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Everyone talks about target marketing, improving the focus of their marketing camapigns and going for the personalized marketing approach. There are discussions on how to get efforts more targeted and then people are assigned to overhaul the website to make it appeal to different market segments or decision making levels. Some are assigned to developing different email content, website content, downloadable documents which are specially made for each target buyer segment while others are busy brainstorming other ideas on how to woo each target market segment with a message which will strike a chord with them. Has anyone checked to see if the contacts in the company marketing database are segmented accordingly? Ooops!

You can’t run targted marketing campaigns on data which has not been segmented! Segmenting your data is step one to planning a targeted marketing campaign as soon as you’ve identified who your customers are. Even if you have a single product for example: a payroll management software for the hospitality industry, its still possibly to customize messages and campaigns for the Payroll decision maker, the VP of Human Resources and the CFO. Alternatively you may want to hit C-Level executives with a with a high level overview on how you product or solution can help their business and hit those directly responsible and those who will use your solution with a more detailed message. In either case, however you decide to plan your segmentation and target messages, your database and business contacts need to be segmented and sorted accordingly. 

To do this the team responsible for data management and data cleansing needs to come together with the team thats planning out the targeted marketing strategy, understand their common objectives and sync the data accordingly. Well tagged data which has complete information such as contact level, contact organization, department, contact type and similar attributes are far easier to sort compared to contacts which consist of names and contact details. For example if you need a list of VP-Level contacts from the Finance organization, the data can be easily sorted IF each contact was associated with these fields. Scheduling a periodic data enrichment effort along with your data cleansing and maintainence routine will help ensure these attributes are added to your data which makes it easier to manage when needed in future. 

So before you plan your next targeted marketing campaign, check to see if your data meets your segmentation needs. If it’s not, there’s some work to be done.

We are excited about posting the first of our series of  ”How Good Data Turbo Charges Lead Generation” interviews where we’ll talk to prominent btob marketing and lead generation experts to get some of their experiences and their views on marketing data, databases and their role in sucessful lead generation programs. We are just as excited that we got to interview noted database and CRM expert Lori Feldman in our very first feature of this series and in the process we have some valuable insights and great takeaways for readers. Without any more introductions and delays, here’s the interview:

You’ve been an advocate for building and managing robust customer and marketing databases, do you think current in the economic times CMOs should call for more focus more towards their customer databases?

Lori: IMO, you can never focus on your customer database enough. It’s the mother ship of sales! Unfortunately too many organizations treat their database like an address book instead of a business asset that appreciates in value with proper care and feeding. 

There are 2 primary database marketing strategies: Retention (keeping the customers you have–critical) and acquisition (getting new ones-urgent). Companies tend to focus on one or the other, but seldom both at once. (Or worse, they treat customers and prospects the same, which is a big no-no.) 

Usually the focus is on acquisition–prospecting, even though it’s at least 7X easier to sell existing customers than to convert new ones. Marketing and Sales sometimes think, “Well, we have those customers already; let’s go get new ones.” They forget their customers are Grade A Prime beef to another company’s acquisition program. Right now with a contracted economy, customer share is stolen rather than created. So it’s imperative to show customers maximum appreciation and head off potential defections. 

That said, if a company has been spending its resources in one area, prospecting, for example, then a great strategy is to beef up sales with the other discipline (customer care).

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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?

Lori: Data quality has 2 components: Is the info correct? And is it complete? For example, I could have a perfectly targeted list of CMOs at their company addresses, but without phone numbers or email addresses. The info may be correct, but it’s not ready for prospecting, unless I’m using snail mail, which, I believe is an expensive way to begin a prospecting campaign.

I recommend that organizations have at least one Database Champion who’s responsible for caressing the data: completing what’s missing, following up on bounced emails and opt-outs, keeping track of decision makers who are replaced. This last one is very important. One of my clients just told me that in her industry at least 30% of her contacts aren’t sitting at their desks anymore. The economic downturn isn’t just having an effect on people and companies; it’s murdering contact databases. 

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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?

Lori: The first challenge is finding all the data. It’s amazing how many different places people keep important leads. Here are a few:

·PDA phones

·Outlook address books

·accounting software

·various spreadsheets

·piles of business cards falling off desks

·multiple contact databases at the same company

·different departments at the same company who have pieces and parts of the same contact info 

I recently worked with a new client to set up his sales database. He just bought a 50-year-old company. The customer “database” was a 10″-high ream of greenbar printout–and no electronic version available. Obviously, getting that report re-keyed was priority one. Everything else he had, including sales leads from a manufacturing directory they subscribed to, needed to be matched to that list before any intelligent territory planning or sales call strategy could be mapped out.

Another common challenge for BTB marketers is combining multi-channel data. For example, a lead may come in through the website with just a name and an email address. Then that same lead may call in to ask a question. If the person taking the call doesn’t try to get complete contact info at that point, there may be 2 incomplete contact records instead of 1 good one.

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What would you advise readers who are looking to build a 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?

Lori: A big list is great–if you have a relationship with them already. You can just turn on a drip marketing program, and away you go. They’re your peeps and they love hearing from you and feeling like  you care. They’ll even help you update incorrect information about themselves if asked. They want to be found.

But in the case of a big prospect list of people who don’t know you yet, don’t let your reach exceed your grasp. It’s too expensive. Only acquire leads you have time to work. I’m a big believer in the hybrid approach: If you don’t have any list, purchase one. But then add sweat equity to finesse it to the quality and target you need, including getting permission to email and finding the right decision maker. It’s a time-consuming and a tedious job but it can be outsourced. But the human edit propels you further down in the sales funnel.

Another mistake I see in building lists is not understanding who the real prospect opportunities are. This comes from not truly understanding your customer base. If companies truly *get* their customers, they’d find more prospects like them and forget about everyone else. But they’re usually afraid of leaving someone out.  When building a sales leads database, I always recommend starting with a customer survey. Let your good customers tell you why they’re doing business with you. Then use that intel to find and talk to the right prospects.

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What are the biggest challenges you have seen with managing CRM and marketing databasesamong 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?

Lori: The biggest challenge is getting consensus from all database stakeholders (those who are using and contributing to the database) on the Rules of Engagement. I always tell my clients their database will only be as good as their worst user. Whoever that is, because they refuse to capitalize names and streets so email marketing goes out looking like a teenager texted it; or they aren’t sure where to put certain info so they “freelance” their own field definitions; or they refuse to look up to see if a contact already exists in the database, so they routinely add duplicates…often with variation spellings…making them harder to find and fix…these are the people we want to strangle if we’re in charge of marketing results.

The next challenge I see is that organizations fall way short of segmenting their databases. The tendency is to create a bucket of prospects and a bucket of customers, the end. In reality, there are at least 20 ways each of those buckets could be further grouped so that messaging is more relevant and engaging. Organizations do a terrible job with this because they think “list” instead of “personas.” This oversight is the big money suck that could put another 10%-20% revenue to the top line.

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About Lori Feldman

Lori works with business leaders and sales professionals to squeeze every drop of profit from their #1 asset–their customer database. She is a popular national speaker on database marketing, drip marketing, email marketing and social CRM. Lori received the Direct Marketer of the Year Award from the St. Louis DMA and her e-newsletter has won the APEX Award for Newsletter Excellence 2 years in a row. You can find her on LinkedIn and Twitter (@LoriFeldman) or her website at www.TheDatabaseDiva.com.

When it comes to building lists of decision makers and expanding a marketing database, every vertical comes with it’s unique set of challenges. As a company that builds customized lists of decision makers, we’ve had the opportunity to work across several of these verticals and and been exposed to quite a few challenging ones and one that comes to mind instantly is manufacturing. 

On the bright side, those who work in production or manufacturing are not exposed to quite as many sales calls as some other departments get which makes them in some ways, easier to approach and perhaps more co-operative in terms of sharing information. If you are looking for a very specific person within the manufacturing organization and happen to connect to someone else within the department, more often than not, he or she will help you find who you’re looking for. However that is IF you manage to connect to someone at that facility or connect to anyone in manufacturing at all!

Manufacturing can be a difficult department to navigate through on the phone. Whether one is looking for plant managers, production managers, process managers,, quality control, quality assurance, compliance, safety, engineers, distribution, materials, purchasing or floor managers, the physical nature and the working of the manufacturing department make it very challenging to locate specific decision makers within manufacturing units. Here are some common challenges with building a list of manufacturing units and decision makers:

• Plants of large companies are often scattered across geography and have multiple locations. This makes it hard to pinpoint locations of specific decision makers and determine at which location they are based.
• Contact information such as location phone numbers and postal addresses of manufacturing locations are not often as easily available as contact details for corporate and regional offices online.
• People move around a lot more in manufacturing units and are rarely found behind desks as one would expect in corporate offices and hence its difficult to connect with decision makers and personel within the factory or manufacturing unit. 
• Factories and manufacturing plants are spread across wide areas and its often possible that you would need multiple phone numbers within a single location to get connected to the right building to locate the decision maker you are looking for.
• Limited email access and phone access at all times of the day is another common problem as many don’t check emails regularly and are not reachable on the phone through all hours of the day.
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All things considered, calling into these locations to get the correct decision makers is still one of the most effective ways to get an accurate list built and here are a few tips which could help simplify that process:

• Research and carefully map out each and every factory / manufacturing unit location within a company along with as much detail in terms of contact information and contact details for these locations as possible before starting the process of trying to identify contacts.
• For the locations which don’t have easily available contact information such as addresses and phone numbers on the web, call into the corporate office, speak to an administrative assistant to find out how to get in touch with someone at a particular unit location. The corporate office usually have direct contact numbers for these locations.
• Contact these locations and ask for the role you are looking to for. If the admin refuses to co-operate its always useful to research or know at least one higher level manager such as the plant manager to try and connect with them and then ask for the role you are looking for.
• Try to time calls into the maufacturing units during the start and end of a working day as thats when you’re more likely to find decision makers at their desk or more accessible. 
• Remember to confirm which is the best contact number to reach them on, a number of companies will be willing to provide a mobile number for decision makers who are constantly on the move.
• If getting an email address is a problem, try to get an email address of an assitant or admin who will have more constant access to email and note down their email address.
• Don’t go specifically by job title as they are subjective and very often for example, a line unit manager maybe the process quality manager for a particular unit or a quality and responsibilities are managed by someone with a different title in different companies.
• Be patient as it is a long and challenging process to build an accurate list but the quality will pay off.

Selling to a large company is no cakewalk. If anything, it needs patience, perseverence and a very well planned out approach. If you’re one of the smaller companies or startups which has a large fortune company like Microsoft, Walmart, Oracle or Cisco on your client list, you’ve gone through the whole process of getting registered as a potential vendor and your inside sales team has probably been spending sleepless nights trying to get a foot in the door. Most of those who finally did break in, bag a contract and get registered as a certified vendor with these companies would have probably kicked back a few beers and thrown a little celebration for the marketing and sales teams little victory. The next day it’s sights set on another coveted large account. In any large account contract, the sale itself is just a foot in the door. The real reason to celebrate would be because your company is now registered as a certified vendor and by this event, a whole new world of opportunity has opened up within that account. 

Although some aspects of management and deceision making in large accounts may be centralized, by and large, these companies are made up of several smaller units put together. Each of these units managed and run by different decision makers, each with their own agenda, requirements and budgets. To make the most out of a sucessful sale into a large account, you need to be able to repeat that success within other areas of the same company and develop business within that account. To do this, you need to start by identifying where are the simlar departments and who are the decision makers who head these units similar to where you had sucess selling into the first time? Build a list of these units along with the other decision makers and reach out to them consistantly to understand whether you can help them solve a problem similar to how you were able to help another unit within their company on a previous occasion. Developing more business within an existing account can be far more rewarding than pursuing new accounts especially when pursuing large companies which have longer sales cycles.

An ISV we worked with, providing cost effective application development to fortune giants used this strategy very effectively. Deciding to leverage their “certified vendor” status in some of these very big fortune 500 companies, we worked with them to expand relations and develop more business within these companies and the process started with mapping the various units within the US locations of these companies. Each of these companies had several offices all over the continent and each could be divided into several operational units which would each have their own requirements. The next phase was to identify the specific decision makers within each of these hundreds of units who in this case were those responsible for application development or software engineering projects and simultaneously do some basic lead qualification to ensure each was a good potential customer for our clients development services.

The inside sales and email campaigns which followed were very productive and revealed how much easier it is to connect with and sell into other parts of the same organization once you already have internal references and you are listed as a certified vendor. References are no longer a problem, decsion makers look at you as an insider rather than someone selling to them and you’ll find discussions happen a lot more freely. After all,  once you have a foot in the door, you may as well map the rest of the organization, build a list and squeeze yourself in.

While its great to see so many marketers enthusiastic about their inbound lead generation programs and discuss metrics and success stories on how many leads came through which can be added to the funnel, the process of inbound lead qualification still remains the ignored step-child of marketing and sales. While some companies are not in agreement whose responsibility it is, others don’t have a formal process in place simply because it’s assumed that when sales calls into these leads, they are going to qualify them while they are trying to sell to them anyway right? Wrong! In order to have an effective lead generation machine going, a very clearly defined lead qualification process has to be developed and dedicatedly focussed on only qualifying leads before they are passed on to sales, the lead nurturing cycle or the completely “not qualified” pile. Whoevers responsibility it is, unless inbound leads are qualified as soon as they generated, there will be a lead in the process which can result in missed opportunities or simply result in sales wasting their time going after leads which are not likely to go anywhere.

Here are some simple points to follow to get a solid qualification system in place:

1. Decide whose responsibility it is to qualify leads is it marketing? inside sales?
2. Define an inbound lead qualification program as a seperate responsibility not clubbed with sales
3. Decide what is the maximum time a lead is allowed to sit before it gets called and qualified and enforce this practice. The first few hours after it is generated is agreed on by b2b marketers as ideal and preferably not more than 24-48 hours later.
4. Chalk out and agree on what will be considered a “qualified lead” decide what criteria will define what will be accepted by both sales and marketing as a qualified lead and be sure to address any grey areas. Agree on a scoring system where leads can be qualified into seperate buckets where A can be highly qualified leads which need to be engaged immediately, B can be qualified but needs to be nurtured not engaged right away and C can be unqualified or dismissed leads which have no potential.
5. Work out action items for each type of qualified lead for example type A must be passed on to sales with an alert immediately, type B can be sent back to marketing or added to the lead database to nurture and type C should never make it into the database or CRM.
6. Narrow down on a small set of questions which can be used to qualify leads. The questions should be simple and aim towards determining the criteria we talked about in point 4 above.
7. Measure & share results. Track few but importnat metrics such as the percentage of leads that get qualified, conversion rate and share this information with the inbound marketing team and sales team to help guage what is working and what is not.

If you can get this process in place and keep it consistant regardless of what is happening with those responsible for lead generation and those responsible for prospecting, you’ll have:

• A happier and more efficient sales team
• A more efficient lead generation system
• Less wastage
• Higher conversion rates
• A database free from junk leads which have no potential

It’s that simple.

There was a well written post by Robert Vanselow, VP of Sales and Marketing at Newsmax Media titled: “When it comes to e-mail lists, more marketing is better” published on DMNews’ The 2009 DMNews Essential Guide to Lists & Database. The article made some pretty good points and there was just one particular point which I can’t completely agree on particularly with B2B and thought “there must be others who wont completely go with this either. With regards to list size for email marketing campaigns Robert says:

The size of a list is very important. When it comes to value, many marketers will argue against large files. We constantly hear that “Quality, not quantity, counts.” What is wrong with having both? It is true you can have a small list that really works, but unless the list has critical mass, it may not be worth the time of your marketing team to prepare and implement the campaigns. The key is to use larger lists. If you have your own list, put money and resources into expanding it. If you market to lists, look for larger list files. As a rule, we will never market to any third-party e-mail lists unless they have more than 200,000 names. 

Now just so this isn’t taken out of context, at no point does Robert say quntity is more important than quality when it comes to email lists, he says ideally, you should have both. Also, the larger your list, the more odds you have of more replies and better results in terms of overall number of leads generated from the email list. However the line that stood out for me is “The key is to use larger lists“. Is bigger really better?

I am one of those who you can often find saying “Quality, not quantity, counts” although as Robert puts it, there is nothing quite like having both. What if you had to pick a stronger focus between the two? I would say “The key is to use better quality, better qualified lists”. Especially if it’s for your inhouse database. Quality data at the cost of quantiy is okay. Quantity at the cost of quality is the cause of inefficiency. In a laboratory conditions scenario with all things being equal, if a company X generated 150 warm leads using an email list of 5000 contacts and company Y generated 150 warm leads with their list of 700 contacts would you agree company B owns the more valuable list? If you did agree, then essentially you believe the value of an email list comes from its “quality” and not from its quantity. If the above scenario were possible in a real life situation, it means you can do “more with less” and if you keep that focus and continue to build out your list, you can really achieve more as the size does increase. 

So now the question….. is bigger really better?

When selling to high level decision making executives such as C-Level and Vice President level target contacts, the frustration for many inside sales executives is in connecting with these decision makers. More often than not, especially while selling to larger companies, the high level executives are amongst the most difficult to connect with over the phone either because they are too busy to take a sales call or they are heavily shielded by layers of administrative and personal assistants. When a sales person looking to connect with the decision maker is blocked by a PA, there is bound to be some amount of resistance unless you were looking to connect with the PA in the first place that is.

“Looking to connect with the PA in the first place??? What on earth for?” a good percentage of inside sales pros would say but it can make sense in several situations. If you think of it from the perspective of a personal assistant who just received a call where a sales person said “connect me to Amanda Jennings, the Senior Vice President of Information Technology.” …she realized its someone trying to get to the SVP of IT and she will do her job by screening the call and asking what is this phone call with regard to. Without having to think twice, he or she will become defensive and naturally try and withold as much information. Now imagine a sales person calls up and says “Hi is this Linda who works with Mrs Jennings?, I had some questions I was wondering if you could help me with.” .. the tone would have changed and the PA would more likely to listen to the sales person and even be willing to help in some way. No road block.

So why the change? In the first case the person asks directly for the decision maker and its the PA’s job to keep them out. In the second case, when the sales person knows the PA’s name and would like to connect with him or her, then it’s more natural to want to help out and not be defensive. Though knowing the key decision maker and connecting with them is the only way to really have a chance at selling into your accounts, starting off with the PA’s isn’t always such a bad strategy either. PA’s if co-operative can often be a very helpful source of information to help profile the account and get some answers to questions which can help when eventually speaking to the decision makers.

So the next time you are building a list of decision makers for an upcoming campaign, you may want to consider adding one additional target contact to your database. The personal assistant to the decision maker. You never know when it will come in useful.

There is no such thing as a free ride but what about free b2b marketing databases? We’re not talking about the free trials, free subscriptions or free sample lists but if a vendor is actually offering a free database of business contacts how much should you trust it? This thought came about after reading a forum where a marketing professional was told they can be supplied with a free database of director level contacts within a specific vertical and was wondering if anyone else is familiar with how to get free databases. While it’s great to fall into free database full of decsion making contacts, it’s best to be at least a little skeptical about it.

There are great free sources of business contacts out there such as LinkedIn, Jigsaw (if you have contacts of your own which you can trade) and even articles or content published online but when it comes to ready lists to use for marketing and inside sales campaigns, it is important to understand how the database was put together and important to question it’s quality especially if it’s being offered for free since there are significant costs involved in building quality databases. More importantly you need to ensure relying completely on this free data doesn’t cost your business more than you’d pay for high quality reliable data. After all, cost doesn’t always manifest itself in the form of money.

Accurate data which is well qualified and meets exact requirements allows for a targeted effort and better results. If the business contacts are not your exact target decision makers, have inaccurate contact details or are no longer valid, you could end up wasting a lot of time. If these are used for inside sales campaigns, then you’ll have very little success with phone calls reaching the right people and again spend a lot of time  looking for the right ones. The loss in efficiency in marketing campaigns or sales efforts could well cost more than the data.

Damage to repuation is another risk an organization can face while relying on data thats not well focussed and qualified. Just as much as reaching out to the right people within organizations can help build relationships, reaching out to the wrong people can help damage your company’s repution and ruin those chances of building those strong relationships.

Lastly, adding unreliable or poor quality data to your database will just end up diluting the value of your database and incur more costs in cleansing and cause more ineffectiveness if used for lead nurturing or future campaigns.  So if you stumble on the fortune of what seems to be a great list from the outside which hasn’t cost a dime, be skeptical first, examine it carefully, determine if it’s really as good as it seems and if it is, I suggest you go buy a ticket for the grand lottery because today might be your lucky day.

Preparation and knowing your account or target prospect is high among the golden rules of inside sales. Whether it’s simply looking up the company’s website to understand what they do, their products and their offerings or  its indepth pre sales research which involves reading and understand all that one can find on the decision maker, the more one knows before going into a call, the better prepared they are. The better prepared they are, the more the likelyhood of success. In almost any organization, there are some who will walk the extra mile to do some pre sales research, look up company websites and learn what they can before going into a call and there are some who won’t.  Even though its an inside sales and field sales commandment to know your customer well before engaging them, on the practical side, it is time consuming and can hamper productivity unless its all laid out in front.

There is no reason it can’t be laid out infront of a sales person before a call or before contacting a prospect. That’s what rich marketing data is all about. It’s about providing more information than just the absolute basic data on names, addresses and contact details. Enriching data is about enhancing the value of the data used by the company with additional information and intelligence. One great source for this kind of intelligence is the RSS feed.

RSS feeds have been a great way of tracking information whether it’s news, blog posts or updates. At the account level, many companies have their corporate blogs, news publications, press release pages, stock ticker and other sources of regularly updated content. A lot of these now offer RSS feeds for this information. Adding the RSS feed links to your CRM or marketing database will go a long way in allowing a sales person to qucikly browse through the latest updates and click on any interesting finds without having to spend time researching and going through the individual sites. On the decision maker level, several executives and individuals too have taken to running their personal blogs and websites so an RSS feed from there beside the other information on the contact withiin the database provide great insights into the person which can give inside sales team an upper hand. 

While the process of searching and adding RSS  to company and contact data is tedious, it’s an investment which will give your organization richer data to work with. Rich data helps sell smarter, so the effort is worth it!