NetProspex - Blog

NetProspex Releases Free Sales Lead Validation Tools

Waltham, MA, March 28, 2008-- Reaching the right person with the right offer is the key to effective selling.  Now, a new set of sales lead tools from NetProspex, a leader in providing accurate sales information, helps sales professionals validate their contact information. The tools are free, and available on the NetProspex web site. 

“The new suite of sales lead tools increases NetProspex’s value as a time management tool for sales,” says Gary Halliwell, CEO of NetProspex.  “The goal of NetProspex is to reduce the time sales people spend digging for accurate, targeted information so they can spend more time selling, which has a direct impact on sales cycles.”

“Our core competency is ensuring data accuracy of user-contributed content,” continues Halliwell, “which we achieve through several layers of quality control.  No one else in the industry is doing this, so we can go deeper into mid-management and provide a higher level of confidence in our data”.  Customer David Haas, vice president of strategic exhibitor services at BDMetrics agrees. “NetProspex's deep coverage into mid-management level contacts augments our database significantly.”

The NetProspex Sales Lead Toolkit:
•    Got a contact name but need an email address?  NetProspex Company Email Pattern Lookup fills an important gap in sales contact information.  Use this tool to select a company, and NetProspex will return the email pattern for that organization.

•    Want to be sure the email address for a prospect is valid?  NetProspex Email Checker evaluates an email address without actually sending email to a recipient.  This is useful to check individual emails for validity or to verify a group of email addresses, to evaluate the overall health of a campaign list. 

•    Got a list of target company URLs? The NetProspex Leads by URL tool maps available executive contacts in target companies.  Simply input a target company URL, and NetProspex returns any matching records from their database of over 2.4 million contacts. 

•    Find the contacts you need using the NetProspex Custom Search function.  The NetProspex search interface allows sales professionals to easily evaluate NetProspex coverage by sales territory.  Specify job function, title, industry, company type and size, geographic location, and more.

NetProspex is a database of sales information, including over 2 million contacts that go deep into mid-management decision-makers at over 350,000 companies across North America, complete with title, phone, address and email address.  What sets the Netprospex model apart is adding value to community-contributed content by actively ensuring data accuracy with rigorous quality control measures before the data is published to the database.

NetProspex offers both subscription membership to its database of business executive contacts (for as little as $25 per month) as well as the free NetProspex Exchange service, for users who wish to trade in existing contact information in return for new contacts.

About NetProspex
Founded in 2006, NetProspex understands that effective sales efforts require the most in-depth and accurate prospect data. The company's core product line overlays user-contributed and commercial sales lead data with layers of quality control to produce an entirely unique and highly effective sales and marketing contact database. With over 2.5 million accurate business contacts across 350,000 companies, NetProspex is a major new source of contacts - including difficult-to-find mid-management decision makers across North American businesses.

In its first year of business, the company has seen significant sales growth and already has over 300 enterprise clients across a range of industries including technology, media, business services and financial markets. The company recently secured Series A funding from angel investors.  For more information or a free trial, visit www.netprospex.com.

HotProspex: News, advice and trends in lead generation from NetProspex

March 2008

Welcome to the inaugural issue of HotProspex, NetProspex’s monthly roundup of news, advice, and trends in the world of lead generation and sales effectiveness. 

In this issue:
Think Beyond the Numbers Game:  The Real Key to Sales Success
Expand Your Sphere of Influence to Capture More Customers
Boost eMail Marketing Success with Free Trials

Quick Links:
Gary's Corner
Blogging Around

Gary’s Corner:

The sales game is changing as business use of the web continues to evolve and new Internet sales and marketing tools hit the market. A lot of the focus has been on innovation in inbound lead generation tools.  Sometimes we hear that outbound solicitation such as phone and email is a thing of the past.  I think that's over-simplification. Outbound sales tools are starting to get interesting. If the market weakens further, then I suspect more than a few CEOs will increase their focus on outbound lead generation.  It's a lever that, when used properly, provides a lot of control in hitting targets. Better visibility into potential customers is like shining a light into the recesses of a sales territory. It really helps to be able to acquire greater knowledge on who the potential customers are, especially with the targeting ability tools like NetProspex provide. Outbound has become less scattershot and more focused.  New tools like this help you dig deeper into a company to identify the right target for your particular message, and help you assess the accuracy and validity of your information.

Perhaps the biggest challenge is in finding and evaluating the best tools for your needs. Assess your priorities – do your require ease of use, low cost, data accuracy and freshness, depth of coverage, high volume?   And don't be shy about your needs - if you don't see what you want out there, ask for it! Technology has broken down many of the barriers to development, and smart companies will listen intently to customer needs.

New Product News:  Contact Trading
NetProspex’s new contact trading mechanism allows users to trade old contacts for new. Check it out! I'm sure you'll find it a great way to get new prospects...FREE. We've made it extremely easy. Just upload a file of contacts to our database and then we take care of all the rest - matching, checking and validating the data so that when the data is put into the database, it’s clean and accurate. We have lots of new tools in development and I'll use this space each to let you know about them.

More HotProspex>>

Blogging Around

We'd like to share with you some of the blogs we've been looking at recently:

Sales Machine
DemandGen Report
Sales 2.0
Forrester's Marketing Blog
Selling Power

Back to HotProspex>>

Boost eMail Marketing Success with Free Trials

If you’re a marketer looking to jumpstart your demand generation program, consider this time-honored tactic:  try giving your product away.

For a short time, that is.

With online services and hosted applications assuming greater prominence in the market, “try and buy” offers are not only a smart marketing tactic – they’re an essential step in the sale process.

“You can’t sell online services today without letting people try it first,” says Seth Godin, author of Meatball Sundae: Is Your Marketing Out of Synch? Because customers are both value and risk sensitive, “if you can answer the risk question and you can answer the value question, then you are going to get the sale. One of the best ways to do both of those things is to put in front of people and get them to try it.”

As important as these offers are, it’s equally important to target them appropriately to ensure adoption. David Lewis, president and founder of DemandGen, a marketing automation consultancy headquartered in Danville, CA, advises marketers to pre-qualify trial users, as well as to create a sense of urgency so that the trial customer will be driven to test the product in a real world environment. Lewis also advises companies to implement an effective “nurturing” program to complement the trials, keeping in contact with trial users and being available to answer questions or provide assistance. 

With an effective nurturing campaign in place to support free trials, Lewis estimates that companies can expect 70% to 80% of people who sign up for a free trial to actually use the application, and from there conversion rates to actual customers can reach between 20-30%.

The success of companies like Salesforce.com bear this out – in fact, Salesforce promotes its trial-to-conversion ratio as a selling point.

“When you are evaluating the digital body language of a prospect,” Lewis concludes,  “signing up for a free trial is one of the strongest indicators of real interest.”

More HotProspex>>

Expand Your Sphere of Influence to Capture More Customers

“Stop obsessing over the decision maker.”

So says  Aaron Ross of Sales Machine.com.  According to Ross, the decision making process is now more important than the decision maker.  While collaborative decision making involving different people and teams approving a purchase has always been an important element of B2B sales, it is now the rule at most organizations.

Ian Campbell, CEO of Nucleus Research, takes this concept a step further, and advises technology sellers to re-think their prospecting targets.  “Technology decisions, including purchasing decisions, are being taken out of the hands of CIOs and handled instead by line-of-business managers,” he tells Information Week.  This means that successful prospecting includes identifying all potential members in the network of decision makers and creating a variety of offers to appeal to the various players.

A recent study released by the Direct Marketing Association, The B-To-B Sphere of Influence: Best Practices in Reaching the Right Person, confirms this approach.  The study shows that 60% of marketers rely on prospect titles or reports from the sales force to tailor their messaging and value propositions to each recipient.

Of course, all of this doesn’t mean prospectors should ignore the “decision maker” entirely, cautions Ross.  “You do want to build a relationship with the decision makers early, but don’t ‘sell’ them until you’ve begun winning over the influencers.”

More HotProspex>>

Think Beyond the Numbers Game: The Real Key to Sales Success

For years, sales gurus have told us that successful prospecting is a numbers game:  X cold calls = Y leads = Z sales.  Methodologies, books, and entire companies have been built around this formula.

But experienced marketers know there’s more to it.  While it’s nice to believe the conventional wisdom that “everyone is a prospect,” in reality there are far fewer companies ready, able, and willing to buy from you.

According to Nigel Edelshain of Sales 2.0, a New Jersey-based sales improvement consultancy, getting the right target list is the #1 determiner of sales success.  “If you call the wrong people, you won’t sell anything.  A name here or there does not seem like a biggie, right?  But this all adds up.”

NetProspex customer Dan Zasloff of Varolii Corporation agrees.  As Senior Manager of Marketing Programs, he’s not merely interested in the numbers – he’s interested in getting the right numbers.

To Dan, a clean database means more and better opportunities to reach deeper into target organizations and tailor his offers to meet the needs of the business owners who are the most likely matches for Varolii’s solutions.  Data quality – the freshness of his contact list, the detail provided about a contact’s title and responsibilities, and the ability to “get ahead” of turnover at a prospect organization – is essential not only to efficiency, but to effectiveness as well.  The less time he spends on list management and cleanup, the more time he can spend developing appealing offers.

“A ton of companies are out there trying to get share of mind,” he explains.  “Reaching the right person with the right offer is what’s key.”

Or, as Edelshain puts it, “The details count a lot.”

More HotProspex>>

How Dr Who and NetProspex both benefit from cyberspace!

I noticed something interesting with my kids this weekend as we talked about TV programs like Dr Who (timelord) and TopGear (car consumer report revamped) on BBC America. Beyond scheduled shows, they also watch old episodes on YouTube with neighborhood friends who are fast becoming fans. They are asking me to sign up to domestic BBC on cable, so they can see the first runs of these shows.  I haven’t given in yet, but I am intrigued by what’s going on.  It’s a great example of how more open markets drive content demand across old boundaries.  This glimpse into real world dynamics in the media resonates for me in terms of what NetProspex is all about.  Content creation and distribution has become much more dynamic even in business publishing. NetProspex has added over 240,000 contacts in the past few months. We are busily validating those contacts before we put them up onto the system…that’s where we add value.  I’m not sure my kids will be looking for NetProspex on YouTube, but the possibilities are equally exciting for the new generation of business publishers who are embracing these changes.