In 2003, I found myself in a large room of businesswomen discussing B2B sales and marketing.

Let me explain why I was the only man in the room in another blog. The event was much more memorable for another reason.

Robyn Sachs, pillar of the DC marketing community, asked “what is the most important part of a campaign: the product, the message or the list?”

She pointed to me, and I answered, “the list.”

“That’s right,” she said.

I’ve thought about Robyn’s question and my answer many times in my nine years selling for B2B publishers.

Perhaps more than any other industry, we use different kinds of lists for different purposes.

We collect contact information from our website visitors and engage them in email marketing.

We have lists of customers who buy individual subscriptions and upsell them to events using more email marketing.

Publishers always want these lists to be longer – for good reason. For many B2B publishers, email marketing leads to most of their topline sales.

Counterintuitively, we want the lists for our live sales efforts  to be smaller – much smaller. To best sell higher priced services to our audiences, we must be much more discrete.

Tens or hundreds of thousands of email subscribers, for example, must be whittled down to a list of hundreds of prospects for more concentrated sales sequences. This number of course varies with the company’s size and number of salespeople.

This contraction can be based on a subscriber’s 

–  Longevity: the longer the relationship, the greater the chance of an upsell

–  Activity: the greater the number of opens or clicks, the greater the demonstrated need

–  Audience size: the greater the number of individual subscribers in a single company, the greater the chances of bundled sales

• Pulling these levers should lead B2B publishers to more topline growth.
  
• 
  

As Robyn taught me more than 20 years ago, lists matter most. B2B publishers are likely to have extraordinarily long email lists. For many reasons, the larger, the better. For sales purposes, however, short lists should also add meaningfully to top line.