Buyer's Guide: Best Practices for Purchasing Net New Leads

Buyer's Guide: Best Practices for Purchasing Net New Leads

SUMMARY Whether organizations are trying to secure more of an existing market share, penetrate a new segment, or implement an Account-Based Marketing (ABM) strategy, B2B contact data providers offer the intelligence needed to identify, connect and engage ideal buyer personas. Send Potential Vendors Predetermined Criteria of Targeted Contacts The upside is tremendous and offers opportunities to quickly realize ROI. By acquiring a list of targeted net new contacts, marketing can eliminate the guesswork involved with attracting qualified leads to their campaigns. So, where does your buying committee begin? ZoomInfo has produced the following ebook to arm your team with a framework for purchasing net new contacts. From a selection standpoint, the buying process is short and boils down to two pivotal steps: 1. Send Potential Vendors Predetermined Criteria of Targeted Contacts 2. Compare Vendors & Analyze Contacts from the Preview File Compare Vendors & Analyze Contacts from the Preview File

1 Send Potential Vendors Predetermined Criteria of Targeted Contacts BEST PRACTICE: BE SPECIFIC WITH POTENTIAL VENDORS Leading B2B data providers will give potential customers a preview file of contacts that should be relevant only to buyer personas that match the specific criteria that you have requested. Below is a step-by-step guide to developing the framework of your preview file: 1 Your buying committee should explicitly communicate firmographic and demographic information about ideal prospects and accounts. Details may include: Company Revenue, Company Size, Industry, Job Function, Management Level, Job Title, Location 2 Contact data decays at an alarming rate. Therefore, freshness of data should be a priority. Ask vendors to only include contacts that have been validated within the last 12-18 months. 3 B2B contact and company data can be used to run a variety of campaigns. Specify your intent to the vendor to help return the right contacts. request contacts with email addresses. If sales is expected to follow up, then you should only request contacts that have both email addresses and direct dial phone numbers. 4 Your existing marketing database may overlap with the returned contacts. Make sure to avoid purchasing information you already have. Recommended Practice: Email vendors a file of your existing contacts that they can use as a suppression list. This way, they can return only net new contacts. Alternate Practice: If your organization is uncomfortable giving their data to the vendor, your team can run a proxy through your CRM once you have each vendor s file of requested contacts. This will determine the amount of net new leads you re purchasing. For example, if you are planning to run an email campaign with your purchased list, then you should Buyer s Guide: Best Practices for Purchasing Net New Leads 3

2 Compare Vendors & Analyze Contacts from the Preview File After submitting your criteria of requested contacts, you should receive a preview file from the vendor. This file is the final output of contacts that your organization is set to purchase. Even though the contact information will be masked, the sample file should offer critical details about the contact data. Determine if the vendor can provide the right contacts with enough depth of contact information to execute successful campaigns. Buyer s Guide: Best Practices for Purchasing Net New Leads 4

2 Compare Vendors & Analyze Contacts from the Preview File Best Practice: MAKE SURE the vendor has adequate breadth of relevant coverage Vendors typically boast about the size of their database. While sheer volume within a vendor s contact and company coverage is pivotal to your selection, volume of irrelevant contacts is not. Make sure your buying committee tests which vendor offers your business the most relevant contacts. Relevant Contact Comparison Vendor A Vendor B Vendor C Relevant Contacts: Total Contacts: Buyer s Guide: Best Practices for Purchasing Net New Leads 5

2 best practices & actions to consider while assessing the preview file: Compare Vendors & Analyze Contacts from the Preview File 85% If the deliverability rate is anything below 85%, you should question the accuracy of the vendor s database and the information you are purchasing. Mine the results. The file should be structured in a way that enables your team to judge the output and line up the results with your expectations. At the very least, fields should include job titles, company names, locations and industries. Re-Assess Comprehensiveness. Ask vendors to only include contacts that have been validated within the last 12-18 months. Self-Select a Test Sample of Contacts. If you re satisfied with the preview file, you should ask to sample a portion of contacts. Providers should be willing to part ways with a few freebies in order to establish proof of concept and more importantly, trust. In order to stage a fair test, it s important that your buying committee DOES NOT let a vendor select the rows of contacts your team is sampling. Self-selecting the contacts will allow you to properly gauge quality. Have marketing execute test email campaigns and let your sales team try their hand on the phones. For a marketing email test, there are several variables that can impact an email campaign. The subject line, who the email is from, the call to action, design, and content, all play a role in a campaign s success. Thus, when testing a cold email campaign, you should strictly look at the deliverability rate (did the email reach the contact s inbox?). If the deliverability rate is anything below 85%, you should question the accuracy of the vendor s database and the information you are purchasing. Buyer s Guide: Best Practices for Purchasing Net New Leads 6

CONCLUSION Partner with ZoomInfo to Connect with Your Next Customer. You have the right strategy, we have the right audience. With a database of 140 million professionals and nearly 13 million companies, ZoomInfo has helped customers identify and connect with buyer personas for over a decade. We used other data providers for the first three months of using ZoomInfo so we could compare the accuracy of the data, and ZoomInfo was by far the best. ZoomInfo s data is superior to the competition and is accurate 90% of the time. Chris Flores Inside Sales Manager, Namely With ZoomInfo, I have been able to pinpoint a handful of contacts to meet very specific criteria with much success, and also was able to add 1000s of valuable leads to my organization s database. Jeremy Poore Director of Business Development, Connect First

Accelerate your growth with ZoomInfo. Visit www.zoominfo.com or call 866-904-9666 to find out how.