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Marketing’s objective is to reach out to prospects and nurture them to build a pipeline of warm contacts who can be further developed into opportunities. Outbound marketing including email marketing, direct mail and telemarketing form the foundation of marketing’s reach out program and the urge, rightly so, is to reach out to as many contacts as possible. Traditionally outbound marketing has, unfortunately, been all about volume, more contacts, more email, more direct mail and more telemarketing. There is a fundamental problem with this and that starts with the urge to build a bigger and bigger list of contacts to market to. The rest of the “mores” are build on top of this, which further magnifies the problem. When you are looking to go after more contacts, you tend to define your “target decision makers and influencers” very broadly so you end up with a list of contacts that is a random mixture of your core buyers and everyone else. The more specific and deep rooted your buyer, greater the chance that your list will have less of them and more of the other non-target contacts. So when you feed this list to the downstream processes of email marketing, direct mail and telemarketing, all hell breaks loose. Email campaigns show a dismal response rate and the response that you get end up being far from qualified. Direct mail reaches the wrong people and goes into the trash can while you wait. Telemarketing reps get hung up on and they loose the confidence in the list. And if your marketing leads from such a campaign flow to inside sales or sales, then you get a heavy push back from sales to not send them leads that are a waste of their time. Garbage IN, Garbage OUT is the result. In most situations, its not that 100% of the leads are garbage so you still tend to believe in the strategy which leads to more similar campaigns. The most important thing is to realize that a “more” strategy without a laser focus will not yield the results you can be proud of. Try a chance. Go for less. Go for focus. Go for smaller campaigns. Test and refine and you will see the results. At ReadyContacts, we are HUGE believers of “less is more” and all out data solutions are enablers for implementing such a strategy.

A common outcome of mergers and acquisitions is that the customers and partners of the acquired company face a lot of uncertainties about product evolution, product support and their own technology roadmap considering this uncertainty. Its also a golden opportunity for competitors of the acquired company to launch an aggressive sales effort of win over the customers of the acquired company. This seems to be the case with Virtual Iron which was recently acquired by Oracle. In the past few weeks, I have talked to a few prospects of ours who are looking for a list of Virtual Iron customers along with the key users of the solution at those accounts. This is a proven strategy that has worked well in the past and will continue to do so in the future as well due to the uncertainty associated with mergers and acquisitions. Companies who recognize this early know that they need to plan a systematic approach to reach out to all the relevant customers of the acquired company within the first two quarters and create a hot opportunity. The key to success lies in high quality and actionable lead data and intelligence which allows them to identify the target accounts and pitch precisely to the decision makers who are exploring alternatives. Do you sell virtualization solutions and services? If yes, have to created a sales & marketing plan targeting Virtual Iron customers?

Sales Come From Conversations: Sales 2.0

I have been tracking Sales 2.0 conference updates from @greenleads and @damphoux this morning and came across this tweet that that RT’d on @readycontacts just now. For the first time in a long time I heard someone say something “real” about the challenge of generating sales. While all the discussions on social media, marketing automation and email marketing are apt, valid and important, at the end of the day people buy from people and that buying cycle gets started with a “conversation”. This is very central to everything we do here at ReadyContacts as every one of our solutions is aimed at helping sales & marketing teams get closer and closer to that “conversation” which helps you engage with your customers and identify opportunities. I think “good quality conversations” should be one of the main measures of sales & marketing campaign effectiveness. Are you tracking “conversations” as a measure? Stay tuned for a lot more on this topic coming up soon.

If you’re an avid reader of marketing and sales bestsellers, you’re bound to enjoy this one. Have fun!

Don’t forget to tweet this to your followers if you enoyed it:

RT @neil_s Check out our new quick “Business Marketing And Sales Bestsellers Quiz” warning: this one is not a piece of cake – http://bit.ly/kQD9r

Our interview series on “How Good Data Turbo Charges Lead Generation” is turning out more exciting with each passing weak and uncovering some really good insights from experts in the B2B marketing and lead generation space. This week we speak to Ardath Albee, CEO of Marketing Interactions and author of the upcoming book E-Marketing Strategies for the Complex Sale which you can pre-order on Amazon. I’ve been a fan of Ardath’s Marketing Interactions Blog and regularly picked up useful lessons completely relevant to what we do at ReadyContacts so I’ve been looking forward to this one and was thrilled when Ardath agreed to do this. Here it is!

You’ve stressed on the value of quality marketing data to readers on the MarketingInteractions blog in a number of your posts , do you think in current economic times CMOs should call for more focus directed toward their customer databases?

Ardath: Absolutely! But not just because of current economic times. Customers are one of the most important and lucrative corporate assets a company possesses.  Often I find that once a prospect buys, the record is not maintained appropriately. Account managers should be charged with not only keeping their customer’s database records clean, but adding information that can be used to segment appropriately for ongoing customer nurturing programs. 

Chances are strong that the customer chose your company for reasons that go beyond your product. Companies have the opportunity to continue to deliver added value to customer relationships, but only if they keep adding actionable insights and information to expand the customer’s database record. It may be tough to segment lead databases in parallel with personas, but there’s no excuse for not delivering targeted communications to your customer base. As long as your database is clean. 

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There is often a debate on whether marketers should focus on developing and cleaning their existing data or spend more time and budget acquiring new data. Is one really more important than the other? What is your take on this?

Ardath: I wrote a blog post, Lift Revenues 70% By Cleaning Up Dirty B2B Data. It was based on a research study by Sirius Decisions where they, “found that from 10 to 25 percent of b-to-b marketing database contacts contain critical errors—ranging from incorrect demographic data to lack of information concerning current status in the buying cycle.” And yes, that 70% lift is true for strong organizations utilizing clean data.

What companies don’t pay attention to is the fact that B2B databases tend to double in size every year. In this economic climate more people are shifting jobs or losing them altogether. I read somewhere that a marketer stated over 30% of her contacts were no longer at their desks. At least she knew that, but what if you didn’t? Dirty data impacts marketing program results across the board. And, let’s face it; you can’t create pipeline progression when your marketing communications aren’t getting delivered to actual leads. Especially when marketing is under tough mandates to prove contribution to sales.

As far as choosing between cleaning existing data or acquiring new data use what you’ve got first. I’ve been involved with a lot of projects recently based on re-engaging dormant leads with terrific results. Companies have already invested money in acquiring those leads. To abandon it in favor of new data is often a waste of that investment. Instead, create a “human touch” program for inside sales to reach out and restart the dialog. And please make it more than, “I just thought I’d touch base…” Deliver something valuable if you want to re-enroll them and validate your data. 

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How important is data quality from a B2B marketing strategy perspective and what can marketers do better to really tap into the full potential of their databases?

Ardath: Data quality is the holy grail of B2B complex sale marketing. Buying cycles are reported as lasting from 6 to 9 months—or longer. That means multiple touches that need to create engagement over time—despite the attempts of your competitors to distract them. 

To get the full potential from a marketing database, marketers should focus on collecting incremental information to flesh out buyer profiles over the course of the buying cycle. This means reaching beyond demographic and BANT data. The more you know about your leads, the more relevant you can be with your nurturing programs. Over time you’ll see patterns develop in your data that can indicate buying stages and propensity-to-buy that help focus your attention on the leads with the most promise. Trust me, sales will thank you.  

Research is emerging to prove that nurtured leads close at steeply higher rates than non-nurtured leads and also confirms they spend more money when they buy. The key to getting those kinds of results lies in the quality of your database and even more so in how you use the information it contains to increase relevance and add value your leads need and appreciate.

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What would you advise readers who are looking to build a high quality lead list / database? Is it worth the additional cost in terms or time or money to focus on acquiring higher quality contacts and more qualified leads versus purchasing or renting pre-built lead lists or database subscriptions?

Ardath: I recommend spending the time, money and effort to build a high-quality list. The more focused you can get on your target market, the better. Most lists you buy or rent are based on title within the organization. Sometimes that works, but what’s even better is when you can target roles. With roles and responsibilities you have a much higher opportunity to generate opt-in and ongoing permission to nurture them because your communications can be tightly tailored for relevance. Precision pays off.

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What are the biggest challenges you have seen with managing CRM and marketing databases among companies you have worked with? Are companies doing enough to update and maintain their data at a level where it’s being leveraged to its fullest?

Ardath: Truthfully, no. Here are a few reasons why this is true. 

1. The marketing database and the CRM system are often disconnected, limiting visibility and knowledge about the disposition of leads throughout the pipeline. 

2. The economic reality is that more people are losing/changing jobs at faster rates and that means data is getting dirty faster and takes more time to manage. 

3. Static information. If your database records contain the same information 6 months after the lead was added, what intelligence have you gathered that you can use to progress the buying process? Marketing databases and CRM need to go beyond housing basic demographic information to include activity history and the answers to progressive profiling questions, and even research notes. 

The upshot is that companies need to consider their marketing databases and CRM systems dynamic, not static, if they’re going to leverage them to their fullest potential. Databases aren’t just lists, they’re sources of intelligence companies can leverage to serve existing customers better and acquire new customers to grow the business.

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About Ardath Albee 

Ardath Albee, CEO of Marketing Interactions, Inc., helps B2B companies with complex sales increase and quantify marketing effectiveness by using interactive e-marketing strategies driven by compelling content. She empowers her clients to create customer-centric nurturing programs that leverage strategic story development to engage prospects until they are sales ready. But, marketing isn’t just about generating new demand. Ardath also helps clients re-engage customers and build loyalty that adds longevity to customer relationships.

Visit her website: www.marketinginteractions.com and look for her upcoming book, E-Marketing Strategies for the Complex Sale

“My connect rates are great! I connect with someone 80% of the time when I dial any number off my list!” … Aren’t we missing the point here? How many of those dials end up connecting with the real decision maker at that account? Not as many in several cases. Typical scenarios of an inside sales call which are based on ‘not so well qualified’ lists starts off at the operator, gets transfered towards the name on the list and connects but one learns thats not the right person to speak with. So the call goes back to the operator, there is a struggle with the operator who refuses to give out any names of alternative contacts who might be the right person, the call is connected finally to the new contact and one gets referred to another number which belongs to the final decision maker and…..voicemail! Pick up the next contact on the list and start over.

Now even with the most accurate data, it may not be possible to gurantee instant connects to the contact on a list but using low quality lists to carry out phone based inside sales campaigns is a productivity killer. Simply connecting to a name on a list isn’t real connectivity if that person is not the right person to talk to. With connect rates on phones being such a barrier to productivity especially with B2B inside sales and teleprospecting, it’s important to have all the basic groundwork done to gather the best possible data before starting a campaign. The data is often the root of the problem with some general business contacts from unqualified companies and researched contact details being put together to serve as a target list. Having worked with several inside sales teams and building very specific role based customized lists, we’ve seen more than 33% of a sales persons time can be spend in finding the right decision makers to speak to. Going into a campaign armed with good data can make a world of difference simply from working off more qualified information which increases the odds in your favor. 

Here are a few very simple data tips to improve those odds and make your calls more productive:-

•  While building lists, identify target decision makers by their job roles and responsibilites rather than by titles. For example, if you’re selling data recovery software, find the person withing the IT department who is responsible for data recovery and disaster management rather than simply finding an IT Manager or IT Director who may not directly have anything to do with data recovery. This will ensure, whenever you do manage to connect, you would have connected with the right person and won’t have to spend time navigating around the company.
• While building data and collecting information on decision makers, ask for a direct phone number or a direct extension as often as possible. Having direct numbers which by pass gatekeepers can save a lot of time and make connecting easier. 
• Identify alternate decision makers or contacts within each account whenever possible, especially in case of larger accounts which can have multiple decision makers in the same or similar capacities. If one is not available, it offers an alternative path into the same company. Adding influencers within each account is also useful in getting to “hard to reach” executives through someone else within the same department or function. 
• While gathering account intelligence, see if you can find any previous interactions with anyone else from the same company. Having a reference contact can  help in getting gatekeepers to let you through without much resistance.  
• Sort your account data and business contacts by location and time zone. Most executives are reachable at their desks towards the start  and end of their working days and tied up with scheduled tasks, meetings and so on for a large part of the day. Knowing where they are located can help identify when is the best time to hit each time zone or location. 

While it’s not possible to know whether or not someone will pick up the line and connect for sure, it is possible to ensure everything that is within control is set up to the best of possible level. Starting with good data is one of them.

We’ve been building very specific role based business contact lists for our customers very specific campaign requirements for what seems to be a very long time now. Over this time we have worked with such a range of B2B companies it’s difficult to recall every project undertaken especially for those who had a smaller, one time campaign specific requirement for customized role based list building. When we say specific…we mean reaaaaalllyy specifc. Where a companies ideal target decision maker is someone who has a very niche function or role within the company and it’s imperrative for our customers to locate and reach out to them. Needless to say, they can be quite challenging to locate. 

When you think about how specialized the contact needs for certain companies are and how targetted their marketing and sales efforts needs to be, you can’t help but be thankful and think “Thank goodness our company sells only to VP of Marketing or CFO’s” unless you happen to target such niche customers. I’m sure we’ve undertaken a lot of very challenging projects over the last few years but just at the top of my head, here are the top 5 most challenging contacts we’ve had to help companies locate:

At Number 5

The decision maker responsible for Emergency Medical Response System management and tracking software in large hospitals and healthcare centers for a healthcare software solutions company

At Number 4

The decision maker responsible for designing commodity linked investment products in Swiss banks for a high specialized financial systems software consultancy firm

At Number 3

The deicison maker responsible for monitoring performance levels of mission critical systems in large fortune companies along with identifying which systems and servers they were responsible for (for example flight control systems for an airline, ticketing and reservation system for a large global travel company etc)

At Number 2

The decision maker responsible for imaging technology used to study cancer and other cell level research carried out on mice at small animal imaging facilities at pharmaceutical and healthcare research centers for a biotechnology product company

And the Number 1 most challenging contact to locate…

The decision maker or prjoect manager responsible for ruggedizing, shock-proofing, fire-proofing and weather-proofing computing servers used in airforce  jets, tanks and defence weapons systems in large defence contractor/ manufacturing facilities to ensure the software systems in these run under any conditions. This was for a company that provided server ruggedization technology to defence contractors.

(BTW: we did manage to deliver on all these)

Can you beat that? We’d love to hear from other marketing and sales pros in the comments – what is the most challenging business contact you’ve had to locate?

Every company works towards improving their sales and marketing effectiveness. It’s a never-ending process in quest for how to generate better results and in today’s perspective, how to do this more efficiently without exponentially increasing resources to get those better results. The “Lean Mean Marketing And Sales Machine” is going to be a series of very simple tips both from our own experience in business to business sales and lead generation as well as others whom we’ve learnt from. We will share these tips on our blog in a downloadable pdf format pages which are easier to collect in one place and share. It’s not always easy to implement every useful tip we learn but the smallest of tips can have the biggest of impacts on how to improve the marketing and sales process while staying lean.  Here’s the first page of the Lean Mean Sales And Marketing Machine: 

Lean Mean Sales and Marketing Machine

As we continue our quest to uncover more expert insights into how quality marketing data impacts the effectiveness and success of marketing and sales campaigns across businesses we had the good fortune of discussing some of these issues with demand creation and sales 2.0 thought leader Michael Damphousse, President of Green Leads in this interview. The prospect of doing an interview with Mike was exciting as a regular reader of his blog and sure enough, it yielded some great lessons and tips. Here’s what Mike had to say:

Tell us about what Green Leads does and have you been seeing any significant changes in how customers are driving their marketing and demand generation programs over the past few months given the current economic climate?

Mike: It’s interesting, when we were at the recent Sales 2.0 conference in San Francisco, IDC said “Companies that significantly reduce their sales and marketing investment in 2009 will be gone by 2010″.   Green Leads specializes in C/VP level appointment setting programs for b2b companies and our programs are significant investments, but it seems that a majority of the industry agrees with this statement and are increasing their investment in demand gen. In fact, if it’s any indicator, Q1 was a record quarter for us – our revenue equaled that of all 2008.   If there is a downturn in marketing spending, we haven’t seen it.  If anything, I sense that marketers are being smarter about their spending and they are focusing on growing the top of the funnel and possibly cutting back on less tactical programs for the time being.

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How important is data quality from a B2B marketing strategy perspective and what can marketers do better to really tap into the full potential of their databases?

Mike: Contact data is one of the most valuable assets any marketing group owns. Some names have thousands of dollars invested in them.  Some are just new contacts they may have just purchased.  In either case, if the data is inaccurate, the value of that contact is reduced.  We spend a great deal of time validating and researching our lists.  Updating the quality of phone numbers, emails, de-duping, and lots of data standardization.  Every improvement increases the value of that asset.

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What are the common challenges you have seen lead generation and b2b marketers have with building or managing high quality lead databases?

Mike: That’s two ends of the spectrum.  When building lists, most companies make errors by selecting far too many and far too broad a list.  There is nothing that can grind an outbound marketing effort to a halt more than large, irrelevant lists.  I would rather have one name that is exactly my target than a hundred names that might be my target.

Long term, the same mistake can be multiplied by data not being kept relevant and clean.  If an email bounces once, it will bounce a thousand times.  If a prospect has the wrong title, they will always have the wrong title.  Clean out the forest so you can see the trees.

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What are your strategies at Green Leads to feed your team with rich data (role-based contacts, profiled target accounts) and how has that affected their productivity?

Mike: Our business lives off of our lists.  We have reps in 7 states, and in 3 countries in Europe.  All day long each one of them is touching a couple hundred contacts.  If they are dialing the wrong prospects, or if the data is inaccurate, then we are wasting valuable time and not maximizing our client’s investment.  By building extremely targeted lists and paying extra attention to data quality standards, we reduce this waste as much as we can.  As I said above, give me that one, perfect name.

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What would you advise readers who are looking to build a high quality lead list / database? Is it worth the additional cost in terms or time or money to focus on acquiring higher quality contacts and more qualified leads versus purchasing or renting pre-built lead lists or database subscriptions?

Mike: Just do the math.  Is a marketing piece costing you money if it goes to the wrong individual or to contacts that are unreachable due to bad data?  Is a sales rep wasting precious time dialing and prospecting with bad data.  Basically, you get what you pay for, and you can either pay for a good list up front, or invest in the bad list and clean it up yourself.  In the long run it typically pays to start with the good list.

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What are the biggest challenges you have seen with managing CRM and marketing databases among companies you have worked with? Are companies doing enough to update and maintain their data at a level where its being leveraged to its fullest?

Mike: Simple answer.  No.  I see some of the biggest companies we work with throw lists around like scraps of food.  There are no practices for data quality or standards or maintaining an asset.  It’s amazing.  We have clients that send us a list over and over.  They keep telling us they are sending a new list, but it’s got the same garbage names.

We typically just tell them to send us the URLs of the companies they want to target and the exact titles and roles they want to target, then we do the rest. We know our data is good, so we would rather rely in it.

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About Michael Damphousse

Mike is the consummate sales and marketing executive, leading both the growth of Green Leads and the techniques and practices behind Green Leads’ demand creation success. Mike brings over 20 years of senior management experience from a series of high technology and marketing firms. During the past 5 years Mike has developed a new brand of demand creation that leverages both technology and the human asset. After sharing these ideas with other leading demand creation companies, Mike decided to form Green Leads, where he can complement these practices with a higher sense of accountability to the company, its people, its clients and its community.

There is always data cleansing for fixing a database which is plagued with bad data although anyone who has been through the process knows how tedious and time consuming it could be and would instantly look for ways to prevent having to carry out a large cleansing operation again. Cleansing old and redundant data is a necessay evil but allowing bad data to flow freely into your database is a cardinal sin of marketing database management. 

Craig Rosenberg’s The Funnelholic blog posted a great interview with Matthew Quinlan, VP of Field Operations at LoopFuse and in answering one of the Craig’s questions, Matthew brings out a really useful tip in curbing inflow of bad data. Here’s a part of that interview:

4.  What are the top oversights marketers are making regarding lead generation?

A lot of marketers still cling to the notion that by making online form fields required, they will get more data. While it may result in more data, it most certainly results in lower quality data. Is a database full of “asdf@asdf.com” email addresses and titles of “Oh Captain my Captain” providing more value than blanks? Even if you require a validation link to be sent via email it’s really only marginally better results because everyone in 2009 has at least one spam account that they only use for registrations. Resist the temptation to make your Web form fields required. Your data will be more accurate and valuable as a result. 

The source of these leads is often where problems with bad data and inconsistancies come up. The larger the number of different sources and the volumes of leads that get generated and move onto the database, the larger the problem with bad data. The landing page leads, the purchased business contacts lists, the webinar registrations, the event attendees, the business cards collected at tradeshows may all be leads but they are from different sources. Therefore, they have different formats and different data points. Some will have garbage values entered and others may have blanks. The worse thing anyone can possibly do is say “well let them go into our database, we’ll deal with them later.” Later is always too late! They need to be fixed before they get into the database.

1. Examine each lead source whether its a list provider, a landing page form, website registration forms etc and look closely at what can be done to ensure data is normalized and bad data can be filtered out before you get them. Can you remove “required fields” on your landing pages as Matthew mentioned? Can you work with your list provider to deliver the data in the format you need and do those quality checks for you? Could you have marketing enter the business card details and other sources in the format you need?
2. Once you have received the leads, centralize the data and run your own quality check process. Delete any leads which have garbage values filled in everywhere to avoid redundancy, do a data append effort to fill in missing email addresses and other blank fields wherever possible, normalize the data to make them appear like they came from a single source and then upload them to your database. 

If you see bad data entering the database, turn off the taps, work backwards and fix the problem at the source. Good data = efficiency = good results.