Building a database with the contact information of your potential customers seems like a relatively easy task. On the market, we have access to a wide, array of tools that will allow you to export even 20,000 contacts in a few minutes. We ourselves at AMU, will provide you with even larger numbers of contacts for Ads campaigns, allowing you to reach decision makers directly with ads on Google, Linkedin or Fb. It would seem that modern database building involves paying for tools and filtering records, and then hocus mary ….. sales and marketing department goes into battle to get leads. Well, nothing could be further from the truth.

 

Build a Persona

I sit down to this exercise with clients many times, most often when onboarding to prepare cold mailing campaigns. Surprisingly often the list of variables that define a persona such as:

• location,
• industry,
• positions of decision makers,
• size of the company,
• the problems our client solves for their customers,
• the reasons why our clients’ customers talk to them

is not at all based on the data collected while working with our clients’ current customers. Much more often, the basis for describing personas is the ideas about the personas that the Owner, President, Founder of the company, or its Sales Director, has in his memory from recent sales conversations. This is not necessarily how it should be, because disregarding the collection of data that make up the persona will end up with a burned-out budget, marketing, frustration and a flop of a sales campaign. To prevent this, follow the simple exercises you’ll read about below.

Where to get data from: industry portals and databases

You have to start where all knowledge should start: with data, and any data available today, is of course already posted on the web. In this case, is an expensive database better than a cheap one, an industry portal with a premium option than a free one? We don’t have to immediately throw ourselves at the most expensive tools such as

• ZoomInfo or Cognism(from €1100 per month, with a 12-month contract).
• For a start, an industry portal such as TechCrunch will suffice,
• you can also use the ready-made Crunchbase (from $49 per month),
• imperfect, because the timeliness of the data sometimes requires manual verification, but still evolving tool, and with the largest business database still remains LinkedIn and its SalesNavigator (from. 300zł net per month).

The most important thing is that the validity of this data is known to you and that you know how to verify it.

What if you don’t want to buy access to the databases right away, but you need to prepare somehow for customer acquisition?

ProTip: Take advantage of contacting b2b lead generation companies such as AutomateMeUp, most of which will provide a report for free and without obligation. Depending on the company, you’ll get a more or less detailed report broken down by data source, and with information on available contact information.

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Learn more about our lead generation services

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So how do you prepare to arrange a persona-exercise:

1. Start by creating a list of all your existing customers
2. The list should include at least the following:
   1. names of clients
   2. industries in which they operate
   3. Location of the client: headquarters, branch office that spoke to us if different from the headquarters
   4. employment size and annual revenue of the client
   5. amount spent with you
   6. the positions of the people interviewed by role:
      1. purchase, most often it is about Presidents, Owners and Directors operating the budget
      2. selection: each solution or product has some use in the client company, there are also the relevant people who are responsible for how the product or solution is used, the larger the company, the lower hierarchical positions we will meet here. For example, in large companies this will be the Marketing Specialist, IT Manager, etc.
      3. Concept/challenge: these are the people you talked to first in the client company, from Presidents and Directors looking for solutions to the problems plaguing them to Middle Managers who have been delegated to solve a problem in the company.

Activities:

1. Determine and record what % of revenue at your company is generated by a given customer
2. Determine and write down why they chose you
3. Determine and write down which customers have something in common (industry, problem, revenue size, etc.)
4. Divide those customers who are united by industry, position and revenue size into groups
5. Create databases of similar companies, for each group separately.

If you are using a CRM such as Hubpsot, or PipeDrive or similar, and have completed the data in these systems, it will take you tens of seconds to pull most of the data. Test Example.

Name	Industry	Positions	Location	Size	Revenue	%	Reason
3M	Production	CIO – challenge IT Director- choice CIO, CEO – purchase	Germany, Hamburg	10000+ employees	1 720 000,00	20%	Referral
Schneider Electric	Electronics manufacturing	CIO – challenge IT Director-  choice CIO, CEO – purchase	Poland Wroclaw	10 000+ employees	120 000,00	1,3%	Price
Lumel	Electronics manufacturing	CIO, CEO – purchase, choice	Poland, Zielona Gora	500 people	200 000,00	2,3%	Price
Solaris Laser	Electronics manufacturing	CIO, CEO – purchase, choice	Poland Warsaw	370 people	250 000,00	2,9%	Referral

  Here we have 3 groups:

1. Foreign corporations, foreign branch, manufacturing industry
2. Foreign corporations, branch in Poland, electronics manufacturing
3. Medium-sized companies, in Poland, electronics manufacturing

 

How to choose the right target group

Depending on your sales and marketing resources, you can even contact all target groups. However, you should focus on the right groups. How do you choose them, and where do you start?

1. At AutomateMeUp, before starting any cooperation, we dutifully study the potential of the target group:
   1. We determine how many similar companies exist in the market in a similar location
   2. Where we have the strongest portfolio
   3. What is the USP we have for this group where the portfolio is strongest
   4. What is the minimum purchase amount that the customer must make
   5. How time-consuming is the implementation of the solution:
      1. low: up to 5 days
      2. medium 10-30 days
      3. high more than 30 days
   6. What is the deal entry threshold:
      1. evolution – the solution can be applied to change the customer’s situation for the better without changing their current working environment
      2. revolution – the solution (usually a new soft) requires a change in the existing work environment, e.g. we offer a new CRM, ERP or accounting system

Based on this, we determine how easy/difficult it will be for us to reach our client’s chosen target group with our message. After collecting basic data from the CRM, the selection of the group will be easier, but this does not yet mean that it will be right. There is still the question of how to verify how the target group indicated by the CRM survey compares to the companies that are actually interested in our offer. !!!NOTE: – if your target group from the CRM, differs from the companies that reach your website, it does not mean that you should suggest only this information. Such a discrepancy means that the communication you are doing via the www may simply need to be improved in terms of your desired target audience. This is a good basis for building effective marketing. We have the following options to choose from

1. Version A “sales” buoy recognition, e.g., a cold mailing campaign to all groups, then measure whether in the group we have identified as most relevant, the number of responses, the number of leads exceeds the other groups
2. Version B “marketing” buoy recognition – if we base in lead generation, on marketing, we send a campaign such as ads to all three groups and check which one responds best in terms of CPM, CTR and, of course, conversions.
3. Version C tracking applications, intent data – if you are already familiar with these concepts then know that your budget will not be wasted (at least not as much as it would be if they were foreign to you). After conducting an intent data survey, you compare what companies showed “intent“topurchase in the sample you received vs. the data from your CRM
   • 1. Intent Data is a certain trend in the market, which is to reach all possible information, related to what a particular person or company, searches online in the context of a certain nature of B2B products or services. Intent Data is available in applications such as TMU, ZoomInfo, Cognism, Apollo, or even SalesNavigator
     2. Tracking applications such as TriggerMe Up, which allow you to identify your business visitors and determine their Intent Data, in other words, their intentions related to browsing your site, based on information such as the duration of the visit, its source, browsing order url’s, returning visits, and so on.

Why am I writing about verification here? It will ensure that taking a content marketing action will be an action taken based on data, not beliefs. PRO TIP: to do a check, you only need a free trial, any software developer will advise you on how to evaluate the data flowing into their application.    

 

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