What are the best lead generation lists for sales prospecting, lead generation, and demand generation campaigns?
When you are building sales lists of target contacts, where you get the intelligence from is an important question. There is no one better answer because it depends on many factors. The answer will critically impact your best in sales results of your focused outreach or marketing lead generation and demand generation campaigns.
Business Intelligence for Sales and Marketing Lead Generation Comes in Many Forms
To find the best lead generation lists, I have researched, selected, inherited, and used various lead generation list sources. A list source is a source of specific data about your prospects.
Here are sources for a few of the best lead generation lists for sales prospecting, B2B lead generation, and lead generation:
- InsideView
- ZoomInfo
- InfoUSA
- Salesgenie
- Salesquest
- D&B Hoovers
- Harte Hanks
- NetProspex
- Infogroup OneSource << was sold: Redirects to https://www.data-axle.com/
Not all sources of company intelligence are the same. I want to share a few planning questions you may want to ask yourself to determine the best list source for your initiative.
So, for those who have asked and those who are wondering, these factors will help you know which lead generation list source(s) to use.
How to Choose the Best Source for List Building and Marketing Strategy
- Define your ideal customer profile. To select the lead generation lists source(s) that best matches your ideal customer profile, you must first define your ideal customer profile for your initiative. Who are you targeting? Which companies? How do you distinguish your target companies? Do you look at industry, vertical, size by employee, revenue, or geography? What characteristics determine your ideal customer? Is it the title? Do you look at the contact title? What level of contact do you want to reach? Decide if you are targeting executives, management, or company owners. What departments do your ideal contacts work in? Is it Corporate, Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, Finance or Systems?
- Determine how you’ll connect. You must understand how you’ll connect to select the lead generation lists source(s) that provide the contact data you need. The question is how buyers want to communicate with you during your sales prospecting, lead generation, and demand generation campaigns. Do they prefer a phone? Email? Both? Other?
- Prioritize must-have information. List source(s) cannot be all things to all people. You need to prioritize ideal buyer profile characteristics and contact details and decide which ones are a must-have and which are excellent for your sales prospecting, lead generation, digital sales enablement and new customer acquisition strategy.
- Research and Select. Using clearly defined criteria should put you in a better position to select the lead generation lists source(s) that most closely meet your needs for each sales prospecting, lead generation, digital sales enablement and new customer acquisition strategy.
Which lead generation lists source(s) work for you?
With so much said about aligning sales and marketing, come back next week to hear my thoughts on aligning customer success and marketing.