Stop Wasting Leads: How to Find Accurate Contact Info

There are many things that go into optimizing your company’s efficiency, but a good place to start is with lead generation. Leads are essentially the fire starters of your business.

Identifying potential customers and making contact with them is the first step in the sales process, and the better you do at this, the more profitable your business will be.

A big part of optimizing your lead generation process is finding accurate contact information. How many times have you compiled a list of what you thought were quality leads only to get loads of “undelivered” emails or non-working phone numbers in response? Probably too many to count.

To stop wasting these leads and maximize your efficiency, here are some tips to try and help you find accurate contact information.

The power of accurate contact information

Gathering accurate contact information on your leads takes some extra effort. It may require some additional upfront costs, but this is well worth it when you consider the impact on your business.

To give you an idea, let’s say, on a list of 1,000 contacts, 20% of them have bad contact information. This automatically narrows your list down to 800 contacts. If you have a 10% response rate and a 2% overall conversion rate, your list of 800 contacts will produce around 16 conversions from about 80 responses.

The impact of cleaning up your contact information

By eliminating this bad contact information, you can bump that number of responses to 100 and conversions to 50, which is more than double your previous result.

That’s without doing anything else. You haven’t even tweaked your message, personalized your outreach or run targeted ads. All you did is make sure the people and businesses you’re contacting actually exist.

Of course, these numbers are purely hypothetical, but if you ran a similar analysis using actual data from your sales teams, you’d find there’s tremendous opportunity just in cleaning up your leads list.

How to get accurate contact information: B2B leads

If you’re going after B2B leads, it’s often easier to find contact information than if you’re trying to contact individuals. Companies usually want to be contacted, so they are more likely to provide this information.

However, contacting someone directly is often more effective than filling out a contact form or emailing or calling a general information line.

Here are some tips that may help you do that:

Start at a Company’s Website

A simple first step for verifying a lead’s contact information is to just head over to the company website. Most businesses publish information about their staff and provide email addresses or phone numbers you can use.

This is a good source of information because companies tend to keep this information updated for clients. So, you can find the contact details you need.

Check social media

Businesses, individuals, governments: Almost everyone is using social media in some capacity. If you have a company or individual name and want to find the best way to contact them, a great place to start your search is different social media platforms.

For businesses, LinkedIn is likely going to be the best place to start. Because it’s specifically set up for creating a professional network, the information you find there is going to be more accurate. You may even want to use this platform as your means of contacting a lead.

LinkedIn can also tell you a lot about the organization you’re trying to reach, such as organizational structure, and this can also help point you toward the right person and their information.

Other social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram can also produce results, or they may turn into viable means of communication themselves. It all depends on the business and how much information they want to make public.

Review sites

Review sites such as Yelp or Google Reviews are great because companies make themselves quite available on these platforms. A bad review can be devastating, so businesses publish contact information for people to voice their concerns.

You may even want to sift through responses to past customer reviews to see if anyone left a company phone number or email address.

Lead generation services

Ultimately, one of the best things you can do to get accurate contact information is to pay for it. The methods discussed above can be useful, but they also take a lot of time. If you’re doing it in-house, this is time and money that could be spent actually pursuing the leads.

Fortunately, there are a lot of services that do all this background research for you and produce a list of qualified leads, meaning the contact information is real and verified.

You can go two routes here. The first is to hire a lead generation company. This is ideal when you’re going after a very specific customer base, one that’s hard to find doing regular searches. These are also good when targeting local customers that might not show up in national databases.

Online lead databases

The other option is to use a lead database such as PeopleSmart . These tools have been the leaders in lead generation for a reason and are well worth their subscription prices.

When going this route, make sure to use a web-based tool. Contact information is changing all the time, so it’s important to use a tool that updates frequently.

While it might seem counterintuitive to pay for leads, the return on investment can be really worth it. Remember, if you’re doing this yourself, it’s going to take a lot of time, which also cuts into the potential value of each lead.

Stop wasting your sales team’s time by having them look up leads and contact information and instead provide them with a curated list of qualified leads they can use to pursue actual customers.

Getting contact information from individuals

If you’re not in the B2B space and are instead looking to track down individuals, things can be a little more difficult.

People don’t make their information as readily available as businesses do. The best thing you can do to get quality information is to convince people to give their information to you directly.

Here are some tips that may help you do that:

Practice inbound marketing

Inbound marketing is the practice of attracting people to your business by providing them with content they want or helping them solve some of their problems or pain points.

It’s in contrast to outbound marketing, which puts content in front of your audiences no matter their interest level. Television and radio advertising is a great example of outbound marketing; you’re getting it whether you want it or not. It’s useful for building awareness and educating, but it doesn’t do much for relationships.

Inbound marketing works because it helps build trust. The idea is that you provide some sort of value to potential customers to help form a connection and then leverage that connection into a business relationship.

One of the ways you do this is to get their contact information and reach out to them directly. Because they trust you, or see the value you provide, they are more willing to give that information.

For example, you could write an eBook or white paper that helps your audience solve a problem they have. The material is free, but to access it, they need to enter an email address. You now have some verified contact information you can use.

CRM tools

Another good way to get contact information from people is to use a Customer Relationship Management tool—ideally one that integrates into your website. All these tools do is keep profiles on your current and prospective customers so you can have all of their contact information in one place.

Tools that integrate into your website are much more powerful because they can scrape information you might not be able to get yourself.

For example, say someone reached out to you asking a question about one of your products. Then, a year later, they visited your site and looked at some of your products but didn’t make a purchase.

A good CRM tool will identify this and will put all the relevant information in one place. Then, someone from your sales team (or you can also automate this) can reach out to that person with a personalized message, which is much more likely to generate a response than an unsolicited call or email.

Use people search tools

Lastly, if you have a person’s name but don’t have any contact information, you can often find this information on the web. You can try a basic Google search, but this doesn’t always produce the results you want.

Instead, there are tools you can use that will scrape a number of databases to find whatever contact information is out there, and if it’s available, you can use it to reach out and pursue a business relationship.

Start chasing quality leads

Identifying quality leads is essential if you want to pursue an efficient sales strategy. While there are a number of different things that go into finding good leads, good contact information is the best place to start.

Use these strategies to help you improve the quality of your leads list so you can start chasing more probable prospects and dramatically improve your numbers and overall profitability.