Contact Sourcing

Back to glossary

What is Contact Sourcing?

Contact sourcing is the process of searching for and acquiring contacts that match your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). In simple terms, this means finding the right people to sell your product or service to by locating their name and company details. But, today, contact sourcing also involves finding relevant associated data like up-to-date email address, phone number and social media handles.

Skip ahead: 

 

The Basics of Contact Sourcing

A key component of prospecting, contact sourcing is used by sales teams to build a rich database of potential leads which can be used for sales outreach. Think of it like building out a reversed yellow pages. Rather than compiling a list of companies to buy from, you’re creating a black book of companies to sell to, who are likely to buy your product or service. 

Traditionally, contact sourcing has involved hours of manual data entry, relying on significant team resources and prone to human error. But as sales automation tools become more advanced and more reliable, sales teams are increasingly turning to software plugins like Surfe to gather accurate and relevant contact information on their prospects. 

 

Sourcing Strategies: How to Improve Your Contact Sourcing

Identify Your Target Audience

How can you determine your most likely leads to convert if you don’t know who you should be selling to? The first step to a solid contact sourcing strategy is to precisely identify who your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is. To build your ICP, you need to get into character. Take into account the characteristics of your perfect prospect. Ask yourself the following questions: 

  • What industry do they work in? 
  • How big is their company?
  • What is their job title?
  • Where in the world are they based?

 

Once you have answered the above questions, segment the market available to you, focusing on specific accounts that match your ICP profile. 

 

Do Your Research

You now know what your ideal customer looks like and is searching for, but how do you find out exactly who they are and how to contact them? You could trawl through Google and LinkedIn for hours, hoping to strike gold on a relevant prospect. Or perhaps you could hit up individual company websites in search of those precious contact details to load into your CRM. Sounds like fun, right? If only there were another way… Sales automation tools like Surfe can be used to automate gathering contact information from up to 15 databases. And with a 93% success rate in email finding, you know that the contact data you’re acquiring is accurate.

 

Verify and Validate

Now you have your contacts all in one place in your CRM, you need to guarantee that they are accurate and up-to-date. Sounds like a headache to do without some help, right?

 

Enrich Your Data

Build out your contact records to paint a clearer picture of the prospect’s company landscape. Adding job titles, company size and social media profile details will be critical to informing your sales tactics further down the funnel. Running out of hours in the day? Surfe has you covered. Integrating your CRM with LinkedIn, Surfe helps you import enriched data directly into your CRM to help you more effectively manage outreach and follow-up communications.

 

Why You Should Focus on High Quality Contact Sourcing

Better Leads = More Sales

Rather than pulling a mass sales list and hoping you strike gold, contact sourcing gives you a pool of qualified leads aligned to your sales proposition. When you tailor your lead lists based on your ICP, you have a better chance of speaking to someone who is primed to buy your product or service.

 

Increased Efficiency = More Sales

By automating the data collection process you can save hours and hours and hours of time. Meaning you can spend more of your energy on discovery calls and pitching, converting leads and making sales. 

 

Improved Outreach (You Guessed It) = More Sales

Once you’ve sourced contacts who you know will receive your email, are in the right industry for your offering and are based in your target market, you can personalize your outreach to truly meet your buyers’ pain points and increase your chances of landing a sale. 

 

Common Contact Sourcing Challenges 

Data Accuracy

You’ve gone to the trouble of collecting your contact data. You’ve compiled your prospecting lists. But how do you know if you’ll reach the people you’re hoping to sell to? One third of people change their email address every year. So it’s likely that the data you’ve collected might not be up-to-date or accurate. 

 

Compliance

Data privacy laws like GDPR are designed to protect consumer data. Sales teams are at particular risk of breaching these laws if their contact sourcing doesn’t comply with regulation.

 

Cost

Either by allocating hours of manual resource to building out contact lists, or by investing in expensive automation and verification tools, contact sourcing can be a costly game. Sales teams can get caught out by overextending resource on sourcing and verification or by purchasing pricey automation and verification tools that don’t sync up together.

 

Time

Let’s say you’ve identified your perfect prospect, they match your ICP to the tee, you’re on to a winner. You’ve found them on LinkedIn, now remains the small task of finding their email address… It’s going to take you 10 minutes at best, but most likely much longer. Now multiply that time spent by the 1000s of prospects you’re hoping to target in a month. That monthly commission you were counting on? Up in smoke.

 

A Better Way to Source Your Contact Data

We’ve already outlined the time drawbacks of manual contact sourcing (who could ever have the time for that?!), and how it can open you up to human error, out-of-date details and put you at risk of breaching compliance laws. 

 

Integrated automation tools like Surfe can help you streamline your contact sourcing process to ensure you get high-quality, up-to-date relevant contact information– and email addresses that you know won’t result in a bounceback. 

 

Automated Data Collection

Use Surfe’s chrome extension to automate data collection from LinkedIn and other sources. By integrating with your CRM, Surfe finds the contact details you need to identify your perfect prospect and save you countless hours pouring over profile pages looking for an accurate email address. 

 

Fully Compliant with GDPR Regulation

Surfe is ISO27001 certified and GDPR compliant. Conducting over 30,000 secure CRM updates every day for more than 5,000 companies, you know your sales lists are safe with us. 

 

Real-time Data Enrichment

Keeping your data up-to-date in the moment, Surfe enriches your contact details at scale. Simply upload a CSV and get thousands of verified email addresses and phone numbers for your sales campaigns in just one click. With a success rate of over 93%, our email finder will help you reach contacts your competitors can’t. 

 

Seamless CRM Integration

Cut through hours of admin, and focus on selling. Use Surfe to Synchronize your CRM and LinkedIn, allowing you to add contacts to your CRM in one click, natively on LinkedIn. 

 

 

Deep Dive into the Future of Contact Sourcing

 

A Three-pronged Approach to Contact Sourcing 

We’ve outlined what contact sourcing is, and why your sales team needs to be improving their sourcing strategies. But what will the future trends of contact sourcing look like? Learning from our trusted partners Amazon Web Services and Uber, we are seeing a shift towards an integrated contact sourcing strategy based on three key building blocks. 

 

Automation

Sales teams no longer have the time or resource to manually compile sales lists. As sales functions across the world continue to adopt automation tools, the value of this brand of digital transformation is indisputable. In fact, businesses using marketing automation to nurture prospects experience a 451% increase in qualified leads

 

Data Verification and Enrichment 

Efficiency is driving a shift in how sales teams operate. As profitability becomes a growing topic amongst business leaders, time spent on nurturing unqualified leads is coming under the microscope. Sales leaders are looking at the impact of expending time on leads that are irrelevant and almost impossible to convert. With 67% of lost sales are a result of sales reps not properly qualifying potential customers before taking them through the full sales process, enriched data is no longer a nice to have, it’s essential in avoiding time spent on unviable leads. 

 

Compliance 

With Meta facing an unprecedented €1.2 Billion fine this year for breaching data privacy laws, senior sales leaders are more conscious than ever of how they are sourcing contacts in a way that complies with regulation.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) About Contact Sourcing

Why is Contact Sourcing Important for Sales?

Contact sourcing helps you build a pool of potential qualified leads that can be targeted for outreach. Better leads mean more sales! 

What are the Best Tools for Contact Sourcing?

Tools like Surfe, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Apollo, Hunter, and ZeroBounce are commonly used for contact sourcing.

How can I Ensure the Accuracy of the Contact Information I Collect?

To ensure your contact details are accurate, use verification tools, regularly update your database, and cross-check information from multiple sources.

What are the Legal Considerations for Contact Sourcing?

Contact sourcing should always comply with data privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA by obtaining consent and managing data responsibly.

How can Contact Sourcing Improve my Outreach Efforts?

If you have a more comprehensive profile of your ICP with better quality contact data, you can personalize your outreach, making it more relevant and engaging to prospects.

Keen to discover more? Sign up for your free 14-day trial and see how Surfe can help you source high quality contacts and help you convert more leads.