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

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.

B2B marketing database management like any other function of an organization has it’s own language and its own terms peculiar to those who use them and sound greek to those who don’t. Data-speak is what you can call it! No matter how vague or complicated any of these words may seem, they all have very simple explanations and anyone can learn how to walk the talk once they break it down to its simplest meaning. Here are some of them we’ve picked and completely broken down into simple explanations:

• Address Hygiene: the level of accuracy of contacts and mailing addresses on a list
• Back-end: the database where the records are stored
• Cold List: a list of contacts which have not been previously contacted or engaged yet 
• Data Append: adding missing or additional information to existing records like adding missing email addresses
• Data Migration: moving data from one place to another. For example moving records from an Oracle database to Salesforce.com
• Data Export: downloading records and data from an application into a simple list format such as a Microsoft Excel sheet or CSV file
• De-dupe: is short for de-duplication. A term commonly used to remove two identical records in a database or list so that it has only unique records left
• Dead Contact: a business contact in a database who is no longer in the same company or job role and thus is not useful as a target contact anymore
• DNC: short for Do Not Call an abbreviation used to mark records or contacts which are not to be contacted again
• Email list bounce rate: a statistic which helps understand out of a total list of emails sent, how many emails bounced or failed to reach the recepient due to a bad email address or some other reasons
• Gatekeeper: usually a term associated with a secretary, admin or administrative assistant who monitors access to a higher level executive
• Geographical Database: a database restricted to a fixed geographical area for example list of printing companies in Atlanta, Georgia
• Opt-in list: list of emails where the receivers have agreed to receive solicitation emails from the sender. List of emails authorized by owners for marketing use
• Primary Contact: the key decision maker within an account who is the main point of contact for all marketing and sales targeted towards that account
• Prospect-List: a list of potential customers or business contacts who are qualified enough to be possible future customers
• Record Status: an attribute assigned to a record to either understand where it stands within the sales or marketing cycle or convey some message about the record
• Reference Contact: not a primary decision maker but an alternative contact within the account a sales person can use to connect with the primary contact
• Supress List: a list of records, names or email addresses which are to be excluded while working on any campaign or email reachout
• SIC Codes: short for Standard Industrial Codes a four digit US government recognized number assigned to businesses to classify them under a set of industries
• Vertical Specific Database: a database of accounts which all belong to a single vertical or industry type such as Financial Investment companies or Furniture Retail companies

Any more that come to mind?

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.

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

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?

I am a few thousand miles away from the Sales 2.0 conference but it hasn’t kept me from following the events through the Twitter feeds and through the last two days there have been a number of events and presentations which echo a lot of what we believe at ReadyContacts. Right now as I’m blogging, there are some updates coming through from the Sales 2.0 conference where Tom Barrieau of IDC is speaking. One of the points that Tom makes (read from Mike Dampmhoux’s tweet) links back to the post I wrote yesterday titled Outsourcing Inside Sales – How Much Can You Save? which highlights how you can leverage vendors to optimize what your inside sales team delivers. Tom advises companies

We agree completely! Activities such as lead list building and lead qualification can easily be contracted on a pay for delivery model which is far more cost effective needless to say also helps ensure your sales rep’s focus is on converting leads into sales and not diverted to other areas.

The second interesting point IDC made is that they are seeing the largest segment of budgets towards demand generation and lead qualification. This reflects not just the need to generate more leads to meet growing quotas on lower budgets but also the need to deliver higher quality and better qualified leads to sales to make the process efficient. IDC stressed the importance of getting the right information to sales at the right time to push closure. It simply re iterates the need to have marketing, sales enablement (including lead data management and lead qualification), inside sales and field sales working seamlessly together to meet the pressing need to sell more by tuning your sales machine.

So if you have your inside sales force working on finding or qualifying leads remember, it may not be the most cost effective strategy or use of their skills. Uncovering opportunities and bringing home the sales is what inside sales does. Have them do what they do the best.

Business to business marketers who have been generating leads for enterprise software or software application development companies have seen better days than the times we live in for sure. When you’re selling software consultancy services and development solutions the cycle is long and generating qualified ’sales ready’ leads is a process that constantly needs a supply of qualified prospects and business contacts in target accounts.

I’ve often seen software development companies go after volume of business contacts and try and sell their services to just about any “IT” contact who is manager level and above irrespective of his exact responsibility and relavence as the correct decision maker. Whether you sell directly over the phone or nurture your leads through several messages, when it comes to software development, knowing roles, responsibilities and knowing they are the right decision makers within the company for the area of application development is extremely important. An IT Director isn’t necessarily your right decision maker because the letter I.T. are in his/her job title. The IT Director may be repsonsible for hardware, IT security, application testing or other areas. Similarly even a single Director of Applications may not be your best bet in every single case because he/she maybe repsonsible for only Java applications, only SAP applications or only web applications. While building an internal marketing database to use, be as specific as possible while identifying your decision makers.

For example: If you are in the application integration space, then verify the roles of your target decision makers to ensure they are responsible for applciation integration and would be the right person to connect with. Once you build a strong database of role based contacts, they can be leveraged in a lead nurturing program to help identify regularly which of these are ready to be engaged by sales. So if you are into software development services sales or marketing, go role based, it will help considerably.

A lead database is no longer a rolodex. Lead data doesn’t come from standard business cards. Lead sources are plenty and highly varried whether it’s from social media, free trials, whitepaper downloads, landing pages, custom built lead lists, webinar registrations or other sources. Lots of lead sources can mean a lot of leads for your marketing database which is great news! The bad news is lots of lead data sources can also mean a lot of different formats, a lot of different data points and a lot of inconsistency in your database records. That is something you need to avoid.

The cleaner and more consistent your marketing lead data is, the more effective it will be in generating consistent “sales ready” leads whether you use a lead nurturing solution, an email marketing application or just simply run individual campaigns off your data. If you imagine your lead generation sources, your lead database or CRM and nurturing machine as three parts of a larger machine connected by pipes, you can’t really do much about data being inconsistent at the lead generation level. Different sources collect different data points. A newsletter subscription form may collect nothing but a name and and email address where as a landing page form fill can collect additional details like telephone number, Job title and company name. Changing the sources is not always an option.

The pipeline between the lead generation sources and the lead database (or CRM) is the point where you can fix this problem. One of the biggest causes of inconsistent and incomplete data is allowing leads generated at different sources to flow straight into the database assuming it can be corrected or dealt with later. It almost never happens! However, this is the point at which you need to put in a data normalization process which helps fill in missing data points and standardizes your lead records before they get to your CRM. Some of the things you may want to do before they get past this stage are:

• Filter out any garbage records which will just be redundant
• Maintain a “minimum required” fields like name, company, address, email, phone number and job title which have to be filled in before considering it a completed record
• Append missing data such as email addresses, postal addresses, account information which is missing
• Check for duplication
• Format and standardize job titles, number formats, naming conventions and so on