Now this is a minor crisis, since email has a low cost to send. But in the ‘real world’ it costs big: imagine a 0.01% response when you’re using post, or having salesmen do visits or telephone calls by the hour, and the costs are significant. So it actually saves to do a bit of list pruning before – even paying someone to do the pruning for you.
For example, one site I found online, Blueberry Marketing Services, does just that. You provide the contacts, and they make sure the people are still there, and the leads are current (obviously, you’ll get poor response calling on people who have left the company!) Called Database Cleaning, this type of work can get rid of the stale contacts, and that means every call made thereafter is worth more to a business.
Of course, that’s just one aspect of a company like this. For example, they also do lead generation – actually doing the initial calls for you – which means you can get by with a smaller sales force (after all, you need fewer people when they aren’t cold calling).
What are the benefits of someone doing the cold calls for you? If you’ve ever talked to a telemarketer, then you know that good ones are few and far between. By using professionals, you pay for their expertise, but that expertise can make the difference between getting stopped cold at the reception desk – or getting put through to the president.
Companies like Blueberry exist because sales is hard – and they succeed because they can do something well that few people can (or want) to do. It’s worth keeping in mind the next time you’d like to weed out unresponsive leads – or generate new ones.
