand your target market, save time searching for prospects and grow your business through effective Lead Generation. If you want to grow your B2B sales – just ask, because we have the experience and expertise to help right now.
Did you know that the companies in whoiswhere™ NZ represent 74% of businesses with more than 8 staff members nationwide, and 89% of companies’ 100+ staff?
That makes us the largest business list in New Zealand with companies’ 100+ staff.
Doing business with these larger companies is a real game changer for sales and marketing professionals like yourself.
Companies just like yours are already using whoiswhere™ to:
- Identify the size of their target market
- Increase the productivity of their sales teams by having access to accurate B2B data about their target market, with names of up to 5 key decision-makers
- Easily segment and identify their target market
- Contact the right people
Where Does whoiswhere™ NZ B2B Data Come From?
Do you know how many sales professionals today are walking the streets to pick up who is where and then come back to the office to research?
Well. I do hope these days there are fewer and fewer of them BUT for decades this was a top way to get contact data – “walk down the street” or “drive around”.
Personally, I think this is a low productivity task not worth of time of your well-paid sales professionals.
Is there an alternative?
The alternative seems pretty obvious – get someone else to gather and verify contact data and buy their list.
Back in 2005, 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 a reputable supplier of B2B 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 starter B2B contact database 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. Needless to say, I was shocked.
Since there was no other option, we took the list of 1,000. After removing companies outside of the 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!
The whole experience was really frustrating and disappointing for me. Because even though we purchased more data for b2b marketing, none of these lists had accurate data.
I went through a number of options trying to find B2B marketing data :
- 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 a somewhat random section of the business community, because membership was not widely ingrained in the business community
- Other contact information suppliers either didn’t cover 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 our own in-house business dataset.
I decided that we can create an operation where someone would walk the streets, but just once. Then someone would research and make calls, just once to these businesses. So that many sales professionals could reap the rewards of these activities.
We decided we would do things differently from everyone else:
- we would cover the entire market
- we would cover every regional centre and small towns
- 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 would collect a wide range of company data
- we will use the power of internet research to get more information
- 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.
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 on 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 marketplace.
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 17 years later we still walk the streets (not lately though for obvious reasons, but we will resume), make phone calls and use the internet as a source of data.
Talking about the internet, we know there is a growing number of people who do data collection online. Good luck, because the outcome of scraped data has three major faults:
- According to our research up to 40% of New Zealand businesses (excluding start-ups and home-based businesses) do NOT have a website, i.e. their online presence is ZERO, so no one can scrape any data about them
- Online B2B data accuracy is largely dependent on the company/human to update and record and format it correctly – the quality of this information is questionable in 37% of cases (our research confirms that)
- Data formatting is a mission because there is no one standard for data recording
We continuously review our numbers against Statistics NZ and we learned to understand that when it comes to larger enterprises, we have the largest list compared to any other B2B data provider in NZ.
If you know of someone who has more verified B2B data, let me know.
Because yes, from time to time we get to work with B2B data from some of the world’s leading suppliers who claim they have a lot more top NZ companies. Guess what, we feel anyone claiming to provide more large companies than Stats NZ is reporting must be dreaming.
Would you agree?
That is why we often quiz people if they know how many companies’ 100+ staff there is in NZ.
Because it’s a little-known fact that there are just a bit over 2,500 companies with 100+ staff in NZ and after 200 we are going to see this figure drop by at least 10% according to our research.
Oops!
What is an unexpected piece of bad news for you is that there are only 2,500 or fewer companies with 100+ staff. It is what it is, the NZ market is small in numbers and we all have to live with it.
Sales and business are all about numbers. And we are passionate about knowing more about the numbers and how they define the NZ market.
Back to The Story
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 homes. Engaging overseas callers has proven unfavourable by NZ businesses, so we only use mature NZ voices.
Of course, working from home became commonplace in 2020, but we’ve been doing this since 2005 and I believe this set-up positively contributed to many happy moments our people spent with their families instead of being stuck in some traffic.
Unlike many data companies, we at E-ideas Limited are a marketing and sales implementation company.
And in 2020 we launched a new service offering Smarketing to tie together our data and market knowledge with practical actions needed in today’s market to for B2B success.
That is why our view and understanding of data are very different from most.
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 over time we’ve developed many robust solutions based on our observations about the key needs many businesses crave.
Are you ready to learn how to set your B2B operation up for greater success and growth? We can definitely help you to create your own B2B blueprint for success.
To enjoy a better tomorrow and be amongst our clients, some of which experienced the best year in business in 2021, some grew up to 90% and some had their best month in 2021.
👉Discover what 1% of successful B2B companies do differently and so can you.
It’s absolutely free and will show how to save thousands of hours and dollars to grow your B2B company.
