If only the reality of business in an increasingly competitive industry were so simple and straight forward! The truth is, of course, that lead generation – finding the right customers at the right time and identifying them as willing enough to seek a more detailed, active sales pitch from you – can often prove difficult, time-consuming and expensive. You might care to consider, therefore, whether this is something that you could more reliably and more cost-effectively leave to the experts.

Call in the experts

We pride ourselves in being the experts in generating live leads. It is an expertise that has made us a leading provider of live leads to small and medium-sized businesses in the UK – we provide more than 3,500 live leads every month to the commercial insurance industry alone, for example, and have the ability to bring our lead generation expertise to any business sector.

Pre-qualified, live leads in real time

The service we offer allows you to concentrate on what you do best, leaving our experienced team of telemarketers to deliver the leads direct to your office. Pre-qualified, live leads in real time – just what does that mean?

• Pre-qualified – your business time is precious and you’ll want to devote the best part of it to dealing with those calls most likely to result in a sale. Pre-qualification, therefore, is a way of ensuring that any enquiries we forward to your office are from callers meeting the criteria we have agreed with you in advance (these “rules” can be as rigorous or as flexible as you choose);
• Live leads – the caller is actively looking the goods or services you supply, has called to make just such an enquiry and has met the pre-qualification criteria we have jointly agreed;
• Real time – just as the term suggests, our telemarketers are working in “real time” lead generation. That is to say that each lead they generate represents a caller who is currently on the telephone line and can momentarily be put on hold while confirmation is sought from your own office that the caller can be put through to you, so that you can take his or her order.

The experience

Buying in the services of professional telemarketers, of course, includes the experience they have already obtained in the market place in which your business operates – in our case it is 16 successful years’ of just such experience across a range of different markets.

The market

The markets successfully targeted by telemarketing are as diverse as they are competitive. Our telemarketing team has experience across the board, with a proven track record founded in our early successes in lead-generation for the commercial insurance sector (arranging cover for a myriad of small businesses from pubs, shops, restaurants and hotels, to offices, landlord-owned properties, and commercial vehicles). Today, however, those same telemarketing skills are put to equally effective use across an even wider range of business sectors.

The data

The Business Octopus solution has become the source for one of the UK’s biggest supply of live leads to businesses, not only because of the experience and expertise of our team of telemarketers, but also because of the extensive and comprehensive range of data we maintain about a range of different markets and their customers.

Our proven success in lead generation is in no small part due, for example, to the more than three million business records and forty million consumer records which we maintain and keep up to date. But it is not only the ability to identify and contact this huge pool of potential customers. Each record is detailed enough to contain the full postal address, telephone number, and email address of millions of businesses and consumers, together with additional data that will help you segment the market in order to focus your sales drive towards the richest seams.

The work

Armed with all the above resources, together with a thorough understanding of your own business aims and objectives, our own telemarketers can ensure that the hard, time-consuming and expensive work of lead generation is taken off your hands and safely put into those of the professionals.

The raw data

There is no special magic or mystery to consumer data lists, of course – they are relatively simple and straight forward. At their heart are the all-important contact details of every potential customer in the list – typically a contact telephone number and full postal address, including the postcode. Increasingly – and especially in the fast-moving and highly competitive world of just about any business – consumer email addresses are also highly-prized for use in online marketing campaigns.

Segmented data

What makes this raw data far more revealing and potentially more useful to your fundamental goal of increasing sales, however, is the extent to which it can be segmented, or specifically targeted towards those sectors of the consumer market most closely matching your customer profiles.

That is why we invest the time and effort not only into understanding the way your business works and the typical profiles of the customers to whom you are pitching your products, but also into collecting additional data such as:

• Lifestyle information;
• Family information, such as marital status and the number of any children;
• Employment status and income;
• Home ownership status, such as mortgage commitments and details of any other borrowing;
• Leisure interests and hobbies; and
• Purchasing history, whether by direct purchases, by mail order or online.

All of this, of course, allows a considerable degree of market segmentation and the use by you of only that data most likely to result in increasing sales.

Up to date data

In addition, we recognise that consumer data lists are only as good as the current accuracy of the details they contain. Therefore, we ensure that every entry has been contacted at least within the past six months in order to confirm that it still represents the customer’s current contact details.

Although accurate and reliable business data thus frequently provides a core source of information, it may often prove difficult, time-consuming and expensive using your own business resources to compile it. An increasingly cost effective way of gaining access to just the sort of information on which your business relies, therefore, is to contract out the service – thus passing on to an experienced and professional third party all the hard work involved.

The Business Octopus service, for example, provides just such a facility. There is a wealth of information upon which your dealings with partner businesses can be developed and refined through the more than three million individual business records that we maintain. What’s more, the quality of that data is assured by the work that we have already put in to sorting it, so that a huge volume of information is readily and practically available to you without further effort or investment on your part.

When you purchase business data lists in this way, you can rest assured that the information is:

• Exhaustive – we can draw on more than 3 million business records and over 40 million consumer records. In the case of the former, these will give you access not only to the address and telephone numbers of the businesses concerned but named contacts, too, together with their position in the company, along with brief business profiles. Consumer records also include telephone numbers and addresses, but also important profiling information such as employment status and income, purchasing histories, lifestyle information, and whether they are home owners, mortgage holders or borrowers.
• Up to date – there is nothing more frustrating or misleading than business data lists that are inaccurate or out of date. Of course, businesses and individuals change their addresses and telephone numbers and that’s why we go out of our way to ensure our data remains up to the minute by ensuring that every contact record has been contacted within the past six months.

For example, if you are in the business of insurance brokerage – especially if you maintain an online presence – one way of compiling your active customer profiles and insurance providers, contact details, and records of communication, of course, is to build up your own database laboriously as you continue to do business. Not only is this time-consuming, however, but also expensive (since it potentially takes your eye off the ball of what you do best; namely concluding the sales that best boost your business’ bottom line).

Instead of diverting your own precious resources in this way, therefore, why not contract out the work to the professionals and, in the process, plumb a far richer seam. List brokers can help to deliver up to the minute analyses of just who your business partners and customers might be and just where to find them.

Take The Business Octopus solution, for example. Drawing on more than 16 years’ of experience, three million business records and over 40 million consumer details, we can produce lists specifically tailored to your own business needs. Lists of business and potential customer contacts can be generated that give you data that is:

• Market oriented – there is little point in your having recourse to merely random lists, of course. Our lists of relevant businesses and consumer data are developed in close consultation with your enterprise, so that you receive only those market leads directly relevant to your business;
• Accurate data – reliable information on all the business-to-business dealings called upon by your own enterprise, together with equally dependable contact information on all your potential customers;
• Up to date – as important as the accuracy of the original data is the fact that it is kept thoroughly up to date. Once again, this is where the professionalism of experienced list brokers comes in, by helping to ensure that the information on which your marketing relies draws on only the current and most up to date data.

We have more than 16 years of successful telemarketing experience – an experience that we are well-placed to share with you and which could prevent your own business from having to re-invent the wheel. Instead, our experienced, top-grade tele-consultants can work alongside you, understanding your business requirements, your business offering and your customer base, in order to develop with you a telemarketing campaign (or campaigns) designed specifically for your business.

As you can imagine, the services required by one business in the insurance market will probably differ from any other. The services we offer remain entirely flexible – in order to match your own business needs – therefore, but might typically include some or all of the following telemarketing services:

• Lead generation;
• Appointment setting;
• Database cleaning;
• Re-activation of static customer accounts and the winning back of dormant customers;
• Sales; and
• Cross-selling and up-selling.

Even less effort

The effort, time and cost of successful telemarketing really can be taken almost completely out of your hands by employing The Business Octopus call centre staff. Once set up to match the parameters of your own business, our staff can help you to generate leads in real time and pre-qualify each call to ensure that you handle only those calls that match the profile according to strict criteria that you have previously agreed with us.

This allows members of our experienced call centre staff to put potential leads on hold while they call your office for confirmation that you will be happy to take the call. Once you agree, the call can then be transferred to you, so that you can prepare the quotation that will hopefully lead to a sale.

For our insurance customers, pre-qualification of such calls ensures that all leads will be within 30 days of the caller needing to renew their insurance when they will be actively seeking a quote. The lead we pass to you is for your exclusive use only and will not be passed to any other insurance provider.

Because our customers are enjoying an exclusive feed of live feeds, they report that they are presently issuing quotes on 90% of the leads referred to them, whilst between 30% and 40% of those leads are converted into sales.

To have a successful telemarketing campaign, you need the most up to date information available on individual business-to-business or business-to-customer telephone details which is tailored to match your profile.

Certainly, knowing just who to call, of course, generally relies on rather more than a simple shot in the dark – it demands a knowledge of your market and potential customer base, the profiles of your individual customers, and, obviously, the specific telephone numbers to call.

Although this is usually the sort of telephone data that practically any business will build up over time, it is a laborious, time-consuming and costly process, and still the data rapidly becomes out-dated as numbers change, business goals and objectives diversify, and customers’ needs develop.

So, how do you ensure that your telemarketing campaign reaches the right people?

Among the many business services we provide, we can:

• clean up your existing database;
• provide our own relevant telephone data;
• provide you with pre-screened leads;
• run your whole telemarketing campaign with fully trained tele-sales staff.

By working closely with your own business, getting “under the skin” of what makes it tick, and understanding the demands of all your present and future clients, we can help to ensure that the telephone data you are using is as extensive as the market has to offer.

Making the data work for you

Once your unique business offering has been understood and the segmentation of your potential customer base analysed, professional services are available that can even take off your hands much of the actual spade work involved in telemarketing.

A company like ours, for example, can draw on own data of more than 3 million business records and 40 million individual consumer details and this is combined with an established record of telemarketing.

We can provide you with live leads. As an experienced telephone data provider, we can carefully screen each call to ensure that it meets the criteria agreed with your business in advance and, so, ensure that you have the opportunity of dealing only with “pre-qualified” enquiries.

Since such lead generation is conducted in real-time, even greater control over the calls you need to field can be achieved by the customer being put on hold by the third party call-centre in order to check with your own business that the call should be put through.

In this way, professionally gathered telephone data is made to work for you, at your own pace and in touch with only those enquiries most likely to represent genuine returns for your business. This means that you only speak to businesses or individual contacts that match your profile, saving you time, effort and money.

These three principles are clearly very closely related and are likely to involve at least the following considerations:

• Acquisition – Customers are needed, of course, if you are successfully to market your goods or your services. The acquisition of an extensive customer base is one of the primary goals of any business enterprise, whatever its size. It is not just the sheer volume of potential customers that is likely to distinguish the successful enterprise, however, but the way that potential market is differentiated, segmented and specifically targeted – so translating potential into actual custom;
• Retention – If you’ve gone to the time, trouble and likely expense of capturing customers in the first place, it makes only good sense to retain as many of them as possible. Once again, this is likely to depend on the effectiveness of your market segmentation and your ability to target the most profitable, long-term sales opportunities. Retaining your customers, however, also relies in the third imperative of cost-effective marketing data – communication;
• Communication – successful marketing relies on your being able to maintain regular and relevant communication with existing, new and potential customers. Whether this is by the more conventional, tried and tested methods of posted mail or use of the contemporary medium of instantaneous contact by email, you will want to be assured that messages actually reach the intended recipients by keeping your marketing data thoroughly up to date.

If you’re running a small to medium sized business, reliable marketing data might prove more important and deliver greater returns than you might imagine. That’s where the service we can provide could prove a genuine boost to both your short and longer-term business prospects within the increasingly competitive insurance market.

How often, though, is the list simply left on the shelf, to be dusted off just a few times each year when new lines need to be announced or when flagging sales need to be revived? How often does that then lead to the frustrating discovery that many of the mailing addresses are no longer in use or that the volume of usable addresses has shrunk to a size that no longer penetrates your potential market?

Amongst the most critical features of any business mailing list is that it is:

• Up to date – the addresses you use are still those being used by the suppliers, customers and clients themselves. Although it might seem to be a statement of the rather obvious, this is something that can easily be overlooked. A decline in the take-up of your business offering is not because of any falling interest, but may simply be because your communications are failing to find their target;
• Relevant – although you might have put considerable effort into building what seems to be an extensive list of mailing addresses, the relevance of each one inevitably changes over time. Clients’ needs and demands are likely to change – old customers fall away and new ones are waiting to be discovered. The result is that your mailing list not only needs to expand with the changing times, but also to become more carefully focused and targeted.

The good news is that we can offer the help you might need in keeping your mailing lists up to date. This means us working closely with you in order to understand your precise business offering, together with the current and future market opportunities available. In this way, you can gain confidence in maintaining mailing lists that are tailored specifically to your business needs and potential, at an affordable cost.

Armed with such email data, your business can maintain a competitive edge by pitching directly to potential customers. The precise terms of your sales pitch, of course, can be whatever you choose to make them. Your reassurance, however, lies in knowing that the message reaches the intended well-targeted audience.

This is where the services we provide can come into their own. Whether it’s business-to-business or business-to-customer sales that you’re after, the features of any data you are likely to take into consideration include:

• Volume – your intended audience might be large or tightly focused, so you’ll be looking for as wide a database as possible. Ours offers up to a million business-to-business email addresses and access to the personal records of some 40 million individual consumers;
• Targeting – to make the most of your announcements to potential customers, of course, you will also be concerned with focusing on particular segments of your market. This segmentation, or targeting, of the most fruitful parts of the market is, once again, something which our type of tailored service can provide;
• Currency – there is little point, of course, in mailing hundreds – let alone thousands – of addresses unless you can be sure that each one is thoroughly up to date and currently in use. The database services you employ, therefore, need to offer the reassurance that the information is regularly tested and maintained completely up to date.

Marketing through the use of large volumes of well-targeted and reliable email data is seen as being one of the most successful ways of earning real returns on your specific and ongoing sales campaigns. Focused in this way, they can deliver far more than a simple shop-front display, laborious door-to-door marketing or the opportunities granted by a limited and less than reliable postal service.

Our email data marketing service can be a cost-effective and eco-friendly way to reach potential relevant customers, so why not get in touch to see how we can assist you in growing your business?