How should you source your leads for your outbound sales campaign? I see a lot of people getting this wrong—they take the most obvious, easiest and least intelligent way, and it hurts their business.
There are several providers that will sell you lists of names, emails, titles and other contact information and business data:
- Hoovers.com
- Data.com (formerly Jigsaw)
- Avention.com/ (formerly OneSource)
- Zoominfo.com
- Netprospex.com
- Infousa.com
- etc.
Highest quantity/lowest quality: Buying lists
If you buy from these providers, you should expect that a certain percentage of that data will be outdated. (It’s been a couple of years since I last use any of these companies, but back then about 30%–40% of the data I bought was outdated).
Consider this will cost you twice: once the money you spend acquiring the bad data, and then the money (time/resources) you invest in reaching out to those unqualified leads.
High quantity/low quality: Web scraping
An alternative to buying lists is to make your own list by scraping websites, which means you extract contact data from a website with a little program/script.
It’s a bit of a gray area, and you should check if the website you want to scrape allows that.
If you target a very specific niche and there are highly targeted websites, this can be a successful approach.
You’ll have to ask a ton of questions and then filter out those that they have in common and that are most relevant.
Based on that you’ll then create a very specific customer profile.
And then you go and find another 5 to 20 businesses that have the same core DNA (sometimes you can start with their closest competitors. 😉
You don’t need thousands of shitty names. You just need a handful of really great ones. [Tweet this!]
Reach out to those and strive to create high-quality sales conversations. Try to maximize response and conversion rates. Gain deep market insights that you can then leverage to make more sales and close better deals.
Find out what works best for you
You can probably tell from my answer that I personally prefer the highest quality, lowest quantity approach. But I encourage you to experiment for yourself. In some industries, for some businesses, the “spammy” high quantity/low quality approach works best.
