When You’re Hungry for Sales, Consider These Lead-Gen Tools

When people ask how successful b to b telemarketing can be I always say the program is only as good as your list.  When implementing a lead generation program it’s important to know who are your best prospects.  If your selling shoes and your list is full of shoe manufacturers the success of your telemarketing campaign will probably be nil. This article discusses options for getting developing a marketing list.

When it comes to generating sales leads, you can make a habit of some best practices. You can exchange business cards at networking events, speak at professional meetings, and keep a 30-second elevator pitch handy at all times. You can use LinkedIn to answer questions, search for decision-makers in target companies, and join discussions in your customers’ groups. You can listen and respond to people on Twitter and Facebook, and prospect from contacts sent through your main website, particularly those arriving through keyword-targeted Google AdWords. If you’re gentle about it, you can even ask your best customers for referrals — always wishing you could clone them.

But how do you scale all this up — reach more people in that sliver of time you have for prospecting? Whether you’re launching a new product or service or doing spring cleaning, you have to assume that the contact list you lovingly tend is inevitably full of holes.

Naturally enough, there’s an industry that focuses on sales-lead generation so you don’t have to. Most of these services let you segment and sort millions of contacts, online, revealing the most vital details (name, email, phone) once you purchase the list or sign in with an annual subscription.

Using a mix of advanced online searching and old-fashioned elbow grease, sales-lead generators gather, cross-reference, clean, and deliver email, phone, and postal data, often matched with business intelligence, such as employee-growth rate, initial public offering history, office square footage, and salary information. Besides selecting targets by number of employees and industry, you often can aim within a radius of ZIP codes you designate.

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/219680