Build Your Own Lead Generation Machine: Effective Marketing Database Building for Sales Leads

How to Build and Maintain a Marketing Database for Sales Leads

In this article, I aim to help marketing executives by elaborating on the main marketing database building methods to foster organizational awareness and cost efficiency. After reading this article, you will have a better understanding of how a marketing database is built, enabling you to prepare your organization to automate and scale operations when generating sales leads.

Yes, you can keep buying contact lists to feed your hungry sales team, and yes, it is possible to land appointments from cold lists, but without owning your very own lead generation machine, you will always have high costs for customer acquisitions. In this article, I aim to help CEOs and CMOs with a simplified flow to assist them in building their own database and appointment-setting machines.

Building and Managing Your Marketing Database

A centralized but carefully segmented marketing database can help sales and marketing teams generate leads, set appointments, and manage marketing priorities. Easier said than done, as building and especially maintaining a segmented marketing database might require time and patience due to data movement, missing data, and compliance issues.

Since I will be focusing on how to build your very own marketing database in this article, I will leave the purchased contact list out. The ultimate goal of this article is to show marketing executives ways to make database building their internal process rather than a recurring expense.

The initial phase of a list-building process that is relevant and healthy involves entrance funnels. If you follow the right methodology, your sales team will naturally be part of the database-building process. There are countless entrance funnels you can create to flood new contacts into your database. Here are some of them:

Let’s take a quick look at the channels and tools your team can utilize to build a database and lead generation machine.

1. LinkedIn Sales Navigator

There are several paid tools to automate list building using Sales Navigator, but I suggest you start this manually. Consider automation when what you do works but needs scaling.

Here are the steps:

• Define Target Audience

• Access LinkedIn Sales Navigator

• Go to Advanced Search

• Input your phrases with the target audience you defined. Here is an example:

“Chief Operations Officer” AND “Finance” AND “New Jersey”

2. Web Scraping

Web scraping in database building refers to the methodologies to identify domains relevant to your business and extract contact information usually located under leadership, about, or who we are pages. There are several tools to accomplish web scraping. I will take Hunter.io as an example because I have used it personally in the past.

First, identify target websites that relate to your niche. To do that, go to Google or Bing search engines and enter the following example command:

“cybersecurity companies” “USA” site:.com

Export the results. If you want to do this in bulk you can install a python script.

For Google search:

Install libraries:

pip install googlesearch-python pandas

Python Script for Google Search

from googlesearch import search

import pandas as pd

keywords = ["cybersecurity companies USA"]

target_websites = []

for keyword in keywords:

    for result in search(keyword, num=10, stop=100, pause=2):  # Adjust 'stop' to get more results

        target_websites.append(result)


# Save the results to a CSV file

df = pd.DataFrame(target_websites, columns=['Website'])

df.to_csv('target_websites_google.csv', index=False)

print("Websites saved to target_websites_google.csv") 

For Bing:

Install libraries

pip install requests beautifulsoup4 pandas

Python Script for Bing Search

import requests

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

import pandas as pd

keywords = ["cybersecurity companies USA"]

target_websites = []

bing_url = "https://www.bing.com/search?q="

for keyword in keywords:

    response = requests.get(bing_url + keyword)

    soup = BeautifulSoup(response.text, 'html.parser')

    for a in soup.find_all('a', href=True):

        href = a['href']

        if 'http' in href and 'bing' not in href and 'microsoft' not in href:

            target_websites.append(href)

# Remove duplicates

target_websites = list(set(target_websites))

# Save the results to a CSV file

df = pd.DataFrame(target_websites, columns=['Website'])

df.to_csv('target_websites_bing.csv', index=False)


print("Websites saved to target_websites_bing.csv")

Use tools like Hunter.io to search and scrape contact information from these domains. Once you have the scraped contacts, you can start cleaning the list if you want to keep contacts with specific titles. Make sure to verify your final list using email verification tools like Million Verifier.

3. ChatBot Lead Magnet

Setup and Train a ChatBot

Pick a chatbot, set it up, and train it. I use ChatSimple, but there are many other options available in the market. You can train your chatbot by submitting your URLs and documents. These bots can quickly learn about your product specs, value propositions, and even your competitive advantages. They can be highly efficient in capturing new contacts and even booking appointments.

1. Set up your chatbot
2. Train it
3. Integrate an appointment booking tool such as Calendly
4. Integrate it with an email automation service such as Klaviyo or HubSpot
5. Create an automated workflow so that once a contact is captured by your chatbot, they are automatically part of your pre-planned email campaigns

4. Subscription Lead Magnet (Popups and Forms)

Most major marketing automation tools enable users to set up behavioral popups and smart forms. I have used both Klaviyo and HubSpot, and both work great (Klaviyo is cheaper).

How you configure your popup triggers varies based on your existing analytics data. You can set one or more triggers, such as exit intent, scroll percentage, time spent, or even click triggers, to activate your popups. The reason I like trigger popups is that you can set URL-based rules so that the content is always relevant to what users read on your site, making conversions easier without daily maintenance.

Forms, on the other hand, have a relatively lower percentage of conversions as they require more action (friction) from users. You can overcome this by making the reward more appealing, such as offering free assets (eBooks, case studies, etc.) or free trials.

Both popups and forms are great lead doors to build your marketing database, which you can connect to your email workflows to nurture, engage, and even convert your subscribers. Since they are your internal lead-capturing methods, your marketing automation tool can segment them (add them to the buckets you identify).

5. LinkedIn Group

Creating and running a LinkedIn group can help you own your audience and control your messaging naturally. Consistency, content quality, and authenticity are key factors for a successful LinkedIn group.

1. Set up your LinkedIn group.
2. Buy a tool such as Canva to quickly generate attractive LinkedIn visuals.
3. Start posting daily.
4. Identify similar groups to yours and start engaging with their community.
5. Once you start getting engaged, export contacts and process them to enrich your marketing database (Hunter.io).

Marketing Database is a Journey and Not the End Goal

Up until this point, I’ve walked you through the methods that I have personally tried and succeeded in when building marketing database lists for my clients. Of course, these are just quick summaries to help executives get on the same page with their marketing organizations. Managing the database, maintaining it against “moving data,” and keeping it compliant (i.e., unsubscribes, database hygiene) are some items you need to be aware of and possibly have someone dedicated to database maintenance and hygiene (it’s worth it).

There are several tools and services you may utilize to set up appointments or automate your processes. When it comes to main marketing functions, I am a big believer in the following process:

1. Do it yourself first.
2. Validate what works.
3. Automate.
4. Scale.

Some companies start with “Automate” purely because they have the necessary budget. Here is my problem with this: most organizations don’t know what to do with the automations or third-party services they pay for. It isn’t always about the money but also about organizational consciousness. Best practices are well and good, but remember they are just general to-dos and won’t always align with all organizations.

Starting to do things yourself doesn’t mean that you have to do it manually. Just make sure that your organization follows each step of data acquisition, data handling, and processing. Only then will you know what automation is best for your specific business model. This method helped me a lot as a fractional CMO, as thanks to this model, I was able to build organizational alignment (i.e., sales being aware of the importance of database building and marketing understanding more about what a quality lead means).

Last but not least, privacy is a serious matter. Make sure your organization complies with regulations (CCPA and GDPR) when building, enriching, and engaging with a marketing database.