The House Doesn’t Always Win: How a Compiled List Can Dramatically Improve Your Company’s House List

The goal of marketers and salespeople is to get the word about your company out to as many people as possible in order to find potential leads, so marketers are always looking to market to more people. As such, marketers might want to search for resources outside of their company to help them find potential clients. After all, when a company keeps an internal list of customers, it’s likely to be composed of people they’ve done business with before and people who’ve already inquired about your business.  As such, a company might look into purchasing a compiled list, which gathers names from various sources and sorts them into categorized lists in order to help businesses get matched with potential clients. For the agriculture business, companies like US Farm Data compile lists of farmers, for example, so that manufacturers of things like farm equipment, crop fertilizer, can market specifically toward farmers who will likely need their products instead of marketing to a broader population, most of which have no need for their services. Compiled lists from sources like US Farm Data can provide not only more names of and important data on potential customers, but also can help fill in any errors in their own records as well. 

Compiled Lists vs House Lists

Your company probably already has its own list of clients and leads that it contacts with some regularity, that is, your house list. So if you’ve already got a list to choose from, why purchase a compiled list from an outside company? While house lists are by nature one of the most useful lists for a business since anyone who is on the list has already expressed interest in your business, they are often relatively small lists and can contain information that is incorrect or out of date. This is where compiled lists can be incredibly useful. As a representative from US Farm Data put it,

“Compiled lists are a great complement to a client’s internal or in-house file, mainly because they offer clients more names, enrich the client’s files, and spark more ideas for their business.

 

A compiled database, such as USFD’s, provides clients more names than what they have internally. More names = more opportunities which = more sales. USFD can suppress a client’s internal database from theirs so the client receives only names that are new to them.

 

A client’s file might also have inconsistencies in it and missing key data points, such as first and last name, company name, phone number, address, email address and more. By using outside compiled files, clients are able to enrich their own internal files and make them more valuable.

 

An outside compiled database can also spark other ideas to grow the client’s business. For instance, a compiled source may have additional verticals to the one the client wants, but similar enough to expand their reach. Clients may be introduced to a whole other market they never thought of.”

Compiled lists can work wonders for a company’s marketing team by supplementing and completing their in-house lists, but their use doesn’t stop there.

Marketing Analytics:

In addition to these benefits, the information gathered from a compiled list can also bolster your company’s marketing analytics. Every corrected inconsistency makes your analysis more accurate, and having accurate data is the key to doing business in the information age. Without accurate data you might misinterpret who you should be marketing to, or miscalculate the most effective ways to market to a particular group. Without proper data for your marketing analytics, it’s difficult to say for sure whether or not your marketing strategies are generating revenue and profit, so having as accurate data as possible is essential. Your marketing strategies would be much less effective than they would be otherwise because you wouldn’t know what’s working and what isn’t. 

Conclusion:

A compiled list is an incredibly powerful tool that companies of all kinds can benefit from. Those in the agriculture field can use them to get connected with potential customers that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to connect with, gather data that they can use to know what to market to particular customers, and use that data to determine what the best way to market their products are.