Marketing Database Optimization Best Practices

If you ask any business to business sales person ‘what is the one problem you face more than anything else and would like to find a solution to?’, they will say hitting voicemail box and spending minutes or even hours without actually getting to speak to a decision maker. In fact we resigned to the fact that the only way to get around this is to have more business contacts and make more calls while keeping your fingers crossed that the decision maker will pick up. I’ve been there myself and its a helpless feeling knowing that if there was a way to get to talk to more decision makers in a day, you would have much better results. So when I learned about a solution developed to tackle exactly this while reading Aaron Ross’ blog post “connectandsell 100x roi in generating pipeline!?” I was thrilled thinking “finally a solution to the voicemail box problem!”

Cold calling is an indispensable part of selling and the biggest impact to its productivity is the low availability of decision makers on the phone and spending a lot of precious selling time simply attempting to connect with them. By filtering out voicemail boxes and connecting sales people directly with decision makers using an innovative system, this is exactly what ConnectAndSell have addressed and solved so that your productivity shoots up and you could get more connected calls delivered through every hour than you would if you had to sift through large business contact lists.

One of the reasons we advocated using customized role based business contact lists for cold calling is the ability to have direct contact numbers and extentions for each of the decision makers located so that you can navigate through departments and gatekeepers and maximize your connectivity with decision makers. The downside is that you can still hit a voicemail. I would imagine building a robust, custom business contacts target list and combining it with a solution like ConnectAndSell would help step up the results from cold calling or teleprospecting by more than 100%. It’s worth checking out!

Marketing and lead generation is one of those roles where no matter how much you do every day, it always feels that you could have done a little bit more if you had extra hands to work with. Perhaps you have a great email campaign planned out and if only you had someone to help you with list building for a bigger list of target decision makers. Maybe a whitepaper download campaign just went well and you would love to have another done within the month if only you had someone to help you keep up with lead qualification for all the inbound leads generated.  What if you could focus more time on generating more leads while someone else could profile existing leads and deliver clear business opportunties to the sales people? So you need some help and the obvious solution is to hire so that you have that extra capacity but there are things to consider and questions to ask yourself such as:

• Do you need the extra capacity in the long run or is it just a need you feel now because you have short term plans which need that extra effort?
• Will it be worth the time, expense and effort required to have a new team member on board, get ramped up and wait for your investment to start bearing fruit?
• Is adding the head count really giving your team more capacity and efficiency or will it be an overhead in terms of management time and other resources?

There are those who will argue that outsourcing parts of your business to business lead generation activity is not recommended since marketing is a core part of the organization and should not be outsourced but I would differ there. Outsourcing your entire marketing and sales perhaps, but then again not many would do that. Leveraging services like we provide at ReadyContacts.com can actually augment your own internal efforts and help you build that lean mean marketing machine. Once you have identified what parts of the process you could use those additional hands on, give it a run and in time your existing marketing team will be able to step up their productivity without having to augment it with additional head count. Especially with a per performance pricing model or delivery based pricing, you will really find a very clear ROI for your costs and you should be able to get a lot more done for considerably less than an additional employees monthly salary and expenses. So if you are looking for those extra hands and still stay lean. Think about it!

Your CRM data is probably one of your organizations most valuable assets. Companies can go through great lengths to protect and secure their CRM data but just how much emphasis goes into the quality of the CRM data? Everyone is well aware about the value of their organization’s CRM data and if there was a straightforward way to put a financial price tag on them perhaps it would put things into perspective better. However CRM data is a perishable asset and left on its own it doesn’t appreciate like an antique with time, it’s value will diminish unless you look after it well. Although data quality management may rank among the most neglected area of CRM management and definitely one of the major pain areas for administrators and managers, following a strict CRM data cleansing and data enrichment regiment is what will help maintain and enhance the value of your data.  

Here are some practices to keep your CRM data quality at its best:

Identify A Drop In Data Quality Quickly

Bad data is often ignored until it really starts to affect daily work by which time it needs a lot of work to get it back in shape. Its important to identify whose responsibility it is to monitor the data quality and keep the maintainence process going on an ongoing basis. Whether its a weekly scan of records to see if outwardly everything looks alright or a periodic email or contact sample check, keeping an eye on your data will help you identify changes in quality earlier rather than later. Sometimes your sales persons or marketing department who frequently use the data to call or email prospects or customers using the data will be the first ones to experience any change in quality and keeping a regular and close feedback loop will help you know how up-to-date your data is or what issues they face while using it.  

Have An Organizational Policy On Data Standards

Bad data in. Bad data out. While CRM administrators and managers are finicky abut ensuring  any data they upload into their CRM is checked and entered exactly how it should be, most CRMs are accessed by several end users across the organization and there is very little control over what data is entered or edited and how it is entered or updated. This is where it can start going wrong. Educating the end users or the company’s data standards and making them aware of healthy data updating practices can help standardize what goes into the CRM. For example if one user enters contact names in the form of initials with currency values in dollars and another enters them as full names with currency values in increments of a thousand dollars there is bound to be a data which is not standardized. Coming up with a well defined data standards policy which is made available to all end users can help considerably.

Put In Stringent Quality Checks At Your Data Sources

CRM data usually comes from several sources from conference lists, whitepaper downloads, website form fills, purchased business contact lists, online ad clicks, business contacts databases and more. Common practice is to upload them to the CRM straight away assuming it can be normalized or filtered later. Its a good practice to manage, normalize, format, qualify and filter out your leads outside your CRM and then have it uploaded so that what is not valuable or quality data does not get added. We’ve covered more on this in an earlier post titled ‘Data Management – Manage Your Leads Outside Your CRM‘. If you check and clean your data right from the source, it will save you a lot of trouble later. 

Check For & Tackle Incomplete Records

Despite most CRMs having validations to check for mandatory data fields its not always easy to ensure a value for every field at the time when a record is generated. For example if your contact source is a conference list of attendees with only contact names, job titles and phone numbers, although it’s been added to your CRM, it has very little value if it needs to be used in an email campaign or a direct mail reach out. Appending missing data is not always easy to automate and often does involve a lot of manual effort which will seem time consuming. However it is a necessary evil and a periodic data append effort for missing data is important.

Check For Duplication And Redundant Data

Duplication of records and having large amounts of junk data is a sign of a sick CRM database. While putting in software checks for validating records and ensuring an entry is unique is a preventive measure thats good to have in place, there are a number of software or technology based deduplication services which can help weed out duplicates some of which are mentioned here in a previous post. With a growing number of leads coming through sources like form fills and online sources where leads can often fill up gibberish values, doing regular scans for such junk records will help you keep your data free of what should not be in there. Its importnat to note that having a lot of duplicates and other redundant data can result in your analytics and reports reflecting false results so it has to be kept in check.

Periodically Filter Out Expired data

Companies and organizations merge, get acquired or shut down, contacts change addresses, change jobs, move within an organization …CRM data does expire. This is an area which is not easily automated and again does require a considerable investment of time and energy. The more regularly you can carry out a check for expired data, the healthier your CRM will be. A database which remains untouched or unchecked for an entire year can see as much as 30% expired data and the longer you have between checks, the worse it can get so making sure its checked periodically is paramount. While being able to run through the entire data once every quarter is ideal, twice a year should be the minimum.

Enrich Your Data, Increase Its Value

If data cleansing is what helps you maintain your database quality then data enrichment is what will help you enhance your data quality and make it more valuable to the end users. Ask yourself what additional data points in each record could help your users do more with the data and give them a better insight on each account. Would it help to have the annual revenues listed in multiple currencies? Would it help to have a list of all countries each account operates in? Would it help to have a link to the press releases of each account to stay updated on recent events? These additional data points can be added with a data enrichment effort after identifying what additional data would help provide value.

If you practice good data management practices and implement a constant cleansing and enrichment process for your CRM you will be able to actually realize its full potential. Thats when your CRM data is really an asset!

Quite simply. Yes they are!

A lot of business to business email campaigns are well planned with the message being crafted to strike a particular nerve with a targeted decision maker who has a specific role or responsibility which should make them think about a product or service and how it could make things better for their organization. So what many email marketers tend to do is throw a thousand emails out to a large list of business contacts hoping that about one hundred of them fall infront of eyes to whom the email is relevant and hope for the best. This is shooting in the dark at best.

When email messages can be customized to hit a specific point, why can’t the target lead lists also be customized to match the email message? They should be. One of our customers planned a well crafted campaign to go after decision makers responsible for testing their software applications for locating bugs in the coding right through the earlier stages of development. However the ideal target for their campaign was not a CIO or VP of Applications. They needed to reach someone specifically responsible for developing and testing applications in Java at the earlier stages for their message to really connect and strike a chord. The solution: A combination of our list building and account profiling services our teleprospecting team called into their target accounts and helped locate very specific contacts within them who were responsible for Java testing and along with the answers to few more profiling questions to score them better. Simply put, as a software applications manager who is responsible for Java testing, you are more likely to open and spend time going through an email which relevent to what you do.

• The open rates are better
• The response rates are better
• You reduce the chances of companies thinking you send them spam
• Your campaigns being smaller and more focussed makes quick follow up and lead qualification easier
• You get into the practice of qualifying early and generating quality business leads over quantity mail blasts

So if you are looking to customize every aspect of your email campaign, try custom building your target lead lists and tailor them to your campaign too. Market smart.

I was reading an interesting post that we could relate to on Jill Konrath’s blog Selling To Big Companies on one sales persons dilema of how he can justify to his sales manager that its worth going after fewer larger deals at bigger companies over more and regular deals at smaller accounts. Similarly we know of many smaller  business to business companies out there whose products and services are well suited to bigger companies but its a known fact that its a must to do your homework well before you attempt to sell into a bigger company. This additional groundwork  means more time, longer sales cycles and more risks as compared to the smaller companies where its comparitively easier to find a decision maker and get hold of them on a cold call. So to many companies this extra time and effort that goes into researching, intelligence gathering, account profiling, qualifying, locating business contacts and other pre-sales activities is a significant risk because shifting focus to these accounts can mean re-allocating bandwidth that was bringing in the smaller but more reliable sales. So do you have to give up the idea of big risk-big reward deals which can be found at the bigger companies?

One of the areas we have been able to successfully help some of our customers at smaller companies is by helping them with their pre-sales activities to help them take their focus off this and put it on the selling itself. By helping do the initial groundwork by doing account profiling where you have someone else do the initial research, identify multiple decision makers within these larger accounts, do some initial calls and have an understanding of their pain points and some intelligence before they attempt to sell. After having these targets accounts profiled and having a clear insight into these companies, you know which ones are worth pursuing and adjusting your sales approach, message and pitch becomes easier and much more focussed.

This way a company can have their pre sales preperation done without having to reshuffle or disturb the current flow too much to also take a shot at the bigger business opportunities and the bigger companies. The rewards could be well worth the risk. 

Email verification software solutions have been around just as long as the need for email verification was felt and if you are looking for a solution to have your business to business email campaign lists verifed there are several options which may vary in terms of accuracy and effectiveness. Other than the pricing factor for each software have a look to see what exactly each email list verifier does and if it fulfils your expectations of accuracy?

If you have tried several email verification tools, you would know there are instances when your verifier software tells you that and email address is good while when you send an email to the same address from your webmail account, it may bounce or show you a failiure. This is because some software mainly strips the domain part of the address and validates whether the domain is correct without really checking the validity of the entire email address. This is useful for very large email lists where you may just want to filter out the complete junk records but it wont give you a very high level of accuracy. The other, more comprehnsive type of software will first check the domain with a DNS request and also emulate sending a mail and connecting with the receipients email server using SMTP. These will tell you whether the user is a valid one or not and give you better accuracy. Although there can still be issues in accuracy caused by company email security setups like anti-spam filters, firewalls and email catch configurations, there are a large number of tools that will do the job and filter out bad email addresses. Some sample options of email list verifiers are:

Advance Email Verifier by G-Lock Software 

Bulk Verifier

Maxprog’s eMail Verifier

Dynamic Mail Validator By Dynamic Software

Fast Email Verifier by Lencom Software

Atomic Email Verifier

If your marketing relies heavily on large email campaigns then investing in an email list verifier can be a good option. Here at ReadyContacts.com, while executing CRM data cleansing and email list verification for our customers, to get that extra edge in terms of accuracy, we use a combination of an inhouse email verifier software as well as a manual process. By running the lists through a combination of different software checks as well as being thouroughly scanned and rechecked by our database team, we are able to update or correct wrong emails as well as check them for bounces caused by email filters or blocks which the software checks may not be able to do as well. In any case, evalute whats best for your requirements well and if you decide that purchasing a verifier is not the best option for you, we can always help you with your email lists.  

As marketers we all get caught up in generating leads, building traffic, creating click throughs, optimizing content and generating more views and leads. In doing all this we often forget that the final objective is not just generating the highest volumes of leads but to generate business opportunities which are well qualified and can potentially convert to sales. So what is being done to make sure all those inquiries, downloads and web leads are qualified and the ones that are clear business opportunities are identified and passed on appropriately?

We have covered the need for inbound lead qualification in previous posts and while talking to companies we often hear that they have it all covered and their inbound leads are uploaded straight to their CRM so that in time they can be conatcted by the sales reps. But have they really got things covered? Time is of the essence when it comes to having inbound leads qualified and ideally they should be qualified as soon as they are generated. With every hour that passes by after that, the chances of conversion to a clear business opportunitiy or a sale diminish. Spending on having your inbound lead qualified as soon as possible is more than worth the extra cost. If you can identify clear business opportunities and differentiate them from unqualified leads in the process you will not only have a better conversaion rate but you will benefit from having only good qualified business opportunities from going into your CRM and have your sales team spend their time better on well qualified opportunities rather than just leads. This simple addition to the loop will make your sales machine more efficient and have it working in the right direction. 

Remember the aim should not stop at simply generating leads. Thats just step one. The aim is to generate qualified business opportunities. Identifiying business opportunities within the leads sooner rather than later will give you that extra edge.