What To Do When You Can't Find That Perfect Prospecting List

Imagine you’re implementing a B2B prospecting campaign. You know your target decision maker is employed in virtually all companies, but you simply cannot find a list of names with your prospect’s title. Believe it or not, this happens more often than not.

So, what do you do? Do you buy a list of CEO’s, owners, and presidents?

Or, do you incur the time and expense of calling each company to find the right person in charge of your product or service?

A Case Study: Let’s take a real example of a program we at VSA implemented for a “security-type” service. Our client wanted introductions to decision makers at specific companies, but the names and titles for these decision makers were not available on a ready-to- purchase list. And, when we researched further, each company housed the decision maker in a different department: the security department, IT, operations, or the manufacturing plants, and so on. So, we couldn’t even purchase a list of heads of IT, for example.

We decided to implement a phone and mail campaign over the course of a year, targeting multiple people at multiple levels within each company. We wanted the CEO and other C-level executives to learn our client’s name and service offering. We also wanted to reach the manager-level individuals because they were close to the decision making process for our client’s service. After our initial set of mailings, we made follow-up phone calls to the recipients. Any time we learned of a “better contact” we included these individuals in future mailings, so our list became increasingly focused.

This dual-pronged approach – mailing/phoning
the C-level executives AND manager-level decision-makers – proved effective.

• The best people to target from a selling perspective were the manager-level individuals in immediate need of our client’s service.
  
• However, since our client had little existing name recognition and was entering a high-profile market where C-level executives needed to approve the purchase, targeting the C-level executives turned out to effective from a marketing perspective.

• If you need to target a specific individual and there is no ready-to-purchase list, you’ll probably need to invest the time and potentially money to call each company in order to identify the decision maker’s name and title. This will enable you to target the RIGHT person for selling purposes, the FIRST time.
  
• Reaching others in the firm, especially C-level executives, to gain a general awareness for your firm is effective in creating brand recognition and expanding your firm’s visibility.
  
• By targeting both high-level executives and lower-level decision makers, you can implement a combined marketing & sales program that makes prospecting particularly powerful.

VSA, Inc. 441 Station Avenue, Haddonfield, NJ  08033  856-547-3500             www.VSAProspecting.com                           info@VSAProspecting.com