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

We’ve been building very specific role based business contact lists for our customers very specific campaign requirements for what seems to be a very long time now. Over this time we have worked with such a range of B2B companies it’s difficult to recall every project undertaken especially for those who had a smaller, one time campaign specific requirement for customized role based list building. When we say specific…we mean reaaaaalllyy specifc. Where a companies ideal target decision maker is someone who has a very niche function or role within the company and it’s imperrative for our customers to locate and reach out to them. Needless to say, they can be quite challenging to locate. 

When you think about how specialized the contact needs for certain companies are and how targetted their marketing and sales efforts needs to be, you can’t help but be thankful and think “Thank goodness our company sells only to VP of Marketing or CFO’s” unless you happen to target such niche customers. I’m sure we’ve undertaken a lot of very challenging projects over the last few years but just at the top of my head, here are the top 5 most challenging contacts we’ve had to help companies locate:

At Number 5

The decision maker responsible for Emergency Medical Response System management and tracking software in large hospitals and healthcare centers for a healthcare software solutions company

At Number 4

The decision maker responsible for designing commodity linked investment products in Swiss banks for a high specialized financial systems software consultancy firm

At Number 3

The deicison maker responsible for monitoring performance levels of mission critical systems in large fortune companies along with identifying which systems and servers they were responsible for (for example flight control systems for an airline, ticketing and reservation system for a large global travel company etc)

At Number 2

The decision maker responsible for imaging technology used to study cancer and other cell level research carried out on mice at small animal imaging facilities at pharmaceutical and healthcare research centers for a biotechnology product company

And the Number 1 most challenging contact to locate…

The decision maker or prjoect manager responsible for ruggedizing, shock-proofing, fire-proofing and weather-proofing computing servers used in airforce  jets, tanks and defence weapons systems in large defence contractor/ manufacturing facilities to ensure the software systems in these run under any conditions. This was for a company that provided server ruggedization technology to defence contractors.

(BTW: we did manage to deliver on all these)

Can you beat that? We’d love to hear from other marketing and sales pros in the comments – what is the most challenging business contact you’ve had to locate?

Being involved with business contact list building and managing marketing databases, one gets a glimpse into which are the executives or decision maker contacts that are sought after by companies for their marketing camapigns, VPs of IT, VP’s of Marketing, Directors of Human Resources, CFO’s and Project Managers are just a few of those positions which are commonly in demand by various marketing and sales team. But every once in a while, you witness a new trend or a new profile which is suddenly in demand and these are caused by a new “hot and happening” phenomenon in the markets which trigger a demand for these contacts.

The last very noticable “most wanted” business contact role was that of Salesforce or CRM managers triggered by the burst of appexchange and add on application software for Salesforce.com and fueled by SFDC’s growing popularity. With the Salesforce boom creating a sudden demand for add on software developed on the appexchange platform, a new market was born within companies which are Salesforce.com customers and may have a requirement for Salesforce based applications. The in demand person to know within these companies and have access to for sales and marketing teams was the person responsible for managing Salesforce within these target companies. While the SFDC market hasn’t cooled down by any standards, there is a new target market thats quickly gaining the same kind of impetus.

Online advertising has become a force to reckon with in the last few years. Even as advertising budgets have been hit by the economic slowdown and TV, print and other media have taken a battering, online advertising continues to steam through the growth charts and more and more companies have dedicted online advertising managers, search marketing, ppc experts and online marketing marketing managers to spearhead their online advertising efforts and manage their online ad spend. These decision makers responsible for online advertising are in demand by online publishers, webmasters and several companies offering solutions to online advertisers and need to reach out to the right people. Being more of an idepth contact, building a custom list for you business by calling into companies and identifying those directly responsible for managing a company’s online advertising campaigns is perhaps still the best way to ge an accurate and focussed list of the right deicsion makers within target businesses that suit your requirements. So right now online advertising managers are in demand. I wonder what’s next….Social Media Managers? Twitter Managers? Let’s wait and watch.

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.

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.

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.

We have been building customized business contact and decision maker lists for over five years now. We have built them for military technology companies, for data systems integration companies, for logistics software, healthcare systems…you name it. We have helped companies identify target decision makers in Swiss banks, French aerospace companies, Spanish telecom companies, the Pentagon and the CIA. We’ve learned something new with every single customer of ours and their target verticals but all said and done, the end product or database of their target decision makers look similar if you see them structurally and don’t look into the details. The data sheets have the names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses of the decision makers or executives. They will all go back to our customer and those decision makers are going to to be contacted through a phone call, email or a direct mail. 

Now for the spin…I built a tiny list of my own a little while ago today. Last night we finalized some details on a series of interviews we plan to do on our blog which will feature some stalwarts of the B2B marketing world to get some insights and perspectives on marketing database management. The obvious next step for me was to identify who we would like to talk to for the first few interviews and as with any situation where you have a campaign planned (even a tiny one like this) the natural next step was to build a list! It wasn’t till after I built my mini list did it hit me what was so strikingly different about this list. There were no phone numbers, no email addresses and no postal addresses. The key fields were a name, company name, website and Twitter id. I didn’t conciously make a decision to skip the other details which no normal target list would be complete with, I simply decided, I am going to use twitter to talk to our possible blog guests to see if they would be open to doing an interview with us.

Last month when we did a post on B2B Marketing Data Forecast – Blog, Twitter & Linkedin Info A Standard Data Field , @nix left a comment on the post which echoes what I personally feel and I’m sure a lot of professionals in a lot of businesses think as well. @nix said:

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.

When I look at this mini list I wonder when a customer would approach us and say something like “we are doing a survey for our CRM analytics and we need to identify and build a list of 300 CRM managers or administrators with their Twitter id’s so that we can approach them to see if we can have about 50-100 take part in our research”. The day that happens, I would probably have witnessed one of the biggest turns in prospect list building. I’m convinced that day is not too far off. Are you?

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.

More than 30 million people out of the 138 million employed in the US will switch jobs in the next 12 months – Gartner Group

The government reported more grim news about the economy Friday, saying employers cut 240,000 jobs in October – bringing the year’s total job losses to nearly 1.2 million.

 CEO departures at the world’s 500 largest revenue-producing companies jumped 10 percent from  2006 to 2007, according to global public relations firm Weber Shandwick’s ongoing CEO Departures™ analysis.