Buying Lead/Prospect Lists

One of the more challenging things for sales and marketing teams is to purchase a high quality list of potential leads/prospects at a reasonable price. Now, I’m not a proponent of buying lists for the purpose of sending unsolicated bulk email (SPAM) although targeted one-off emails tailored to the recipient are fine. Lists, when well done, are great for cold calling, which is an under appreciated technique, especially for more modern, web-centric companies.

Here are some tips for buying lists:

• Use sites likes Jigsaw.com or NetProspex.com to build your own list based on typical categories (e.g. geography, job title, etc)
• Contact non-profit associations for one of your customer industries and ask if they sell their member list (some provide it in book form where you then have to use a service like eLance or Mechanical Turk to convert it to digital form manually or through OCR)
• Reach out to magazines/portals of one of your customer industries and see if they sell their subscriber list

What else? What are some other ideas for getting potential leads/prospect lists?