What is B2B Leads & Contacts Data and how to use it?

Hi there,

I'm Ekku from Datarade.

Welcome to Data Explained. Today we're gonna talk about B2B leads, contact and intent data.

Every B2B marketer probably knows what leads are. You've bought them, you've used them. So today we're gonna we're gonna dig deeper and see how the leads, the contacts and the intent actually play together.

So what makes a lead?

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If you ask any salesperson in your team, what are they going to need in order to provide you with a sale, to give you that lovely cash money. What they're going to tell you is that they're going to need some some level of contact information for their prospect.

It's a name, phone number, email address, the position in the company that they're working in,  just to get the ball rolling, right?  Such information could usually be collected from public resources like LinkedIn, through through scraping, whether that's manual done by yourself, or done through an external source like a data provider, that's another question. Alternatively, the contact information could be found from CRM databases that you own for yourself.

So, now you have a lot of phone numbers, email addresses and names of people. The next thing you want to understand is whether they're actually interested in buying anything. Are they ready to buy? Do they have intent? 

Understanding interest and need of a customer or a prospect, you want to make them show you a signal that they're willing to buy.  This can be done on your own your own web page by adding CTA’s. Call to actions (CTA’s) are the easiest form for the prospect to show interest. - “Hey, I want to learn more. I want to demo.”

Other methods could be looking into the online behavior by external sources. This is where data providers can again help you. You have a lot of comparison sites that essentially collect all of the interest and the intent from the online space.

They they collect their information and they sell this information to you telling that: “Hey, here you have one hundred people looking to buy this and that product, right?

More traditional methods could it could consist of making direct calls, outreach or to sending out surveys to these people to find out the same information.

The last step before your sales team can be ready to engage with these leads is some sort of qualification.

You want to know whether they actually have the budget to buy your product. Is there a low level of urgency, and whether that person behind that phone number is the right person to make that decision within the company?

This information usually is received through through qualification calls or lead capture forms, to be more technical.

So I think we covered a lot of the use cases already but let’s take a closer look into the three major use cases in the B2B space for leads.

Prospecting

You know what your ideal customer looks like. You want to multiply that.  You want to go “into the wild” and you want to collect all of the possible contact information for all people and prospects alike, filling up that sales funnel from the top.

CRM enrichment

Maybe you have already a wide enough base off of B2B contact data that your you're willing to utilize.

Here you can add additional information attached to those contact details to make sure that they have the intent you are looking for.

Account based marketing

Now, this is a buzzword in the industry. Essentially that relates to the last part of the sales funnel. This is where you have qualified all the information and the related attributes of that contact that you're going to need to make sure that they're willing to buy.

Knowing that your leads are ready to buy today, you can start sending out those very personalized messages that are going to resonate with that exact account.

So with B2B leads, like any form of data, essentially you want to take a look into the quality aspects of it.

I would say there are three major points in terms of data quality for leads.

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Level of qualification

In which part of the sales funnel are we with that contact information at the current moment? You want to understand the leads within the data set that you're buying from your data providers.

Qualification methods

When we talk about qualification, how is it done? Are the leads being qualified through phone calls or surveys? This might have a huge impact on the level of accuracy of the information. 

For example,  you want to make sure that the qualification, especially the intent, is recent so that a company that was willing to buy a product last year might not be willing to do that this year anymore. You want to make sure that information is up to date.

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P.S. If you have a business case you are looking to solve with B2B leads , you can find suitable datasets here. The platform allows you to browse, and compare data vendors and their data sets.

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