Making the most of it
Buying in qualified, warm data can be a great way to generate new business – you can tailor it to your own business model, choose where you want to target businesses, build rapport with your customers from an early stage and measure your return on investment with clarity and ease. However, you need to make sure you’re getting a good return from it.
Here at Logic we don’t assume to know more than anyone when it comes to selling mobile phones, so we are not going to attempt to teach you how to do it. However, for the last three years we have been using our database to book thousands of qualified appointments for B2B mobile dealers - and we’re getting pretty good at it. We book hundreds of appointments every month, supplying over 30 dealers nationwide and so far have generated new business opportunities to the equivalent of over 190,000 connections.
Based on our experiences we have written this brief guide to help you make the most of any data you purchase from us, and maximize your return on investment – after all, if you’re making money from our data then its likely you’ll buy more.
Building an effective pipeline
When buying data, the first thing we suggest is to look at your long term pipeline and buy data further in advance then you might normally, especially with the larger companies. We appreciate that you may want businesses that are renewing within the next 3 months so that you can get a quick turnaround on the deals and get those commissions in, however, you will have a much higher conversion rate if you get your foot in the door a little earlier.
By this we mean buying data with expiry dates as far as 6 months in advance. By doing this you can start calling companies long before the competition or the networks do, start building rapport, maybe even sell them some smaller products like data cards or car kits to warm up the relationship. By the time it comes to them looking to renew their mobile contract you’re already a company they are aware of and you’re more likely to win their business. This will involve more work from your sales guys making more calls, and it will take longer to see a ROI from your data, but your conversion rate from it will be much higher.
To compliment this, we can also sell you a proportion of data with expiry dates sooner, just so that you have some deals to close quickly and create a shorter term pipeline. For these we recommend smaller companies that are less likely to have been approached by other dealers or by the networks and are more likely to make a quick decision.
Testing the water
We’re always happy to do trials with our data so that you can test the accuracy and how profitable it is before you commit to larger numbers. We do have some suggestions for how you go about this:
Firstly, trialing anything less than 100 records is a complete waste of time – you just won’t get a good impression of how the data will work for you. You need to see what percentage of the leads you are going to turn into appointments or into sales, so the more data you test the better.
Second, when you do test the data you need to give it to your best sales people so that they can set the benchmark for what’s achievable.
Thirdly, if a percentage of the companies have already renewed their contracts then that isn’t the end of the world – let us know and we will work with you to replace a certain amount of that data with expiry dates further down the line.
A data trial is all about tweaking what we generate for you to make it as effective as possible.
What to buy
We understand that most dealers will have an ideal range of connections they like to deal with; some will want to target the smaller companies (e.g. 3 -50 connections), some the larger (e.g. 50-500 connections). However, if you put these restrictions on the data we provide then it is going to be more expensive to buy.
This is because we only sell data once, giving you complete exclusivity, and so if you buy the ‘cream’, then we still have to find a dealer willing to buy what you don’t, and we have to make our money from somewhere. If you will accept the whole range of data (3+ connections) then we can give you a much better price. We can also bring the price down if you are willing to buy large volumes, in a wide range of areas and are willing to commit to a contracted length of 3, 6 or 12 months.
Buying the whole range will allow you to build a balanced pipeline of short, medium and long term prospects – the smaller companies will give you a quick turnaround, while the larger companies will take longer to close but will yield greater profits. If you can get in to these companies early enough then you can give yourself a much stronger chance of competing with the networks based on the rapport you have built with the company from an early stage.
Statistically we estimate that around 70-80% of the data will be in the 5-50 handset bracket anyway.