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The challenge in business-to-business direct mail is knowing where to look for new business. You need a source of potential new clients that is reliable and affordable. A source that will give you the contact information you need to send a direct mail package to prospective customers who need, want and can afford what you offer.

At a minimum, any source of names should supply the following for each lead:

First name, last name
Job title
Company name
Address (sometimes on two lines)
City
Province or state
Postal code or zip code

Other details that are nice to know:
SIC Code (Standard Industry Classification)
Industry by name
Size of company (in number of employees or sales volume)
Telephone number
Email address
Business type (manufacturing, services, consulting)
Job function (engineer, owner, purchasing, management)
Purchasing authority
Budget
Geographic region (international region, country, state)

Where to find names of potential customers:

Associations
There is an Association of Legal Administrators. There is an association for social workers who specialize in helping people with cancer (Association of Oncology Social Work). There is an association for manufacturers of fasteners in the mid-west of the United States (The Mid-West Fastener Association).

If your target audiences is a niche market, the first place to look for potential customers is trade associations. These associations (local, regional, national, international) often rent lists of names of their members.

Trade publications
Most industries have a trade journal. You are familiar, of course, with Frozen Food Age, Industrial Hygiene News, Eyecare Business and Waste News. These trade publications and most others also rent the names of their subscribers.

Trade directories
You could look in the phone book. Or you could look in the Organic Export Directory, a compilation of contact names for companies that export organic food products. The more narrow the field, the more likely it is to have its own directory of companies in the industry. Some of these directories are in print, and some are online as well.

Trade shows and conferences
Another excellent source of names is industry events. These are usually hosted by trade publications and associations, but independent events also exist. Event organizers rent or sell the names of event attendees and exhibitors.

List brokers
List brokers are specialists who help one company use the list of another company. Their services include research, selection and recommendation of lists. A list broker, for example, would search on your behalf for lists that meet your unique criteria. There is a Hospitality/Travel Professionals list. And a Firefighters Bookstore list (people who have purchased from Firefighters Bookstore). And a Federal Student Aid Schools list (28,994 schools that provide federally financed aid to their attendees).

House list
Your best source of new business is your database of current and lapsed customers, otherwise known as your house list. Getting business from a current customer is always less expensive than getting business from a new customer.

Government
For some products and services, another excellent source of potential clients is the government. I have a number of clients who buy mailing lists from their state governments and use them to mail offers to businesses that are in their target audience. One client buys the names of dentists and dental hygienists whose licenses are about to expire, and mails those prospects a direct mail piece that promotes the client’s continuing education courses (which prospects need to take and pass to renew their licenses). Another client buys the names of garages in his state who conduct state-mandated vehicle safety inspections. He mails them direct mail pieces that promote his software product, which is designed specifically for these inspection stations.

Keep in mind that the most important part of any business-to-business direct mail lead generation campaign is the list. You can have a great product, a terrific offer and the best timing, but if you mail to the wrong people, well, you know what happens. So make sure you get the best list you can.

Alan Sharpe is a business-to-business direct mail copywriter, lead generation specialist and publisher of “Sharpe & Direct: The B2B direct mail marketing e-newsletter.” Receive a free report when you sign up at http://www.sharpecopy.com

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Your boss wants to see evidence that the money and resources invested in the company’s business-to-business marketing activities are really paying off. You start to sweat.

Relax. It is surprisingly easy to prove that B2B marketing is contributing to your company’s bottom line. Here’s how.

Show the relationship between your marketing and your revenue

Start by looking for sales and revenue that can be linked to marketing activities. Simply compare lists of new customers or invoices to companies or prospects in your marketing database and look for matches. You don’t have to find every sale that resulted from your marketing activities. Sometimes all it takes is one big sale to justify a campaign.

If sales haven’t closed yet, count the number of qualified leads and use estimated conversion rates and average sales size to quickly determine the sales potential of those leads. Or look at the forecasted sales in the company’s CRM system and compare them to the database of prospects, inquiries or qualified leads.

You can also send “Did you buy?” surveys to inquirers and qualified leads, using their answers to show that the prospects being targeted by your marketing are buying from you or the competition. Ask if they bought, and if so, from whom. Ask why and how much they spent. If your sample size is large enough, you can also use the answers you receive to estimate the number of sales and the amount of revenue that are represented by all the inquiries and leads you’ve generated.

Show how much you saved the company

Just give it some thought and you’ll probably come up with a list of things you’ve done to save your company money or time. For example:

- Printing and postage savings after cleaning the mailing list or delivering the company newsletter by e-mail.

- Savings accomplished by offering electronic versions of literature.

- The money you saved by eliminating non-productive marketing activities

- Time and money saved by automating the capture of Web forms and eliminating some manual data entry.

Show other ways your marketing is more effective

This can range from showing how many more prospects you reached with your marketing messages to indicating the improvements that have been made in cost per impression, cost per inquiry, cost per attendee or cost per qualified lead.

List all the marketing projects your marketing team completed

Marketers often don’t think about their own productivity when justifying the money the company invests in marketing. Unfortunately, people quickly forget what happened last month or last quarter. Or they simply have no idea what’s involved in creating a mailing or designing a new Web site.

Pointing out the number of marketing projects completed, and all the work steps involved, can be a real eye-opener to others who are completely unaware.

Always be ready to make your case

I recommend that you block out a couple of hours to create your business-to-business marketing accountability reports every month so you’ll always have up-to-date results at your fingertips. If you’re pressed for time, use an intern or temp to do it for you.

Your results may vary, but consider this …

A marketer I know recently reported to her management that awareness of their company and products among target prospects more than doubled, the cost per qualified lead delivered to sales by marketing dropped by nearly 40 percent, 58 percent of the opportunities in the sales pipeline were found first by marketing, and 48 percent of the sales closed and 62 percent of the revenue during the past 12 months came from marketing-generated leads.

The result? She received a bigger marketing budget and senior management executives no longer doubt marketing’s contribution to the company’s success.

M. H. “Mac” McIntosh, is one of America’s leading business-to-business marketing consultant and an expert on the subject of B2B lead generation. Mac’s Accountability Audit helps marketing communications, advertising and tradeshow managers increase their B2B marketing budgets by proving a return-on-investment. For more info visit http://www.sales-lead-experts.com/blog/news-audits.cfm.

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You know what qualified sales leads are, but if you asked your sales account managers and corporate executives, would they have the same definition of a qualified lead? Probably not.

If qualified lead generation in a business-to-business marketing-for-leads program is to succeed, marketing, sales and corporate management must share a unified definition of qualified sales leads. If you all agree from the start on what a qualified lead is, the marketing team stands a better chance of generating leads that will be valuable to its sales managers and associates.

It’s important to confirm the qualified-leads definition, in writing, with all parties. This definition is different for each company, so you must do some work to define the meaning of qualified sales leads at your company.

Step 1: Know the characteristics of a qualified sales lead
General questions that need to be answered in order to determine if a lead is qualified include the following:

• Does the prospect have a need or an application for your product or service?
• What is the prospect’s role in the decision-making process?
• What is the prospect’s timing for purchase or implementation?
• What is the status of the prospect’s budget?
• What is the size of the opportunity?

However, additional or more detailed criteria may be needed to define qualified leads at some companies. This starts with a company contact, who admits to a business problem (either latently or directly) that could be solved by a product and/or service you are selling. Here are a couple of examples of problems/solutions to use in qualified lead generation.

Problem: The company’s current disparate computer systems require employees to perform redundant data entry, which wastes their time and reduces efficiency.
Solution: Your software product would enable single data entry.

Problem: The company’s managers suspect it is paying too much for unused software licenses, but they don’t know for sure.
Solution: Your license management software tracks all software on a network so companies can determine what software is licensed and being used or not

In addition to having a business problem that your company’s products or services can solve, truly qualified leads must meet four other conditions:

• They must have an established project in play.
• They already have or believe they can find the money to buy a solution to the problem, or they are in the process of developing a budget.
• They plan to purchase within a reasonable amount of time.
• They have the power to get you in front of the appropriate final decision maker(s) when the time is right.

Step 2: Create a sales lead glossary

In addition to defining a qualified lead, consider creating a glossary of standard terms defining what your company considers to be a “suspect,” a “prospect,” an “inquiry,” a “response,” a “qualified sales lead,” a “qualified suspect,” a “qualified prospect” and so forth.

Again, sales, marketing and management need to agree on the definition of each term, as this will help you avoid confusion later during qualified lead generation.
Step 3: Use a lead scoring approach
As you develop your lead qualification criteria, keep in mind that lead scoring can be an effective method of determining which leads are qualified and ready for sales follow up.

To score a lead, assign points based on how well the prospect meets each of your lead-qualification criteria. Consider the following example:

• Funding, ready to go: 5 points
• Budget in formulation: 3 points
• No budget for project: 0 points
• Is the decision maker: 5 points
• Is the recommender: 3 points
• Is an influencer: 1 point
• Has a clear need for product: 5 points
• Plans to buy within six months: 5 points
• Plans to buy in one year or later: 1 point
• Plans to buy $50,000 of product: 5 points
• Plans to buy less than $100 of product: 0 points

To score the lead, add up all the points. Then, for example, those with 20 or more points are determined to be qualified sales leads; you should send them to your sales force.

Step 4: Drive sales opportunities with teamwork,

Meet with your peers in marketing, your company’s sales executives and your senior managers to learn about their definition of qualified sales leads. Use the lead-qualification criteria and scoring examples mentioned earlier in this article as discussion starters. Distill what you learn into a draft definition and run it by all the participants for further discussion and approval. If there is still disagreement, let your company’s senior sales management make the final decision.

With marketing, sales and management all speaking the same qualified sales leads language, your company can pull together to target and nurture the most promising leads. And boost sales and revenue as the result.

M. H. “Mac” McIntosh is one of America’s leading B2B marketing and sales consultants and an expert on sales leads. Put Mac to work for you as a marketing speaker or for business-to-business marketing consulting. SIGN UP NOW FOR A FREE: Business Marketing Newsletter

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