Sales Leads: Why Buy 5,000 When You Only Need 50?

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This post comes straight out of the “why has it taken this long?” category. Sales professionals can now buy information on prospective clients on a one-at-a-time or small-quantity basis. If you need contact information for B2B selling, you should take a look at Demandbase.com.

As most salespeople know, you’ve always been able to buy large lists of B2B prospects with contact names from Experian, Hoovers (Dun & Bradstreet), InfoUSA, and others.

But that’s the problem: large lists. Most sources let you add information when it’s available, such as multiple contact names, gender, ethnicity, fax numbers, and more; some let you obtain estimated Yellow Page spend, building square footage, and other details.

With Demandbase, while you do sacrifice these finer details , you get speed, a clean and fast, Flash interface for searching and drilling down, and the beauty of pay-as-you-go, no-minimums. That’s huge for sales managers operating with a small or non-existent budget.

In just about three minutes I was able to drill down from 18,000 leads to six, and purchased these six for a measly $5.43. I received the company name, address, phone, web site, contact name and title (I chose slightly more obscure titles like Director of Operations and Engineering Manager , not CEO or Chairman), and company credit rating.

Demandbase is for sales professionals; the others are for marketers. Demandbase allows you to buy a small number of manageable leads and contacts; the others allow you to start a direct marketing campaign. At the very least, when you can’t get in by networking, and the company won’t give out names on a cold call, it’s certainly worth a look.