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Data Strategy Magazine published reports of a study carried out in the UK by Kalido where they researched companies with a turnover higher than $500 million and found less than half of the respondents satisfied with their database quality. In the report Data Strategy Magazine published:

Nearly one quarter of respondents (24 per cent) said they were not very or not at all satisfied with the consistency and accuracy of master data in their company and that data issues were many and constant. Just over one third (35 per cent) said they had no data issues at all. The largest group of 41 per cent fell in between, being somewhat satisfied, but with a few data issues still to resolve.

Given that marketing organizations of such large companies need to rely so heavily on their data for driving new revenue, its surprising how little attention is paid to it’s upkeep. Perhaps if their customer and marketing databases were valued monetarily as a company asset and this value was tracked through the year based on how much of the data is active and useful in developing future business, it would get the kind of attention needed. While marketing budgets are generously allocated towards events and campaigns aimed at generating new leads, very few VP’s of Marketing or CMO’s apportion an amount towards maintaining, cleansing and enriching existing data which incurred a sizable cost to build earlier. The article in Data Strategy goes on to say:

As part of the study, companies were asked to put a financial value on the costs savings or increases in revenue that might result from data quality initiatives. The majority (57 per cent) were unable to answer. Among those who could, the average benefit was put at $38 million. 

Thats no small change in potential revenue and it may have been possible by budgeting a fraction of that amount in data cleansing and putting in a more stringent policies to keep data quality in check monthly or at least quarterly. It’s not just the large companies in the UK which suffer from data quality and management issues, we can only wonder what the results would show if the same survey was carried out on the Fortune 500 companies. The company database is a valuable asset, treat it like one!

Paid online advertising to spread the word about your company or product is a significant online marketing strategy. Depending on the size of the company or nature of products and solutions the company is looking to drive traffic for, using Google Ad-words or vertical specific ad sales networks are the quickest solutions to getting an online advertising campaign started for the business. Vertical specific ad networks such as Federated Media, Adbrite, Adify and others enable companies to find and distribute their advertisements across numerous networks to focussed online audiences and cater to a number of verticals from travel, food to technology. What if you want to build your own network and connect with some very niche or specific sites? What if you want to link your product or services to these sites and have a special agreement with them?

Building your own ad network for either advertising on a pay per click model or even simply connecting with some prominent sites within your industry or network needs a marketing + sales approach. Once the online publications or sites within the vertical where you’d like to drive traffic from are identified, the next critical step is locating the decision makers for these websites who need to be approached along with contact details such as email addresses and phone numbers. Building this list of the sites you want links from and the key decision makers for those sites is half the battle. From there onwards, it’s about connecting with those who are in charge of advertising and links on the sites through well crafted email messages and followed up by personal calls to put across the proposal you have for either an advertising on their site or perhaps a mutual exchange of links.

This could be a very effective strategy for niche businesses and products such as bio-technology, renewable energy solutions or various others where carrying out an ongoing effort to reach out to popular sites in the area and working out how to partner with them along the way is a sensible investment. Does your company network with others in your vertical? What is your game plan for building a network within your vertical?

Companies are waking up to social media marketing and making a proactive efforts to develop company active blogs as a part of thier social strategy and reach out to0 their customers. Many have figured out its a great way to connect with their customers and communicate with them. Others have learnt its a great way to get feedback from them. Then there is using the blog traffic and capturing leads. The most common way to do this is creating a call-to-action form with some incentive for the reader to submit their email address, company name and phone number so that it can be added to the marketing or lead database. Comments are not often looked at as a source for leads. Why? Many of them could be good prospects. They could be a great addition in the lead nurturing cycle. Why don’t they make it to most databases?

Active blogs that are drawing a good amount of traffic get a fair amount of comments from readers who are often prospective customers. A good percentage of these commenters will link to their company website or their own website so its not to difficult to determine which company they are from. The email address is usually a mandatory field for submitting a comment so you have a contact point and possibly another clue to the organization they work with. Not many companies harvest the data entered while these comments are submitted. If they do, perhaps they dont make it to the CRM or marketing database because they are “incomplete” by the standards of what is considered a complete contact or lead which can be entered into the system. These contacts don’t have to go to waste. Its possible to carry out data append or data enrichment efforts similar to those we do here at ReadyContacts for our customers. Once details like the account name, address, website url, description, contact name, email, phone number, postal address and so on are confirmed and appended its a complete record fit to go into the database. 

There are data append solutions available to enrich your data or you can build a process which ensures comments are regularly exported, appended with additional data, filtered and directed to the marketing and sales cycle. Once you have such a process in place, you know you’re making the most of your company blog. If you’re not, you may have missed a possible customer somewhere among those commenters.

There is a plethora of marketing and lead generation software applications tools out there. Some of them simple, others loaded with features. Some of them cost a small fortune and others are priced as low as nothing. While large companies can set aside significant technology budgets for their lead generation technology, it doesn’t mean small businesses don’t have other options to carry out similar tasks. We wrote “B2B Lead Generation Using The Big Friendly Giant” to help startups and small businesses see just how much can be done with the free services Google offers. Whether you want to build a target list of accounts and decision makers, set up product sites, landing pages, start a company blog or track competitors, there are ways to leverage what Google offers to put these plans into motion. 

Please download a copy from Scribd and let me know if you found any part of it particularly helpful or have any other tips and tricks you’d like to share.

B2B Lead Generation Using the Big Friendly Giant -2009

I know there are two very different schools of thought when it comes to inside sales with one selling aggresively without taking no for an answer and trying to push towards sales and the other more passive who digg for insights to judge whether the prospect is open to buying and carefully wait for the right time to pitch an offer. I’ve seen both work so I can’t advocate one over the other but there is one tactic which is very relevant to the current slow economic times which can help inside sales pitch to the right accounts in a more informed way.

Sales account profiling or building detailed first hand intelligence on target accounts can really give the inside sales team the kind of ammo they need to alter their message and sales pitch based on what they know about the account, the decision makers, their preferences and their inside agenda. A set of key questions would normally help shed some light on who those decision makers are, what their challenges are and what their budget and time line look like. However , a lot company plans have been upset by the economic conditions today and getting a clearer insight into where these companies stand in light of this will help identify which accounts are better to pursue so that inside sales can focus their efforts. A pre sales call into key target accounts to ask a decision maker within your market area with open ended questions can help pre qualify and prioritize the accounts. For example:

• Has your company changed direction or announced a new strategy for the current times?
• How has it impacted your department?
• Has the company strategy to tackle these times hit your departments budget?
• What are the current challenges your organization is seeing?
• Have you curbed spending on new initiatives? When do you see things possibly turning around for the better?

As mundane as it may seem to know the answers to such questions for every target account in your database, these questions can help quickly filter out businesses who have completely capped spending and have extremely tight budget restrictions within the organization being sold into. This can be a huge saving on inside sales or sales’ time which can be directed at accounts which are still investing and growing or possibly not hit by the economy at all. Even one or two questions slipped into the usual account profiling process will help streamline the efforts towards what can convert and not chasing the wrong leads. Bad times call for better practices. Start with better account profiling.

Salesforce Annnounces Twitter App – Read this post on the Zdnet blog and it confirms one of the new year predictions we made in January and validates what we have been talking about in some of the earlier posts B2B Marketing Data Forecast – Blog, Twitter & Linkedin Info A Standard Data Field . 

As quoted in the Zdnet blog:

As for the Twitter application itself, salesforce is enabling companies to query the tweets that are being blasted through the Twittersphere as they relate to the company’s brand, products or even competitors and monitor – in real time – what people are saying. A company like Comcast might quickly learn when a city is experiencing an outage or service problem, for example, while a company like AT&T might be able to monitor what’s being said about iPhone service in a particular region.

Twitter feeds are a great source of intelligence and can give you a great insight into what a company is doing or even an individual. The fact that you can put up a 140 charachter update in just seconds as opposed to having marketing communications come up with a press release, its often a realtime source to hear chatter related to companies. Almost exactly like a quickly doing some research into a company’s website and a google search before calling in, checking out a Twitter feed can help with some really good insights and goin in better prepared.

Other than a source of intellience and updates, its proving to be an equally good channel to get a message out to a group or individuals who actively follow on Twitter and is slowly developing into a channel for communication. With phone channels being protected from cold calls and email boxes being plagues by spam, reaching out via Twitter is picking up pace. How long this will last and will it ever reach the popularity of phone and email is not certain. What is sure is it is currently gaining momentum and Salesforce has been quick to act on it. Gathering account intelligence data just got smarter!

To get updates on what I’m currently doing, follow me on Twitter

An inside sales rep with the task of cold calling the CEO or high ranking executive of a fairly large organization over the phone would have a daunting experience even connecting. Getting past the gatekeepers and assistants is just part of the battle. Even if one is lucky enough to connect, its not always easy to strike up a rapport as executives are more likely to be pre disposed ‘not to entertain a cold call’.

Now think about this…have you ever approached a high level executive or noted professional using a Linkedin message or sending a Twitter direct message / tweet? Whoaa a reply! That was easy! We haven’t put this through a formal research so I cant state this as a fact but from my experience, it’s a lot easier to connect with a CEO or executive using Twitter, Linkedin or commenting on his/her blog. Somehow, just as much as we dislike being interrupted by a phone call at the office, we love recieving a direct message on Linkedin, a comment posted to our blog or a tweet from one of our Twitter followers. I’m sure when phones were still new, executives were happy to answer calls but times have changed and more often than not, they aren’t always excited about incoming phone calls. It was the same with emails and once spam came into being, open rates declined and connecting through email also became challenging. Communication channels are evolving and even executives are shouting out “connect with me on Linkedin” or “follow me on Twitter”. So how does this effect marketing and CRM data?

For starters, other than having a company phone number, contact phone number/extension, postal & email address, Linkedin profile, Twitter url, blog url and others are likely to become standard contact data fields for leads. Imagine going through your Salesforce data, clicking a contact and seeing a feed of the leads most recent updates on Twitter. Imagine cold calling a CEO and saying “We haven’t spoken before but we’ve exchanged thoughts thought comments on your blog”. It helps connect on another level which is a lot easier than pure cold calling. It’s effective, it’s relevant to our times and it works! If these contact details can make it to visiting cards, don’t be surprised to find them as a standard requirement in CRMs and marketing databases soon. Would this make you re-think how your marketing data looks?

Jim logan posted an absolutely brilliant piece on the B2B Rainmaker blog titled “The problem with the problem with cold calling” which is a must read and brings out a very important point. In his post Jim says:

If the call you receive is irrelevant and unwelcome, the problem is with the preparation before the call, not the call itself.  The person making the call failed to do their homework before the picked-up the phone.

Cold calling and telemarketing has picked up a bad name and in recent times has become a lot more notorious than it was a few years ago. As Jim points out really well, there is nothing wrong or ineffective about the process of cold calling its the preperation or lack of it which determines how effective it is. Havinig worked with clients varying from small startups to large fortune companies, we know cold calling is still a very importnat channel for sales and leads. Surprisingly, something as small and simple as the business contact lists or marketing databases which these companies can use for their telemarketing campaigns can be an Achilles heel if its not of the highest quality. One of the most important questions to ask before picking up the receiver and dialing away is:

“Am I calling the RIGHT person?”

Have you ever walked into a movie cinema a bit late when everyone is seated and you have to feel your way through the dark, bump into and trip over everyone, irritating them and apologizing as you go along? Thats what its like cold calling into an organization when you have no clue who you need to speak to finally and how to get there. Decision makers rarely outright reject calls that are relevant to what they do or will be unwilling to speak to someone who has something to say that is within their area of responsibility. It’s the constant irrelevant calls which have nothing to do with them which put them off and give cold calling a bad name. Bad contact lists are also to blame. 

For example : the IT Manager of a company responsible for quality control software and systems used by manufacturing should usually be open to a discussion if he is called about questions or technology related to quality control. However if he is called by a sales person who starts talking to him about IT security and anti-virus software products he’s more likely to snub the caller for interrupting his work. In the second case the caller assumes just because he’s speaking to an IT Manager, he must be open to talking about anti-virus software. Wrong! If  business contact lists and data are built based on roles of the decision makers rather than simply by job titles, the chances are connect rates are higher and conversations will be much higher than unqualified contact lists. More conversations, more opportunities, more sales. Cold calling isn’t ineffective. As Jim Logan sums up very well:

The problem with the problem with cold calling is there is no problem.  The real issue with cold calling is preparation and technique – the use itself is valid.

Contact us or sign up for a free trial list of role based business contacts with complete direct contact data to experience the difference in calling on higher quality decision maker lists.

Have you ever moved house where everything you had needs to be moved and looked at it as an opportunity to get rid of what you wont be needing or replace what doesnt work anymore? It’s an almost natural chain of thought when you are moving things to a new setting that you would like to bring with you only what you need and leave behind what you dont need. The next time you need to migrate your CRM data to a new system or are in the process of overhauling your CRM, then look at it the same way. As an opportunity to cleanse your CRM data rather than as just a painful migration process which is a necessary evil to shift to a better system. 

Even the best CRM, lead nurturing or marketing automation software won’t deliver magical improvements without ensuring its fed with quality data and if you are going into a migration with data that hasn’t been monitored for quality for a longer spell, then it’s not likely the new solution will function at 100%. Migrating your data can be a fresh start of sorts and give you the chance to overhaul your data completely once and then put in a periodic and frequent review process to keep the data at peak performance levels thereafter. Here are a few things you can do before the data is moved to its new location:

• remove junk records 
• remove any duplication of records, accounts or contacts
• verify and update email addresses
• validate and update postal addresses, urls, phone numbers etc
• check for and filter out contacts and accounts which are no longer active
• append any missing data points for imcomplete records
• add any additional fields or data points which could be valuable like SIC codes, alternate currencies etc
• normalize and format data
• make any changes to the format or structure of the database

Once the big task of cleansing the entire database is completed, the task of maintaining that level of quality across the new system becomes incremental and won’t be as difficult. If you are planning a migration, plan a clean up too.  It’s a good time. It’s an opportunity.

For more on data cleansing best practices download a free copy of 7 Tips To Healthy CRM Data – CRM Data Management, Cleansing & Enrichment Best Practices

The US healthcare pharmaceuticals market is valued at several hundred billion dollars. It’s little wonder that it’s one of the top segments in the sights of a large number of b2b companies eyeing a slice of that pie. When it comes to building a database of healthcare leads and decision makers a custom list building approach is perhaps one of the best sources and well worth the time or money you invest in building it. Depending on the organization within which you need decision makers whether its IT, finance, accounting, compliance or administration, role based lists are a lot more reliable and accurate. Some of the larger company databases may not have the level or type of contacts needed and although ready lists can be purchased or rented, accuracy would depend on how recently they were built and unless these lists can be sampled. When the products or services are more niche and require very specific decision makers engaged in the sales process then aside from generating inbound leads and inquiries for the offering, building role based lists is ideal. For example if the decision maker is the person responsible for diagnostics technology in the lab or the person responsible for emergency response systems and software, it’s unlikely they can be found on most directories or ready lists.

To build a role based list, use a telephone based process of calling into to prospective accounts and asking for decision makers by role rather than asking for someone in a specific job title. For example, if the product being sold is a tissue imaging solution for diagnostics, navigating through the diagnostics lab and identifying the person responsible for imaging is a lot more productive than asking for the IT Director or having the name of  the CIO and asking inside sales to connect with him/her. The phone based process is time intensive and slower than buying a list of more general  higher level contacts but the value of having a database of accurate direct decision makers which sales and marketing can connect with quickly is well worth the effort and extremely valuable while going after the healthcare segment.

In a market like healthcare and pharmaceuticals where high quality marketing data isn’t always readily available off the shelf, try building your own. Starting with the right person may help you get that piece of the pie before someone else does.