Data is the ultimate foundation for all sales and marketing activity, but especially telemarketing. Without a good foundation of data for telemarketing use the whole activity falls down. You need to ensure you are reaching out to the right profile of company, and the right people within the company. But more specific than that – the details such as phone numbers, emails, contact names and roles, turnover details etc need to be up to date and accurate to ensure you’re not wasting time.
Here are some tips to help with choosing good quality data:
1. Create a specification
Spend some time considering who your ‘best-fit’ customer is.
- What does their company look like?
- What industry is their business in? Can you narrow down the businesses based on turnover, number of employees, geography, or any other factors?
- What profile of contact is your ideal customer? What job roles do you typically engage with? Which roles are decision-makers and which could be influencers?
Don’t be afraid to include senior commercial roles in your dataset, CEOs, Commercial Directors, and others may seem too senior for your proposition but them or their team may be able to give you a top down referral to the decision maker.
2. Find a quality provider
Evaluate the relevance and reputation of various list providers. If you target a particular niche or industry in the market, you may find it best to use a specialist data provider in that area. You may find it useful to ensure the company detail you get is the HQ location, so make sure you mention this to your provider.
Get at least a couple of different quotes to assess the differences, you may find different providers have drastically different volumes of data for your specification.
3. Check you’re on the same page as the data providers
When speaking with providers make sure they understand how you’re planning to use the data. For telemarketing use, ensure the provider has filtered out phone numbers which are CTPS listed. Companies can ‘opt-out’ of receiving telemarketing calls through the CTPS (Corporate Telephone Preference Service), so make sure the list is screened.
You may find it useful to still buy data which is CTPS listed depending on if you’re doing an email campaign alongside prospecting.
It is also important to make sure you know how you can use the data. Data can be purchased outright, or under a licensing agreement. For example, single-use data records are less expensive to buy, but can only be contacted once. Whereas multiple-use data records can be contacted as many times as required during the period of the agreement. Where possible we aim to buy a perpetual-use type license.
4. Request a data sample
Quality means that the data should be as recent as possible, and as accurate as possible.
To ensure your selections are optimal for you, ask the data provider to provide you with a data sample before you make a purchase. You can check if the data is accurate and matches your criteria before making a commitment.
If you want to take matters into your own hands, make some calls to the sample data to check its accuracy yourself. As good as a provider seems, it is important to do your own research rather than blindly trusting them to ensure you don’t lose out financially.
Data decays rapidly, so do not be too surprised if the data you receive lacks some updated information. Continuous data cleansing is crucial, and you can implement this to keep your database updated once you have purchased it.
5. Allow time for research
Not necessarily a tip for buying data, but it’s extremely important you allow your team enough time to do research alongside their telemarketing activity. Once you have bought your list you may find there are certain crucial roles that are not included. Allowing your team enough time to do the calling AND a Linkedin or website search for each company as they are going down the list will mean they can supplement their list with more relevant contacts, getting them closer to finding and engaging with the right one.
Telemarketing can be tough but all of these tips will help you in securing good quality data for your efforts. Being clear about who you want to contact, combined with relevant data that reflects this, will ensure your efforts are best placed. If you want to discuss more about how to successfully collect and manage your telemarketing data, get in touch!
