Marketing Database Optimization Best Practices

CRM has been widely adopted across organization of all sizes over the past decade for effectively managing all customer relationship functions, though a large focus has been on sales force automation. Sales and lead management has been streamlined a lot with CRM systems and though there are newer challenges, the sales management process would be terribly cumbersome to manage without a CRM. However, as organizations have been into CRM for a few years now, a fresh new challenging has been staring at them – the challenge of managing lead data to keep it complete, accurate, relevant and actionable. Leads and business contacts have a shelf life as contacts change their roles, leave and take up other jobs and in doing so create a dead lead in the databases of vendors who were selling to them. And if this happens with 1000 leads out of a total of 40,000 leads in the CRM database of a vendor, then how do you really keep track of those 1000 leads and deal with them? More and more companies are loosing significant amounts of budget to campaigns that are sent to dead or no-longer-qualified leads. This is not an easy problem to solve but it is an important problem to address. I call it Marketing Database Operations. Over the past few quarters I have come across marketing managers whose sole responsibility is lead data management – its a dire need and a new marketing role is being defined around building and managing marketing databases that are to be maintained on an ongoing basis. Its a tough job as lead data grows every day and an unknown fraction of it becomes unusable everyday. Here are a few recommendations for marketing database operations managers to constrain the problem and potential create a system that works: 

• Focus on quality of data over quantity. This will help you reduce the enormity of the problem on an ongoing basis. 
• Lay strict rules for new data that is added to the system from the perspective of completeness and verification status. Any data that is not complete or verified should not be added to the CRM database. 
• Don’t use web-t0-form features of CRM application as this is a major source of junk leads entering the CRM system. 
• Don’t allow website traffic data to be pushed to your CRM system without verification and acquisition of role-based contacts at the companies that visited the website. 
• Purge bounced email records from the database on a regular basis to remove records that no longer seem valid. If the email bounces (which was not bouncing earlier) you can safely assume the contact is no longer at the companies, unless a sales person shows call activity on the contact. 
• Remove and build a plan for data that has not shown any activity in the past 90 or 120 days depending on your specific scenario. Chances are that leads that are not called or have not shown any email responses in the past 90 days are not valid or dead anyway. One way to deal with this is to export these from the CRM database and create a strategy to re-verify/re-connect with them and if some of them respond or qualify themselves then, those can be loaded back into the CRM system. 
• Purge duplicate data on an ongoing basis across leads and contacts databases if you are using Salesforce.com. 
• Get a clear perspective of all the lead records that are missing critical contact data like email addresses and phone numbers. Other data like industry, number of employees might also be critical for segmentation and do consider that as well. This will give you an idea of how much of your past data needs to be fixed for it to be truly usable and will also prompt you to consider what you need in the new data for it to be ready for upload to your CRM database. 

Marketing Database Operations Managers must invest in build a customized dashboard to have clear perspective of all these parameters that matter the most of them to be able to structure data cleansing and enrichment projects to keep getting better in terms of data quality. This is a challenge as well as an opportunity though, and companies who are able to get a good handle over their marketing databases will win.

Rich Data: Role-based Decision Makers Are Key

Mike Damphousse of Smashmouth Marketing blog posted an interesting analysis today comparing the value/cost of inbound versus outbound marketing. With the rise and hype of social media, there is a lot of discussion around how to leverage social media for B2B lead generation, but what is really missing is the fact that social media takes a lot of time and effort, the results are not easily measurable and it is time you are taking away from other proven channels for pipeline development, specifically outbound marketing in B2B. As Mike points out, while inbound marketing is a necessary element, it must be clear that its just not going to replace outbound marketing, especially telemarketing.

If we leave out low priced software or SaaS offerings which cannot justify a large inside or field sales force, the rest of the B2B market segments usually have significantly priced products and solutions where sales cycles can be long, prospects need to educated and relationships need to be build to develop a qualified opportunity. In such cases, while inbound marketing may take a long time to reach the complete segment of buyers (especially considering the fact that a tiny fraction of B2B buyers are interacting with social media for their buying decisions, other than Google search) and it may take more time from there on to qualify the leads. Compare this to a systematic outbound marketing effort and I am positive that the results will be a lot more effective and in a shorter period of time.

Having said that, outbound marketing will only be as effective as the quality of data that its structured around. Broad brush approach of calling on large lists or emailing house lists is not going to cut it. Rich Data must be the foundation of your outbound marketing if you are to get highly effective cost per lead metrics. Rich Data is list of contacts and profiled accounts that help you understand who are your critical decision makers and influencers at your target accounts along with key sales intelligence details at the account. Rich Data ensures that your telemarketing team will be focused on having conversations and not on trying to discover contacts and pre-qualify accounts. The telemarketing team is just 1 call away from a fruitful conversation with a laser focused contact who is their buyer. With Rich Data, email marketing also becomes orders of magnitude more effective as messages are clearly focused reach decision makers who “get it”. Organizations that don’t realize the value of Rich Data to power their outbound marketing will continue to see mediocre results and its not appropriate to compare these results with any inbound marketing results for any analysis of the two.