Buying Telesales lists - who is really good?

[AdrianF]

I am looking to do a marketing campaign for my business in the next few weeks and plan to buy a bunch of phone numbers for cold calling

MarketingFile came recommended by a friend and their search allows some good discrimination of roles etc

But I am interested to hear who else people use as the time commitment will be pretty huge and I don't want to be using an average list if a better source exists

thanks

 

[Bruceflea]

What job roles are you looking to target and whaat sort of budget do you have to play with?

 

[Market Trade News]

Depends what you are after. Is it business to business or business to public ?

 

[AdrianF]

Should have put some detail in before, sorry folks.

It is professional services b2b, we are looking at Director/Budget holder level in "bigger" organisations. We figure a couple of hundred calls will give us maybe 1% new clients - but this is about raising our profile with folks who don't know us as well. We can get more business organically or from current clients but want to try something else too

Budget is "not much". £100 will buy a list of 200 names, job titles and telephone numbers - and then we pick the phone up to ring the ones that look good. If we get a good response then we will look at putting some more money/time in to it

Given what we want to achieve and what we offer I suspect a cold calling service would not merit the expense

 

[beasty]

Cannot tell you a good one but I would certainly NOT recommend data octopus

The data was a joke

 

[AdrianF]

thanks Beasty, looking at the B2B list we wouldnt have picked them anyhow

MarketingFile seem to have the right data sets for our needs, it would be good to hear from a satisfied customer though - or to hear of someone who has been used with good results

 

[ScotComp]

MarketingFile drive me insane, as soon as you sign up or purchase anything they will phone you all of the time.

I ended up setting up a fake account and they still seemed to call me, in the end I got fed up and cancelled it. I would say B2B Prospector is pretty good as well.

 

[Chris Ashdown]

Unless you are a great tele sales person I would think more like1% per thousand is more likely depending on the market

 

[AdrianF]

Unless you are a great tele sales person I would think more like1% per thousand is more likely depending on the market

Chris - what make you say that?

we did a "proof of concept" last month and got 2 warm leads from 18 calls, we are meeting with the 2 this month - even if they don't buy now they know who we are and what we do

 

[kate1]

Joined Up Marketing very good

 

[theleadmachine]

1% is 1% whether you're calling 100 or 1000 people - its still 1%

On the data front we use a couple depending upon the campaign we need it for.

Creditsafe has a nice functioning website to download data from and we use this for a lot of apprenticeship campaigns we run.

For anything more specific, or where I need some input from the data provider, then I couldn't recommend Toby at Responsiva Data more highly. He listens to what our campaign is all about, reads through the client brief and then works with us during the first days of the campaign to ensure any creases are fully ironed.

 

[acozier]

Hi Adrian

Who did you use in the end for your data? how are the calls going?

 

[Databroker]

The most common question that I see on these forums around data lists is "which is best list".

Its also possibly the most pointless question to ask for the following reasons:

1 ) One shoe does not fit all. What list worked for one company will/may not work for yours. A full brief and campaign objectives are needed for any kind of credible answer.

2 ) The respondents would have had to have benchmarked all data lists to have some kind or basis for comparison. Granted, positive or negative reviews can give some kind of insight but since data can be cheap or expensive, then its rarely that simple. Our company has bench marked all suppliers but we are data geeks and its all we do, day in, day out.

3 ) Its not a nice thing to say but the unspoken truth is that most people who are on the forums are either sales people of a respective organisations (bias) or possibly not qualified/experts in the topic. Accountants telling a forum about their experience, although useful, will have limited value if not in your industry. Take this into account.

The answer to this question is that no-one knows BUT you can give yourself the best chance of success by speaking to list experts whose core competency is direct marketing who can pinpoint suitable lists for testing. Don't be naive to think that certain profiles don't have hidden agendas.

PS Marketing file is a reseller or list manager of certain lists that pay to be on their website. Although there are some good lists on their website, there are also ones where "better" options are avaialble. I appreciate this is subjective and abstracting. Scotcomp - web tracking based on your IP address. Big Brother!

Happy to offer help and hope the campaign was a great success. Please guys, seek council on this and always use DMA members. Buying the cheapest data is sure fire way to failure for majority of time.