From Salvage to Space

Both Robert and Nicole Edmund agree that the toughest single challenge for the business-to-business (b-to-b) marketer is finding new customers. When an order comes from a corporation, it’s almost always signed by the purchasing agent. Yet, if they mail the purchasing agent a catalog, they may have wasted $2, because they actually want to get the catalog into the hands of the specifier, the person who tells the purchasing agent what to order. As a result, Edmund can trace only about 30 percent of its customers by name and by list source. Building the prospecting database is thus an extremely important responsibility and relies heavily on post-sale database techniques to match revenues to mailing efforts.