Demand Generation: Lead Gen Lists Are Not Enough
If you rely only on lists, you miss 80% of what brings demand generation success.
Relying heavily on lists is like a sugar rush. But this sort of diet is not sustainable, scalable or healthy for growing sales results. Let’s look at all the components needed to get great demand generation results.
1. Good Lists
Lists are the lifeblood of outbound demand generation. They power the outbound calling and marketing campaigns which can bring 50-70% of total pipeline.
But lists alone are not enough for successful demand generation.
Here’s why you should have these other components in place:
2. Database Quality
Have you ever bought a list and found out you already had 40% of the names? Or did you realize after buying that you were missing important attributes like fleet size or vehicle type? This is why you should invest in building a database, and maintaining data cleansing.
3. Market Insights
Before purchasing lists, how well do you really know your market? Some segments might be great at conversion, others at shortening time-to-close, and yet others at high average revenue. In-depth market analysis can help you select the right lists.
4. Sales & Marketing Process
Have you had the campaign ready to go, and rushed to buy leads? A lot of people do this. So what’s the problem? The list you buy may not be the perfect fit with the campaign objective. You might think the list failed, but the list could have produced better for another campaign.
5. Performance Measurement
If you bought list after list, and felt disappointed with the results, it’s probably not the whole list that’s a problem. People rarely ask, what part of the list DID work?
If a list produced a 1% response rate, you might find that some industries produced 2% while others produced .5%. So your measurements need to be able to identify segments that out-perform the average.
In summary, for many, the attention starts and ends with lead lists. But, lists are only a small part of demand generation. If you’re not doing the others, you’re missing out on 80% of the formula to success.

President & CEO at Valgen
Rainmaker extraordinaire for our clients. Turns databases into gold. Analytics executive and entrepreneur with a track record of producing significant and sustained revenue gains for sales teams in fleet, transportation, high tech & financial services.