Inside Sales Telesales Tips Blog

Mailing list mayhem: is your prospect data helping or hurting you?

  

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Almost all of my customers use prospect lists that are commercially available. They’re suspect lists, really, because you have to call and qualify them before they become prospects. One of my inside sales training course customers hired me last year to train his team, because he spend a lot of money on lists with low conversion (suspects-to-prospects) ratios. He started suspecting that his list was good, but his team needed our training to ensure that his reps were operating at optimum level. It was either that, or buy yet another list. Our program was so successful that he rolled it out to his field sales team a few months later. 

But what if your list is dodgy to begin with? And how do you find out if it’s dodgy before you rent it? Recently, I conducted some research on a very popular list by taking a look at my company’s profile on the list. I was shocked to discover that I had numerous employees, including a number of C-level folks, and they were named, too! I recognized the names. They were mainly film directors, movie stars, and one of them even endowed a famous art museum. My company, incidentally, has one employee (me). 

My company soon began receiving promotional mail from a high tech company, addressed to a couple of my “employees.” So essentially, at least one company spent money renting the list, more money on mailing to the list, and, I’d imagine, will spend even more money when its reps try to contact those film and museum folks at my company by phone. 

Those of you reading my blog are sales execs, sales or business development reps, or Marketing Managers and execs. You all have some degree of input as to the quality of the list your company rents or buys. 

So here’s a tip: before choosing a list, do some due-diligence by looking up your own company, along with perhaps ten others that you know well. Check out the data. Occasionally you’ll find someone that’s no longer there, and that’s just part of the list business. But if you find names of people that were never there, you may want to increase the vetting process a bit. 

In these days of increased KPIs and tremendous competition, the practice of calling suspects is challenging, important, and time-consuming. Ensure that your calling list meets high standards for reliability, so that you spend more time with the right suspects, instead of calling people that, I guarantee, will never answer their phones. And add exacting list-vetting to your Best Practices Playbook.