Admit it, you've thought about buying address lists to boost your B2B sales, right? No problem—the same probably goes for most companies in the B2B sector. But do you know what the advantages are to buying addresses and what you should look out for when buying B2B address lists?
Where we use B2B addresses is quite diverse, and companies buy addresses for cold calling, mailings, social selling, or even ads and advertising on LinkedIn/Social media.
You can find a multitude of offers online where you can buy address lists for B2B sales. However, not every source is legitimate and there are often more intelligent solutions than just simply buying company addresses—digital tools and sales intelligence, for example.
In our guide, we will give you all the necessary information for you to be able to safely and successfully buy addresses for your B2B business.
Here's Why It's Worth Buying Address Lists for B2B Sales
There are lots of good reasons that support buying addresses. The benefits are clear: Addressing your B2B sales or marketing campaigns is made easier and even more personal through buying address lists. These lists give you access to things like a correct company address, contact person/decision-maker name, telephone number and email address.
If you want more reasons, we've got them, so let’s check out the 6 most important reasons in favor of buying B2B addresses.
When you buy high-quality company addresses you can:
1. Accelerate New Customer Acquisition
It's not all that easy to acquire new customers. In the world of B2B, many resources are needed to obtain addresses of potentially interested parties. But by purchasing B2B addresses, you no longer have to spend hours searching the web for suitable companies, possible contacts, and their addresses. You can save yourself an enormous amount of time and energy! Just convert the research effort into your hourly rate. This makes it very easy to determine whether it's worth buying address lists, instead of starting the painstaking search yourself.
2. Expand Your Client Base and Sales Territory
Even if you already have many satisfied existing customers and your sales pipeline is full to the brim, it's never a bad idea to put out your feelers. Who knows what might happen? Maybe you will stumble across companies that weren't previously on your radar. New customers and sales territories can open up new opportunities for you. When purchasing company addresses, you get a broad selection of potential new customers that you wouldn't have otherwise been aware of.
Keep in mind: You only profit from these advantages to a limited extent through the purchase of addresses. But when you invest in sales intelligence, you can be sure to secure yourself these advantages. We'll discuss exactly what sales intelligence means below.
3. Receive Clear Market Insights
If you don't just buy a data set, but use a whole company database, you can get deeper insights into the market. How large are the companies that you plan to work with? What is the competition doing? With comprehensive online tools such as sales intelligence tools, you can answer all these questions in just a few clicks.
4. Specify Your Marketing Measures With Sales Trigger Events
With comprehensive data records, or better still, with a complete online database, you can conceptualize your marketing campaigns more accurately. Let's say you distribute software for a chatbot, and you get a company address list that includes companies that offer customer service or a hotline. These companies may want to complement their existing offer with your chatbot to provide their customers with an even better customer experience! It doesn't get more targeted than that.
Source: Echobot Sales Intelligence Tool
So-called sales intelligence tools—the automated version of address buying—offer the opportunity to search for trigger events. This way, you can find out before the competition if there has been a change in management. Such sales trigger events offer you the perfect conversation opener and reveal the right time for your approach.
5. Minimizing Scatter Losses in Campaigns
Scatter losses happen when you address a target audience in marketing campaigns, for example, who doesn't really fit your business demographic. Of course, scatter losses are unavoidable, and a target audience won't ever fit 100%. That would be too good to be true, wouldn't it?
However, if scatter losses are too high, the ratio of resources spent on a lead is no longer ideal. Luckily, you can buy address lists and to keep your scatter losses low. Only purchase company addresses that fit your ideal customer profile (ICP) and only approach target audiences that actually suit your offer.
6. Define Your Buyer Persona
Today, it is impossible to imagine B2B marketing without buyer personas. A buyer persona describes—in comparison to ideal customer profiles—not an ideal customer directly, but the buyer of your product within a company. So, before you buy addresses, you should know your ICP and buyer persona to obtain effective company addresses.
With address lists or a sales intelligence tool that offers a multitude of filter methods, you can then work out your buyer persona more concretely. Who does your offer attract the most in the company? Which department is involved in a purchase decision? Sales intelligence tools in particular can help you define your buyer persona—but also your ICP—as precisely as possible.
Source: www.thebpowermba.com
Where Can I Buy Suitable Addresses for B2B Sales?
Generally speaking, there are lots of different ways to buy B2B addresses—but not every way is ideal. We'll show you the most popular providers and our recommendations.
Classic Method: Buying Addresses from a List Broker
The classic form of purchasing company addresses is through a list broker. With this, you select your industry and often also a location and receive a catalog with company addresses. Depending on the provider and the costs, the information received is more or less extensive. Most of the time you get the name of the company, the address, or the contact person in the company for your money. Even if such packages seem worth the money, they can bring more disadvantages than you might think. For example, the data may be outdated, not particularly comprehensive, or simply wrong.
But don’t worry! There are other, more intelligent solutions available. Modern B2B sales and clever B2B marketing departments prefer to rely on software and artificial intelligence (AI) to obtain detailed, up-to-date, and complete company addresses.
Smarter: Sales Intelligence Provides Relevant B2B Addresses
Sales intelligence is the term of the moment when it comes to high-quality company addresses. This term refers to digital tools or software that help you find and target potential customers.
The Sales Intelligence Tool Echobot
Sales intelligence tools, or SI tools, collect and analyze various business data from the internet and make them available to you in a compact form. As a rule, such software is based on AI and machine learning, so it not only prepares all the information for you in clear profiles but also adds trigger events to an address—such as a foreign expansion. Even outdated data no longer plays a role as crawling technologies automatically ensure that up-to-date information is available.
As previously mentioned, these tools can save you a lot of work in the long run. The cherry on the cake: You get B2B data that you may not normally have come across or would have had to spend countless hours researching. SI tools are also able to help you create your buyer persona with their extensive data—classic address packages simply can't come close.
Another plus is any of these technologies can be integrated into existing CRM systems. This way you can design your work smarter and don't have to jump back and forth between tools.
Our Recommendation: Echobot
Echobot's Sales Intelligence Platform goes further than just buying addresses. You obtain an intelligent B2B database with over 60 million contacts and over 20 million companies from all over Europe. This means that in addition to an extensive company search, you can also access other intelligent features such as B2B lookalikes, trigger events or lead alerts. You can "clone" your best customers and never miss an opportune moment for an approach, or a lead again.
A View From the Sales Intelligence Tool Echobot
This is What You Should Consider When Buying Address Lists
If you want to buy company addresses, you should always look carefully at different providers. Not every provider is reputable and when an offer seems too good to be true, it probably is. Here are some things to be aware of when buying addresses in B2B sales:
Buy Current Addresses
What's the use in buying addresses that aren't current anymore? B2B addresses that are several months old will be of little use to you, as you never know whether the company still exists, or whether the contact person is still correct. Normally, cheap address lists are inaccurate.
Buy GDPR-Compliant Data
It is often assumed that the new GDPR only applies to the B2C sector. But as soon as you process personal data, this regulation naturally also applies in B2B. One criterion that can give you security regarding the GDPR is: Make sure that the B2B data, the addresses that you buy, are also publicly available. Some providers, for example, provide you with mobile numbers for direct contacts— even if it is very tempting, caution is advised, especially with such "personal" data. If you do not know exactly how the provider has obtained this data or if you do not have the consent of the person concerned, it is already illegal for you to store this data.
Source: Echobot
Buy Complete Address Lists
Which types of data are relevant to you? Check beforehand whether the provider can provide it. What use is a company name and address when your sales department usually acquires new customers via email or social media? You would be missing the most important information. If you want to contact a company that you don't yet know, it is important to know who the contact person is or how big a company is. The more information you have, the better you can decide whether the company suits you and your services.
Look For Flexibility in Filters & Lists
When buying address lists, we are talking about static B2B data. If you use software, on the other hand, it is "dynamic" data. What does that mean? Static data remains unchanged, even if the contact person changes or the company moves in the meantime. You get a data set once and it inevitably becomes outdated and unusable over time. The advantage of flexible or dynamic B2B data that you obtain with sales intelligence is that it is permanently adjusted and updated. New information is added automatically and can be used according to your marketing and sales strategies. That way, you have full flexibility!
There are many more ways to find suitable target companies than just using the parameters of company size, sector, or postcode. Of course, these filters help you to throw out some unsuitable companies. But there are even more accurate settings! With sales intelligence tools such as Echobot, you can search for companies with specific keywords on a website that are highly relevant to you and your field. This way, you will find the exact companies that mention this keyword and can convince them with an individual and targeted pitch.
Is it Expensive to Buy Addresses?
There's no 'yes or no' answer to that question. If you look around online, you will find that there is sometimes an enormous price difference when it comes to "buying company addresses".
As previously mentioned, cheap isn't always the best option as these offers often contain outdated and incorrect B2B addresses. Otherwise, the price depends on your requirements. In concrete terms, this means: The more information you want to have about the company, the more expensive the purchase of company addresses will be.
You're probably asking yourself now how much information you might actually need. Counter question: What information do you need to make contact with a company? If you only receive the address and the company name, you can only contact the company in a very impersonal way. Companies often receive messages like this, so your chances of getting a response are rather slim.
So, if you are clear about exactly the information you need, then you also know what information the address broker has to provide. Of course, more information costs more money. Here you have to weigh up for yourself how much you want to invest in the purchase of company addresses.
Is it Legal to Buy Address Lists?
Although it is legal to buy B2B address lists, you have to make sure that these are exclusively B2B addresses and no personal data. Otherwise, you will come into conflict with the GDPR very easily. Although the GDPR also applies to companies, there are some exceptions: The GDPR is divided into recitals and articles. This means that if it is not clear whether the article also applies to you or whether there are certain exceptions, the recitals are used.
The decisive factor for B2B address purchasing is recital number 14, where all legal persons (i.e., companies such as GmbHs or AGs) are excluded from protection. That means that you're able to buy company addresses completely legally. However, we advise against sending mass emails. Here, the risk of receiving a warning letter is very high.
Find out more about GDPR and why it matters
Is it Also Possible to Only Buy Email Addresses for B2B Sales?
The idea of only buying email addresses at first seems quite logical: Most contacts in the B2B sector today are made exclusively via email. So why do I need any other information? However, as you have already read above, more information is always useful when buying addresses.
You should know the name of the company and the contact person at the very least so that you can react quickly in case they respond. Otherwise, just having email addresses are of little use to you. This way you can target a decision-maker at the perfect time and address them directly with an individual message.
Tip: Please note that emails with advertising content without the express consent of the recipient are prohibited under Section 7 (2) No. 3 of the German UWG. In practice, the double opt-in procedure is used to obtain consent.
If you only buy email addresses, you run a certain risk. Sending the same message to a large number of these email addresses, can easily look like spam—and you can be cautioned. Not to mention that the success rate with this method is very low. Another risk is the purchasing of addresses itself: Providers who only sell email addresses are often acting on the border of legality, as their data is used for mass mailings. So, if you see such an offer, it is better not to take it.
Tip: How about another postal advertising campaign? If you send mail to a company address, you are not only GDPR compliant but you will probably also be remembered. Because honestly, who still sends letters?
Conclusion: Buying Addresses Was Yesterday’s News. Nowadays, People Stream B2B Data!
Buying company addresses is a simple but rather outdated way to expand your database. It's much more modern, elegant and comprehensive using sales intelligence tools such as Echobot—here you stream up-to-date and high-quality B2B data exactly when you need it and at an uncompromising quality.
This eliminates the need to buy a fixed set of B2B addresses, which are static, inflexible, and error-prone. With modern software solutions, like with Echobot you also get other useful features like sales trigger events, B2B lookalikes, and lead alerts. This way you can personalize your acquisition perfectly!
In addition, this solution includes many other tools that make your marketing particularly smart. You can filter companies according to certain criteria, be informed when a change in management is imminent and much more.
So, are you still buying addresses? Or have you already started to stream?