The official blog of AG Salesworks, Sales Prospecting Perspectives will give readers an insight to the challenges of managing a targeted outbound Sales Prospecting effort and team.
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Sometimes, more frequently for complex technology solutions, the right list simply does not exist. From premiere services, you can hope to reach 60-70% of the titles per company you are searching for, but that leaves a significant void. Even more frustrating, many of our clients solve advanced problems whose ownership could cross any or all of several business units. Having a few correct names in one unit may be a complete waste if the ownership, if the problem resides elsewhere.
Everything that we covered over the last week really can have an significant impact on your progress toward pulling together your ideal list. Unfortunately, manual input will always be necessary in order to obtain a sales prospecting list with true value. Any data you've purchased is a "jumping off point" until you have validated the contact. Additionally, there will always be missing data points. No list will be as granular as you will like. Thus, another manual research step is necessary. Free resources through Wikipedia help to segment data by student population in Education, bed count in Healthcare, and employee count in the enterprises. For example enter "List of schools districts in the United States" in Wikipedia's search and it will give you a listing of schools by state.
The single most important step in building a targeted sales prospecting list is validating the information. The only way to be sure your list contains value is by having a real person physically pick up a phone to verify and substantiate the information and worth of your data. Place your initial dial into the highest point of contact within any organization. When contacting a College/University or Enterprise/Fortune 500 account reach out to the CEO/President. Within hospitals I suggest administration. For the K-12 vertical I suggest the superintendants office. Invariably in all cases you will get their assistant live, and as Chris Snell pointed out in his blog, they can be a powerful resource.
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