Beginner’s guide to building a B2B contact database

You must be working hard in order to hire the best sales personnel in your team and come up with a brilliant strategy but still, sometimes, with all the resources at hand, it can prove to be difficult to understand unfulfilled sales targets.

Well, even with the best sales personnel and with the best strategy, there are maximum chances that everyone is not spending their time on what they should, and you might not even come to know about this for long. You might consider that B2B contacts database building is a part of their job.

Your highly skilled and experienced professionals might be working hard in order to collect the right details of the target buyer and then work towards building a relevant database. But this doesn’t mean that your team is working towards building an accurate sales database. And since you are aware of the cost of bad data, you will need to make sure such mistakes are not repeated again.

This is why, in this blog post, we have come up with an ideal guide that will help you with B2B contact database building.

Create detailed specifications using customer data

Everything starts with understanding your customer well. If you have successfully build a buyer persona in a detailed manner, then moving on with this step will become a pie for you. But if you haven’t, you will need to start collecting vital information from all the teams that are in direct touch with the customers like customer support, sales team, marketing team, etc.

You can also start using follow-up calls along with feedback in order to collect information that will help you in understanding your customer in a detailed way. After that, you will need to start entering the information in an excel sheet into common categories like company size, industry, pain points, feedback, and much more.

Make a list of target companies

Now that you have clearly understood whom you need to target, you will need to move on with your approach of building a list of companies that will fit the specifications that you have come up with.

There are various different types of resources that will help you in this process. Some of the resources that you can start using are Zoominfo, LinkedIn, Limeleads, DiscoverOrg, and much more.

Make a list of departments and decision-makers

After building a proper list of target companies, you will have to start working on searching for departments you are planning to target and get complete details about the decision-maker. You will have to use a similar kind of approach even when using a B2B contact database.

The lead data that you will build will help you in understanding the pattern of job functions or simply knowing who is in charge of making the purchase decision. This is why you will have to start using this kind of information as soon as possible. For example, if you are selling a cloud accounting solution, then you will need to start targeting the head of accounting or directly the CEO of the company. This approach will be useful even when you will be using a B2B contact database.

Get contact details of the lead

The one thing that you can’t skip during this process is research. You will need to keep researching online in order to improve the outcomes of your effort. There are various sources from which you can start collecting information. Some of the sources that you can use are- social media profiles, interviews, websites, media releases, and much more. So, all that you will have to do is to make use of all the helpful online tools.

But never complete this step in a rush as if you will make errors during the collection of contact details of the lead, then your marketing campaign will hang in the middle of the digital world, and it will never reach the recipient.

Validate the contact details

Now, you will need to start using your B2B database efficiently, and you will need to begin this process of using a B2B database by calling your leads one by one. But before making any call using your B2B data, you will have to make sure that you already have a call script ready otherwise, you will end up losing the lead.

If you are planning to build a B2B mailing list and validate the emails, then you will need to start using different tools that are easily available on the digital platform. But always make sure that in every case, you are only verifying the accuracy.

Building a B2B contact database is crucial in order to gain a competitive advantage in the market and also for better personalization by understanding your customer. So, use this blog post as your guide and build impeccable B2B data.