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

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.