In these economic down times when cost cutting is the mantra the positive effect is that it forces you to think out of the box and come up with alternative solutions to ensure you get the most out of your marketing and lead generation dollars. After having discussed this with a number of marketers and bloggers who have debated how will the recession affect lead generation budgets, there are a few things that most of us would agree on:

• Overall spend on online marketing is still likely to rise
• Budgets on offline advertising like television, newspapers, magazines will take more of a hit
• Measurability of results and being able to show clear results on every dollar spent will be important. You need to be able to link spend to what you get back for it clearly in these times.
• There is going to be pressure to generate more leads and more qualified leads during these times and since budgets wont increase, marketers will be driven to do more with less 

Your CRM data is probably one of your organizations most valuable assets. Companies can go through great lengths to protect and secure their CRM data but just how much emphasis goes into the quality of the CRM data? Everyone is well aware about the value of their organization’s CRM data and if there was a straightforward way to put a financial price tag on them perhaps it would put things into perspective better. However CRM data is a perishable asset and left on its own it doesn’t appreciate like an antique with time, it’s value will diminish unless you look after it well. Although data quality management may rank among the most neglected area of CRM management and definitely one of the major pain areas for administrators and managers, following a strict CRM data cleansing and data enrichment regiment is what will help maintain and enhance the value of your data.  

Here are some practices to keep your CRM data quality at its best:

Identify A Drop In Data Quality Quickly

Bad data is often ignored until it really starts to affect daily work by which time it needs a lot of work to get it back in shape. Its important to identify whose responsibility it is to monitor the data quality and keep the maintainence process going on an ongoing basis. Whether its a weekly scan of records to see if outwardly everything looks alright or a periodic email or contact sample check, keeping an eye on your data will help you identify changes in quality earlier rather than later. Sometimes your sales persons or marketing department who frequently use the data to call or email prospects or customers using the data will be the first ones to experience any change in quality and keeping a regular and close feedback loop will help you know how up-to-date your data is or what issues they face while using it.  

Have An Organizational Policy On Data Standards

Bad data in. Bad data out. While CRM administrators and managers are finicky abut ensuring  any data they upload into their CRM is checked and entered exactly how it should be, most CRMs are accessed by several end users across the organization and there is very little control over what data is entered or edited and how it is entered or updated. This is where it can start going wrong. Educating the end users or the company’s data standards and making them aware of healthy data updating practices can help standardize what goes into the CRM. For example if one user enters contact names in the form of initials with currency values in dollars and another enters them as full names with currency values in increments of a thousand dollars there is bound to be a data which is not standardized. Coming up with a well defined data standards policy which is made available to all end users can help considerably.

Put In Stringent Quality Checks At Your Data Sources

CRM data usually comes from several sources from conference lists, whitepaper downloads, website form fills, purchased business contact lists, online ad clicks, business contacts databases and more. Common practice is to upload them to the CRM straight away assuming it can be normalized or filtered later. Its a good practice to manage, normalize, format, qualify and filter out your leads outside your CRM and then have it uploaded so that what is not valuable or quality data does not get added. We’ve covered more on this in an earlier post titled ‘Data Management - Manage Your Leads Outside Your CRM‘. If you check and clean your data right from the source, it will save you a lot of trouble later. 

Check For & Tackle Incomplete Records

Despite most CRMs having validations to check for mandatory data fields its not always easy to ensure a value for every field at the time when a record is generated. For example if your contact source is a conference list of attendees with only contact names, job titles and phone numbers, although it’s been added to your CRM, it has very little value if it needs to be used in an email campaign or a direct mail reach out. Appending missing data is not always easy to automate and often does involve a lot of manual effort which will seem time consuming. However it is a necessary evil and a periodic data append effort for missing data is important.

Check For Duplication And Redundant Data

Duplication of records and having large amounts of junk data is a sign of a sick CRM database. While putting in software checks for validating records and ensuring an entry is unique is a preventive measure thats good to have in place, there are a number of software or technology based deduplication services which can help weed out duplicates some of which are mentioned here in a previous post. With a growing number of leads coming through sources like form fills and online sources where leads can often fill up gibberish values, doing regular scans for such junk records will help you keep your data free of what should not be in there. Its importnat to note that having a lot of duplicates and other redundant data can result in your analytics and reports reflecting false results so it has to be kept in check.

Periodically Filter Out Expired data

Companies and organizations merge, get acquired or shut down, contacts change addresses, change jobs, move within an organization …CRM data does expire. This is an area which is not easily automated and again does require a considerable investment of time and energy. The more regularly you can carry out a check for expired data, the healthier your CRM will be. A database which remains untouched or unchecked for an entire year can see as much as 30% expired data and the longer you have between checks, the worse it can get so making sure its checked periodically is paramount. While being able to run through the entire data once every quarter is ideal, twice a year should be the minimum.

Enrich Your Data, Increase Its Value

If data cleansing is what helps you maintain your database quality then data enrichment is what will help you enhance your data quality and make it more valuable to the end users. Ask yourself what additional data points in each record could help your users do more with the data and give them a better insight on each account. Would it help to have the annual revenues listed in multiple currencies? Would it help to have a list of all countries each account operates in? Would it help to have a link to the press releases of each account to stay updated on recent events? These additional data points can be added with a data enrichment effort after identifying what additional data would help provide value.

If you practice good data management practices and implement a constant cleansing and enrichment process for your CRM you will be able to actually realize its full potential. Thats when your CRM data is really an asset!

In previous posts we have talked about various tips, tricks and solutions to keeping your CRM clean and healthy through regular CRM data cleansing and CRM data enrichment. There is another solution which may seem more obvious but is one of the most forgotten ways of maintaining a healthy CRM. Managing and processing your leads outside your CRM before they are uploaded there. The objective is simple. If you have only good data go into your CRM, you have a cleaner and stronger CRM to work with.

Lead data management is essential to keep your CRM data clean. Its often easier to manage batches of data as and when they are sourced and have them cleansed, formatted, profiled or qualified before they actually go into your CRM. Its always better to have unqualified leads or junk data removed before this stage so that everything you have within your CRM data is a quality, useful record. Web leads and other inbound leads often contain a lot of missing data or can be completely filled with junk information for which an inbound lead qualification process put in as soon as they are generated will help filter them before they are entered in to the database.  

If you have trouble with a lot of unqualified leads and junk data getting into your database then do have a look at our lead data management solution or have your lead data cleansed and qualified internally before they are uploaded to the CRM. Prevention is better than cure.

There was a time when business visiting cards were the most valuable forms of contact information and having a rolodex with as many phone numbers and postal addresses meant you had all the data you need to do some serious selling. Times change. While contact address, contact phone number, contact name and contact title still make up most of the contact information a business to business marketer or sales person needs, its still incomplete without one of the most sought after pieces of business contact data needed today. Contact email. 

While it is one of the most important data fields for a contact record in anyones CRM, its also perhaps one of the most guarded bits of information which is well protected and not easily available. This probably explains why in so many organizational CRMs you will see a blank in the contact email field. The amount of marketing messages directed towards a business professionals email address as well as the stricter spam regulations has lead to companies as well as individuals being more cautious about their email addresses and also why several lead sources that are used to populate CRMs with contact information dont come with an email address.  

However if you have good customer data which you can’t make use of simply because its missing that crucial contact email, then its time to run your data through an email acquisition or email append process and enrich your data so its complete and ready to use whether for email campaigns or just good enough to communicate to an individual via email. Remember, your marketing and sales contact data is only valuable to your team when it is complete!

If you are a Salesforce.com user and have an active account with a good amount of data being updated regularly within the CRM, then you would also have noticed the need to have your Salesforce data cleaned. If your sales machine is more efficient by using a great technology platform like Salesforce.com, then bad data is an issue you need to have a solution handy for to prevent any inefficiencies that it can cause. Luckily, there are a number of solutions out there to evaluate which you can find in the form of a salesforce.com appexchange application which can connect with your SFDC account or a data cleansing service to keep your data healthy. However before we go to the solutions, here are some of the common problems when it comes to salesforce data:

•  Duplication - possibly one of the most common problems and creates redundancy as well as inaccurate reports
• Incomplete records - from missing contact details to incomplete mailing addresses or annual revenue figures there are usually several important data points which can be missing and need to be completed
• Junk Data - inbound web leads with garbage values, data from download campaigns and lists which have junk records, these accumulate within the database and serve no purpose. 
• Expired Data - contacts who are no longer active, company addresses which have changed, companies which have been acquired or merged. Expired data needs to be updated to be useful again
•  Unclassified Data - records which have made it into the database without being labeled correctly or allocated to a campaign, a source, owner or category. 
• Non-Standardized Data - unformatted data with differences in following a standardized nomenclature, currency, address format etc

Migration from one CRM system to another or even swicthing from managing customer data in spreadsheets to Salesforce.com or some other CRM can be tedious. Once you have your new CRM configured and ready to use, although adding new records that were not previously there is quite simple, shifting previous data into your new CRM often needs a good amount of effort and a few things you need to pay close attention to. The data in your existing format may need some amount of formatting, enrichment and cleansing before its ready to upload into the new system and instead of considering it an evil that comes with the migration process, you could also look at it as an opportunity to get your data cleaned up and in shape to reuse within your new system.

Here are a few tips to keep in mind while migrating your CRM data:

• Remember “Murphy’s Law” and make sure you have an exact back up of your previous data and your new CRM as it stands before the migration porcess so that if anything goes wrong you can roll back to where you were before it all went wrong.
• Check a data upload format or a some reference which tells you which additional data fields are compulsory in the new CRM and identify how it’s different from the fields you currently have or your existing structure for records.
• Carry out a data append effort to add any additional data items that are missing, remove those that are not required and make sure you have complete records which are ready to be migrated to the new CRM. If you dont have the bandwidth to do this internally, make use of a data cleansing service like on ReadyContacts.com 
• Use the opportunity of having to go through all the data to update it, normalize what is there and ensure its ready to reuse.
• Categorize your and label your data very systematically as soon as its moved to the new system, It makes retrival much easier and the more data you have which has not been put under the right sets, campaigns or is not labelled, the messier the database will be at a later stage.
• Put into practice any policies on entering data as soon as users switch to it so they are familiar with the new requirements and are particular about data that goes into the system from day one.

Here is the report on the conversion of qualified web leads to oppotunities generated between Saturday and Sunday with an estimated closing time of between 2 and 3 weeks. Here is another report of total leads generated by various channels and the return on investement for the first half of last month. Here is the ratio of emails sent with projections for revenues of next month based on last years open rates. Just because your CRM software gives you a million reports and does analytics like nobody’s business, it doesnt mean you need to use all of them.

With all the analytics features available now, it can get confusing if you are tracking 30 different metrics every week to understand where your lead generation or sales figures stand at that point of time. Printing and analyzing unnecessary reports can actually become more a bottle neck in your lead management process rather than being  a source for information which can help you better it. In short, if you spent half a day on reprimanding your sales team for a reduced number of sales calls and number of hours spent logged onto the CRM as compared to last month when your monthly revenue from qualified opportunities was actually higher this month…..then you are missing the point.  Too many data points to analyze can often create a wrong impression and shift your focus from results to questions on how much activity was there?, how many campaigns were run, how many raw leads were added? 

Good reports have only the metrics you need to track. Additional ones that need to be pulled up to solve certain problems or take a closer look into how a particular campaign worked can be done when required. Here are a few pointers that can help remove the noise created by distracting analytics reports and still give you visibility into your lead management:

•  Create a dashboard which has only the metrics you have identified as important to track on a daily or weekly basis. Any other report can be pulled on a need basis.
• Track the simple metrics which show you the results and where you stand in terms of those results. In the end the aim is to generate results from all the activity and not just generate activity since thats what lead generation entails.
• When you compare metrics, compare them with the right context. As we mentioned, if your sales people did less calls than last month but still got more customers than last month, then they did something right, not wrong. 
• Tracking metrics is pointless if you cant convert what you leanrt from them in to tangible action items and use them to improve on the results.

Maybe there should be a report on all the pointless reports some of us end up reading just because we can. Or, we could simplify it and get what we need to know and filter out the rest.
 

When you are looking for decision maker business contacts within specific target accounts there are a a few names that instantly come to mind like Hoovers, Onesource, Spoke, Jigsaw, Zoominfo, ActiveContacts and Linkedin to name some of them. While each of these are great sources for company information and locating business contacts and decision makers in companies, they are quite varied in terms of what they offer and the model on which they are based. While selecting a source for your contacts its good to know what these are and weigh them out to determine which is the best source for your specific requirements. Here’s a quick overview on Linkedin.com and Jigsaw.com, two contrasting models that revolve around business contacts and b2b leads:

Linkedin

• What is it?
  • Linkedin is an online business network built to connect business professionals much like social networking sites such as Facebook.com, Orkut.com & Bebo which are a network of friends and social relationships. Users sign up and setup a profile for free and start linking to other connections or professionals they know who also have Linkedin accounts. This will give you access to not only your connections profile information but their connections and connections’ connections as well. In short the more connections you personally know and add to your account, the larger the business network you will have access to.
• How do you locate business contacts?
  • Once you have built your network by adding connections you can search through your network of contacts by various criteria such as company name, location, industry, keywords, contact names, titles and so on. By clicking on a contact name you will have access to any information that contact has made available on his/her profile which can include a lot of detail such as previous employment history, position, job role and responsibilities, interests, education background as well as testimonials from others who have worked with them. In short there is usually a lot you can tell about the person professionally from viewing their profile which is a huge plus for sales and marketing professionals
• What are the pros of Linkedin as a business contacts source?
  • Sign up and setup is free, you can get started and build a business network of contacts over some time without any upfront investment
  • If you know about 50 people who you can add as connections it can give you access to up to 2 million contacts or more
  • Users often provide a lot of details about themselves professionally from current position, roles, responsibilities, areas of specialization and more which can be extremely valuable to sales and marketing efforts
  • Since users update their profiles and information by themselves most of the data is quite reliable and makes this model one of the stronger sources in terms of data quality
  • With over 25 million users signed up it provides a good range of contacts at both executive as well as more deep rooted levels
• What are the cons of Linkedin as a business contacts source?
  • Since is based on a networking model, the depth of contacts you will have access to is dependent on how many people you know and can connect to in your own network. If you know fewer business associates who use Linkedin, your own network will be smaller and hence the access you have to others within the Linkedin network will also be less
  • It’s a useful source for finding individual contacts or locating decision makers within few accounts but does not have an option to bulk download contacts or export so that they can be uploaded to a CRM. It’s not ideal for lists that are needed for campaigns
  • Linkedin profiles don’t provide complete contact information such as postal addresses, phone numbers and email id’s. So it may not be as well suited as a direct information source to run direct mail, telemarketing or email campaigns

Jigsaw

• What is it?
  • Jigsaw is an online directory of decision makers and business contacts targeted especially at sales and marketing professionals who need to locate specific contact information on decision makers at accounts they are looking to target. Users can sign up free and then use points to buy a business contact they need. It uses a combination of a paid and social model where the user can either buy points for cash or earn points by sharing and uploading business contacts he/she already has in exchange for business contacts he/she needs which someone else may have added.
• How do you locate business contacts?
  • Before you start out locating contacts you need points in your account which works as credit. You can either earn points by contributing data that you already have or simply buy credits for money. Contacts can be searched through company name, industry, title, location and several other criteria. Once you have located the contacts you need you can simply buy them in exchange for points from your account. Alternatively Jigsaw also sells lists of contacts from within the database which allows you to select a list based on industry or types of contacts etc and purchase an export of the data to use in campaigns
• What are the pros of Jigsaw as a business contacts source?
  • The Jigsaw database has accumulated over 9 million contacts with a large range of contacts at almost all levels of an organization from executives to those at a deeper level which makes it one of the larger databases of its kind and provides a great source for contact information
  • The point system allows users to pay for only what they need virtually like buying contacts off a shelf and not having to pay for a subscription they may not make as much use of so its a pay-as-you-go model
  • The ability to earn points by contributing data allows you to barter your existing contact data and can enable you to access the contacts without having to use cash if you already have data that you can share
  • Jigsaw provides complete contact information from names, job titles, email addresses, postal addresses and direct phone numbers which makes it ideal as a source for email, tele and direct mail  campaigns
  • The option of buying a list is useful especially when you intend to upload the data into a CRM or other application for running campaigns
• What are the cons of Jigsaw as a business contacts source?
  • Although having a database of 9 million contacts is a benefit, it can also be a drawback since there is a fairly high percentage of contacts which has expired and although there is a system in place for users to mark bad contacts, the sheer volume of data makes it difficult to maintain the quality of it so its not uncommon to find contacts that no longer exist in their roles
  • Since the data is not added by the contact themselves, updates don’t reflect in the data when people have moved from their positions or companies
  • The lists are defined on a certain criteria and while you can specify the type of contacts or accounts you need, the contacts are identified by the type and level of contacts you need and not role based contacts which are more customized as against ready lists

Whats the verdict? It depends on what suits your requirements and is best for your marketing and sales efforts. So choose wisely!

A pet peeve for anyone in marketing or sales who has to work with CRM data while setting up their direct mail or other outbound campaigns is bad data. While there are great features when it comes to hosted CRMs like Salesforce.com, Sugar CRM, you will only realize the full potential of these CRM if you maintain clean data. A poorly maintained database results in lots & lots of inefficiency whether you need to run reports for analytics or even a simple task like printing out addresses for a direct mail campaign. With multiple access and data pouring in from several sources, CRM database maintenance is not as simple as it may seem. It needs a disciplined ‘every day’ process and consistent effort from all of those who use it. Here are a few simple Do’s to maintain a clean database:

• Do make sure you enter only the data you need into your CRM and filter out what looks like junk right at the start. Many have a habit of dumping entire excel or csv sheets of leads, accounts and contact data which hasn’t been screened before upload for junk data which may be completely unnecessary
• Do run your data through a normalization process and format all the data well in the csv file or sheet before you upload it to your CRM. It’s a lot quicker and it can save you from having to access several accounts and check the data online once it has already been assigned to various user accounts and campaigns
• Do label all campaigns and sets of uploaded data items with a standard company wide naming convention which is clearly understood by users and ensures that every record is assigned correctly. As simple as it may seem, a lot of accounts have data that is simply uploaded and in time nobody knows to which source it came from, which campaign it belongs to or whose lead it is
• Do follow a standard convention across all users for entering data such as account names, postal addresses, job titles etc. It standardizes formats and makes things easier while printing reports or direct mail campaigns
• Do look for missing data elements like a missing phone number or missing zip code in the address preferably before uploading the data or at least while entering an individual record. Appending missing data at an earlier stage when there are fewer records to handle is a lot easier than having to go through the entire database and then look for whats missing
• Do ensure that users update the status of a company, lead or opportunity every time some activity is performed. If these are not updated the reports run on this data will yield inaccurate results
• Do run regular audits for data quality and carry out a data cleansing effort periodically (at least once every quarter). If you can do it more frequently, there will be less data which needs to be updated or cleansed and the data will stay in better shape

Good data in. Good data out. Its that simple!

When you are selling into mid-sized and large organizations, most likely you have multiple business contacts within your target account who drive, influence and take decisions. Depending on the industry vertical as well as the way your target accounts are organized, it is possible to have varied business contacts who take part in the decision making process. For example, if you are selling a web security product in the Education, Banking and Health care markets, you will find that the types and roles of contacts who drive the final decision in each of these verticals are varied. Understanding the web of contacts that drive and influence decisions for your product is critical for your sales and marketing success. Before you embark on expensive email, direct mail and telemarketing campaigns, the first order of business must be to acquire all business contacts at your target accounts who are expected to take part in the overall decision making process.

It is also critical to understand how every industry vertical may be different before defining who are your target contacts in each of the verticals. We recommend that you identify these by the roles and responsibilities they hold so that you get the right set of contacts to start with. Missing the mark on this critical foundational piece can lead to failure of all subsequent sales & marketing campaigns. Focus on understanding your decision makers and define them well for every vertical. Then simply build out a list of such role-specific decision makers and influencers to create your core CRM database of business contacts who you care about the most. Getting this right is crucial and its important to use the right team internally or outsource list building to the right vendors who gets it.

Fail on the core list and you will just see more failures in your sales & marketing campaigns. The list is at the heart of your sales machine, and its success or failure.