Written by Ryan Ohls, a Market Development Executive at ReachForce.

Before joining ReachForce I was a sales guy with no marketing department.  Knowing how important and effective marketing strategy can be, I set out to try and do my own lead generation. I can remember investing days and days of work on this one project.  As a sales guy, I had a particular interest in automated lead generation (that’s right, sales guys are typically lazy) and had been studying it for months.  I finally grasped the concept of doing it right, I thought.

So, having never been blessed with the spiritual gifts of patience or discernment, I decided my next step was to find and buy a list of 1,200 names to send my message to.  The plan was to do an email blast with an offer to download a new report.

The report looked great – guaranteed to attract plenty of hot prospects, turn them into customers, and make me look like the Dalai Lama.  The email was perfectly crafted, engaging, and sure to catch the eye.  I told my wife to get ready for the commissions to start pouring in.

So, with palms sweating and my reputation at my company completely mortgaged (side note – companies don’t like spending money on things they don’t understand), the time had come for launch.  Three…two…one…CLICK.

Within 15 minutes my mailbox was full!  The response was unbelievable…from “System Administrator, Address Unknown.”  The list of 1200 contacts turned out to be about 60% accurate, at best.

I believe whole-heartedly that a company’s biggest asset are customers and happy ones are even better. I’ll even take that a step further, though.  A sales and marketing person’s biggest asset is a database of FUTURE customers (prospects).

** WARNING – Here comes the ReachForce promotion.  Your prospect database should be 100% accurate, up-to-date, properly targeted, and relevant to your business.  Each name you have listed should be the right person inside the right company.  You’re thinking “in a perfect world…”

If you’re not a ReachForce customer and you’re reading this, here’s a few interesting data points to consider:

• Industry listed (rented) deliver less than a 3% response rate
• Sales people can spend up to 1/3 of their time hunting down the right buyers in a prospect company
• According to Gartner, 30 million people out of the 138 million employed in the US will switch jobs in the next 12 months.
• 2.5 million businesses will move, according to the U.S. Census Bureau

If you’re interested in cleaning up the data you already have, check out this post on Dirty Data.  If you’re interested in hearing how ReachForce can help, please contact me.

Sales people out there – please jump in here, tell your marketing counterparts to help you out and make sure they are marketing to the right people in the right companies so you can spend your time selling, not hunting.