B2B Prospect Lists

Mailing Lists for Housing and Economic Development Businesses

The right leads are a must-have when selling. Ultimately, housing and economic development business contact lists are especially helpful in the never-ending search for more sales.

Everyone knows that housing and economic development business sales are all about relationships -- and good leads are the seeds for great relationships.

Typically, companies that sell to housing and economic development businesses find it hard to meet their lead generation requirements using in-house resources. As a result, solving the lead gen challenge is top of mine for many sales managers and business owners.

Use Your Lead Lists for Both Marketing and Sales

If you limit the use of housing and economic development business lead lists to direct mail and cold calling, you're handicapping the return on your investment. A quality lead list can serve as a collaborative resource for sales, marketing and other business divisions. For example, after you have acquired a lead list that has been filtered by area code, your marketing division could test a handful of marketing concepts in each area. If the marketing division's efforts are coordinated with the sales division, you could then determine which marketing concepts have the highest conversion rates in each area before launching a full-scale, one-size-fits-all campaign.

Lead Generation Tactics

Not surprisingly, housing and economic development business lead generation strategies are extremely diverse. While some businesses rely on informal networking, others conduct formal prospecting campaigns through trade associations, business lists and even online searches. The majority of companies use a combination of strategies, but struggle to automate the process.

Lead lists eliminate the unpredictability of lead generation and deliver leads that have been compiled from the best possible sources. Beyond that, purchased lead lists generally have a higher conversion rate than the ones that are acquired through in-house processes.

Criteria for Lead List Vendor Selection

In our experience, third-party lead list providers are definitely not created equal and Experian Business services stand out from the crowd. What sets them apart is that Experian has all of the qualities we look for in a good lead list provider, including the following:

  • Large database. We think it's important for businesses that sell to housing and economic development businesses to cull their leads from an expansive business database. Why? Because more contacts equates to a higher volume of truly qualified leads.
  • Updated contacts. Contact updating is lead list 101. Long contact lists are worthless unless they are regularly updated for accuracy.
  • Delivery speed. When your business needs a new supply of housing and economic development business leads, you can't afford to to incur vendor backlogs. Good list providers respond to client requests in hours or less.

Creative Ways to Get Sales Leads

Finding new customers by buying low-cost sales leads from mailing list and lead database brokers is a no-brainer. In addition to that, try to brainstorm on other ways to improve lead generation.

For example, try calling up a peer company that sells to the same market as you do but is not a direct competitor. Ask them if they are interested in swapping leads. This is a great way to get access to leads that may not be in the lead databases at the big business list sellers.

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