Woooohhhoooo!! We're thrilled to accept the CODiE Award for Best Lead Generation Service and Best Solution Integrating Content into workflow at the 2012 SIIA Summit.
We're SO excited... we made a video about it:
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Recent Posts
- NetProspex wins two CODiE Awards at SIIA Summit 2012!
- What's rocked the boat in B2B marketing via Eloqua
- The Winter Release of NetProspex's B2B Contact Tools
- B2B Social Media
- B2B Social Media Examples (From SocialMediaPlus 2011)
- Find the love in your B2B prospects with lead nurturing
- See Gary talk Crowdsourcing at Data Content 2011
- 100 Million Contacts!
- CleneStep: Three-Dimensional Verification
- The Jig is Up. What’s behind Salesforce.com’s re-branding of Jigsaw to Data.com
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January 25, 2012
January 13, 2012
What's rocked the boat in B2B marketing via Eloqua
As the old cliché goes, you can't know where you are going until you know where you have been.
(Of course Lewis Carroll also said "If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there." but that's a different situation!)
The research of B2B marketing history shows how rapidly the industry changes with every new innovation. We thought this was a great point in time to take a snapshot of where we've been as an industry, considering all the funky and exciting things coming in our space.
Check out Eloqua's nicely done infographic below.
Click here to view the original source.
December 21, 2011
December 19, 2011
November 16, 2011
November 12, 2011
Find the love in your B2B prospects with lead nurturing
Here at NetProspex, we know to get the most value from a prospect database, marketers have to be agile and skilled in managing leads at various stages. One of the most important things on a B2B marketer's endless to-do list is to develop an on-going strategy for prospects who are not ready to buy. The old days of relying on the cream of the crop (sales-ready leads) to drive pipeline while ingoring the rest are over, as best-in-class companies reap the benefits of a lead nurturing and lead scoring strategy.
Eloqua's Jesse Noyes has developed a wonderfully original way of looking at buying stages and nurturing folks from one to the next, and back:
Eloqua's 8 Stages of Lead Nurturing
Source: http://blog.eloqua.com/8-stages-of-lead-nurturing/
Locking Eyes
You lock eyes at a bar or the supermarket, and you think there’s something special. This is where you approach to see if there’s that initial spark. This stage involves a lot of small talk. You don’t know much about your prospect – he or she might have filled out a form or downloaded a white paper – so this is where asking the right questions is vital. It’s all about seeing if there’s any chemistry.
First Date
You’ve determined there’s some mutual interest. Now it’s time to see if that spark has lasting power. This is where you go out for a bite to eat and ask a lot of questions of each other. You have explicit criteria to investigate (how big is her or his company, what’s your prospect’s title, etc.) as you build a basic prospect profile. This is where you are both deciding whether it’s worth a second date. If you’re not already, you’ll want to employ a robust lead scoring program to keep track of your lead’s movements and makes sense of his or her behavior.
Dating Casually
The first date went well. Next, you spend your time getting to know each other better. What is it your lead’s larger aspirations? How can you be part of accomplishing your lead’s ambitions? Likely your lead will want to take it slow and easy while you pursue him or her. At this point you know you have a qualified lead, but you want to get your lead more invested in buying specifically from you.
Getting Serious
Dating is going pretty well. Your lead has shown a level of engagement with your content and brand. You know he or she is looking at a more serious relationship. You keep the nurture campaign going, providing high-value content, as you try to take your burgeoning relationship to the next level.
The Boyfriend’s Back
Doesn’t it always go this way? Once your lead starts getting serious about you is probably right about the time the competition will show up. This might be a pervious relationship your lead is having difficulty letting go of, or someone else just vying for his or her attention. You’ll want to differentiate yourself. This could be with price-point comparisons, demonstrating the level of ROI you bring to the table, etc. The idea is to appear as the better bet.
Engagement
So your lead is sold. Now it’s time to meet his or her family, and vice versa. You want to make a good impression among the other stakeholders in the relationship. Be ready to show why you are the best match to the executives and other internal teams your lead reports to. Also, prep your company to be warm and welcoming.
Marriage
This is a pretty obvious one. You’ve impressed your lead, his or her family, and everyone has come together for the wedding. The champagne may be flowing, but remember a successful marriage requires just as much, if not more, work than dating.
Remember the Anniversaries
Every healthy relationship requires work. To keep the marriage healthy you need to make sure your customer is getting stellar service. But you also want to ensure they are taking advantage of all you have to offer. You’ll want to gauge how they are using the product. Are they using several features or just one? Are they engaging with educational content you send their way? Be sure to check in early and often. Like any relationship, you want to keep the lines of communication open.
Source: http://blog.eloqua.com/8-stages-of-lead-nurturing/
"If done well, successful nurturing can build a strong brand and solution preference long before a prospect is actively engaged in a buying process. Lead nurturing software allows for leads to be tracked and content delivery to be automated through various marketing channels." - Eloqua
Are you feelin the love?
November 03, 2011
October 12, 2011
100 Million Contacts!
We've officially hit the 100 million mark for the number of contacts traded to the NetProspex db!
"B2B companies share a common need to create demand today, this month, this quarter," said Gary Halliwell, CEO of NetProspex.
"This milestone recognizes the success of crowd-sourcing as a way for companies to turn contacts they have into prospects they need. Gaining access to all potential buyers in their audience has accelerated the sales process of our clients, and is a great example of crowd sourcing in the fast-growing data cloud."
Clients using the NetProspex contact trading platform use the service to pool contacts gathered (i.e. at a trade show) and download carefully targeted new prospects.
"The trading community at NetProspex has been an integral tool for our sales and marketing efforts," said Tim Doscher, CTO of Enteracloud."What sets NetProspex apart is the information is consistently higher quality than other contact record providers. Their accurate data and ease of accessibility has been our secret weapon for direct access to decision makers."
According to Dave Kalstrom, founder of Outbound Excellence,"NetProspex's trading feature is a zero-cost way to grow prospect databases for clients."
Additionally, Michael Turi, President of Health Care Reach commented, "I continually use NetProspex as the trading user-interface is easy to use, I can find targeted emails for contacts, and the support team is great."
September 16, 2011
CleneStep: Three-Dimensional Verification
Jimmy Becker, SVP Content, NetProspex
In a prior blog post, I offered some specifics about how we approach quality. In this discussion, I wanted to continue that discussion by specifically describing how we verify our data.
I started out that post by defining what quality means to us. It is worth re-stating:
Can you connect to this person via the phone number and/or email address that we have provided in our business contact record?
Other B2B contacts providers rely on the crowd to verify their data. That is, users may chose to indicate which records are current and which ones no longer are. This approach is fraught with challenges and shortcomings. How many users contribute to this data cleansing effort? Are their motivations selfless or selfish? Are consistent standards applied? What quality control procedures are used?
At NetProspex, we verify our database records in a very different manner. We take a scientific approach that is both more rigorous and more comprehensive, and re-confirmed through continual testing.
Our framework to verification is what we call CleneStepTM – a set of initial screening algorithms, combined with our proprietary three-dimensional verification.
First, we screen out all records that are:
- Incomplete (do not contains all the necessary fields)
- Duplicates (of what we already have)
- Personal emails (eg, domains such as gmail, yahoo, hotmail)
- Generic emails (eg, prefixes such as sales@ or info@)
- Invalid postal addresses
- Invalid phone number formats
- Potential spam traps
Next, we apply our three-dimensional verification:
- We make 1 million phone calls per month to ensure the contact is phone-connectable
- We test 1 million emails per month to ensure the contact is email-deliverable (including sending the contact an email with an option to remove her/his record from our database)
- We compare our networks to social media to confirm the contact’s company affiliation remains current
This verification framework allows us to repeat the process and re-verify at regular intervals. In addition, because each of the three tests is verifying a different dimension of quality, we can integrate the test results and triangulate to a higher level of insight and quality for each record.
That is, we know a lot more about the quality of each record by integrating all three dimensions than if we just used any one or two of them. The result is a higher level of overall quality than other contact databases, for both email and phone.
We welcome your comments and questions about our verification process, as we aim to constantly provide B2B demand generation marketers with targeted prospects that exceed their quality standards.
September 07, 2011
The Jig is Up. What’s behind Salesforce.com’s re-branding of Jigsaw to Data.com
Gary Halliwell, CEO NetProspex
Along with 42,000 other people, I attended Dreamforce in San Francisco last week. It’s a staggering event, from the Jobs-like keynote by CEO Mark Benioff, to guest speakers like Google CEO, Eric Schmidt and even an appearance by Metallica at a private concert for thousands of Salesforce customers.
Amidst all the hoopla, Salesforce surprised many with its announcement that it is rebranding Jigsaw to Data.com. Concurrently, the company announced a deal with Dun & Bradstreet to include its company data in the new Data.com product.
What’s with the Jigsaw brand and why is Data.com better? What does a deal with Dun & Bradstreet mean?
With attendance almost doubling each year, Salesforce’s momentum is testament to the company’s vision. By being first to market to harness cloud-computing with a platform business model in the CRM space, Salesforce has single-handedly fostered a bloom of innovation in business processes delivering significant value to thousands of nimble Salesforce customers in an area that really matters in these tough economic times - sales.
Salesforce has considerably disrupted the CRM market by fundamentally shifting the innovation model in the CRM marketplace, taking it out of the imaginations of a couple of dozen product managers at Oracle or SAP and putting it into the hands of thousands of product managers and developers across Salesforce’s AppXchange ecosystem. This allows hundreds of partner companies to offer an array of sales tools and services to Salesforce customers.
So what’s with the abandonment of the Jigsaw brand and the Dun & Bradstreet announcement? The answer to both is quality. The Jigsaw database continues to grow through its crowd-sourcing roots as B2B customers pool contact data, but we hear directly from partners and customers alike – and our own testing confirms - that the quality of the contact data continues to underwhelm.
The D&B partnership is focused around improving company data - something NetProspex did a good while ago to provide marketers with reliable company affiliation data. In other words, this partnership within data.com is much ado about nothing, beyond its deep integration into the Salesforce interface.
The quality of the Jigsaw contact information remains an issue. The mechanism of sales people cleaning bad data just isn’t working because too many people game the system to gain points for free data. One adjustment to a contact record earns a point towards viewing another record. Besides, who wants their sales people cleaning someone else’s data? Crowd-sourcing business contacts clearly works in gathering data, but getting the crowd to clean the data is something NetProspex realized early on is not a viable solution.
In the past couple of years, Salesforce has been busy building or acquiring various strategic assets in the areas of collaboration with Chatter, social media monitoring through its acquisition of Radian6, and crowd-sourced Jigsaw for integrated sales data. Clearly Salesforce is revolutionizing the sales desktop and this bump in the road with Jigsaw is something it needs to overcome. We believe we can help.
For Jigsaw customers in marketing who need to drive leads, NetProspex has solved the quality issue, maintaining our database of millions of contacts at a continual accuracy level suitable for marketing automation. Our process validates data as it is contributed by users with a three-dimensional approach to verification including email, social, and manual phone validation. By aging out old data automatically, we strive to improve the accuracy of each customer’s purchase. No customer is harmed in these processes, as we do not ask customers to correct data. So if you are a Jigsaw customer and need a cleaner source of data, or new verified contacts at a scale that suits your business, let us know.
