I have to admit that I’m doing this right now.
I am looking for contact information in some target enterprise accounts. It takes time. If you’re not careful, a lot of time.
And I’ve done this many (many) times in my sales career and
used many (many) hours of time on this. And I know many senior sales people
that have spent lots of time on this too.
If you’re going to sell an enterprise account, you have to
do this contact research, so what’s the discussion? This is just the cost of
doing business.
Sales people should sell
Apparently, a lot of sales people think researching this
kind of contact data is the price of doing business too. Even outside of
enterprise sales where I could claim this burden is higher than in selling to small
business, sales people seem to spend a huge amount of time not selling.
A couple pieces of research data:
Xant (formerly InsideSales.com): in a 2017 study