Jack Meisinger
Thinking of subscribing to a market intelligence service like Barbour ABI or Glenigan in order to find some new leads for your building product business?
Here are 5 questions to ask before jumping into it.
Do you have the money for it?
It’s true that construction market intelligence isn’t cheap, and it can take a bit of time to start showing a return. However, if you want to make money you have to spend money. But you don’t want to spend it on the wrong things.
You’ll make money if your subscription is part of a larger, proven strategy. If you don’t have an implementation plan and sales/marketing strategy, then it may turn out to be just what you fear: a punt without a plan.
Avoid buyers remorse – think about how you’ll use it before you get it.
What is your search criteria going to be?
You want to make sure you’re going to get a good amount of contacts from your subscription. Talk to a representative and see how many projects turn up for your search criteria.
One quick tip: make sure your searches are sufficiently broad. You limit the amount of results by being unnecessarily specific. For instance if you search for jobs using a specific material, then you’ll miss all the prospects who may use it given the chance.
A good way to check you’ll getting the right type of contacts for your criteria is to get a sample search. Check out Barbour ABI’s “10 Free Leads”. This offer allows you to test the quality of your leads that meet your search criteria.
How will you follow up the leads?
There are a few solutions for this. Some of them require more budget or time than others.
Sales representative – does your sales team have capacity for additional leads? If so, then this will be a rich resource for them. If they are already stacked, you may need to look at hiring addition team members.
Call centres – there are call centre services which can call your Barbour ABI leads for you. This may be of interest to you, or not. Hiring someone from outside your business to represent your business is risky, but these guys are professionals.
Project Prospecta – shameless plug. We are an automated marketing service that warms prospects and delivers hot leads. This is a perfect solution for many of the subscribers we talk to. We can target all good-fit prospects in Barbour and reach out to every one of them via email marketing. This way you make good use of the broad targeting in Barbour, but can narrow it right down to those who are actually interested.
Do you have a robust CRM to help nurture these leads in the future?
You’re going to need a robust CRM (Customer Relationship Manager software) to store contacts, log the history of contact and conversations, and even automate workflows for prospects.
Add all your contacts to your contact database and continue reach out to them from time to time with email marketing or phone calls.
This is one way to make sure the value of these construction market intelligence doesn’t slip through your fingers. These leads can continue to be nurtured, and may develop into profitable relationships in the future.
A contact database of high-quality, good-fit contacts is worth the subscription to construction market intelligence by itself.
Have you gotten the team on board?
There’s nothing worse than paying for a software or service, only to have it sit unused on your teams computers.
If you’ve thought through a plan of how you’ll use it, you can motivate the team to adopt it. If you don’t have a plan, the rest of the team probably won’t know what to do with it either. Don’t just drop it on them and hope they make good use of it. Lead the way in utilizing it, or give that responsibility to a member of the team to develop, implement, and champion a use-strategy.
Conclusion
Construction Market Intelligence like Barbour ABI and Glenigan can be much more valuable than your annual subscription. It’s just going to take a little bit of thought about how to make sure you get the most value out of it.
If you’d like to book a demo of Project Prospecta and explore it’s potential for your business, just schedule a demo below.