Business Lead Mailing Lists
Mailing Lists for Institutional Food Businesses
For those of you who sell to institutional food businesses, sales prospecting can have a huge impact on selling efforts. So what can you do if your company is unable to generate an adequate number of high-converting leads?
Remember: institutional food businesses are diverse operations with unique needs and circumstances.
But by reducing the need for internal lead generation, your business can gain momentum in the area of actual selling. Deployed correctly, lead lists are powerful resources for B2B institutional food business selling.
What Companies Sell Leads?
Google is often business owners' first stop when they're looking for a lead list provider. Although online searches have value, they don't tell the whole story. Many online vendors are big on promises and short on execution, so it's important to verify each provider's claims and references.
We've known many lead list providers throughout the years, but we have been consistently impressed with Experian. One of the reasons we like Experian is because they have a database of more than 14 million U.S. businesses. Companies that sell to institutional food businesses rave about Experian's ability to deliver updated leads that have been filtered to meet precise geographic and demographic criteria.
Lead List Ethics
When you purchase a list of institutional food business leads from a third-party, you are usually entitled to limited use of the contacts it contains.
Mailing and lead lists are generally restricted to the terms of the contract, so you'll need to exercise diligence in understanding what you're paying for before you agree to a purchase. In some cases, vendors may permit usage upgrades, but you'll need to contact your provider before you exceed the limits of your contract.
Lead Lists: Build or Buy?
Many business owners struggle with the decision to purchase lead lists because (in theory) they can produce the same results using in-house personnel. However, they often overlook the fact that lead list providers are specialists who are extremely adept at identifying targeted leads. So a decent list provider can produce a list of prospective institutional food businesses at a cost that is much lower than in-house lead generation. Even more, world-class lead list vendors have developed mechanisms that capture new institutional food businesses as they enter the marketplace and meticulously maintain their contact databases. For most in-house sales units, it's impossible to match the performance of third-party list providers.
Types of Data Available from Lead Database Vendors
In dealing with the biggest lead list companies, you usually receive Company Name, Contact Name, Address and Phone Number. What you actually get depends on which lead vendor you buy from. For some vendors, for example, you can opt to receive fields like Executive Titles, Email Addresses and Number of Employees.
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