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 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.

If information lacks quality, then it’s not really information

Thats what Lou Agosta a principal analyst at Forrester Research said in 2005 for an article which still holds true and will hold true for a long time to come. The news article in in Techtarget titled “Information quality market to reach $1 billion” It’s one thing to claim having a great customer and marketing database with hundreds of thousands or even millions of records but the value doesn’t lie in the data or bulk of data gathered itself. The value lies in it’s usefulness and what it helps the company do. Whether its for marketing programs, improving customer care or helping make decisions, the value is how that data translates into into information which is useful to the organization. There are two specific areas which data quality can be broken up in to.

The first type of quality refers to the validity of a data record. For example, a simple record which states Benjamin Davis is IT Director at XYZ company located at ABC address and can be contacted at 123-456-7890 tells you Mr Davis is a prospect responsible for IT and provides contact details which is all useful information in connecting with him. In this case if either his name, job title, location or contact details are no longer correct, that data is no longer useful. It can’t be considered “useful” information. Dead contacts (no longer within the same company or holding the same job role), bad contact data and invalid addresses are all signs of deteriorating data quality which can be avoided with a little more attention. 

The second type the less obvious type and doesn’t refer to the validity of the data but rather “does it give you all the information you need?” For example, lets look at the same record where we know Benjamin Davis is IT Director at XYZ company located at ABC address and can be contacted at 123-456-7890. Similarly assume you have 5000 similar prospects and the same data. This is useful to some extent but if your intent is to use this data to execute an email campaign… it falls short. It lacks email addresses so from the usefulness perspective, it lacks quality till its complete. This type of quality is subjective to the purpose of the data and what information is needed of it to make it useful. A company that sells java software testing solutions would perhaps need to know if their target accounts use Java in addition to the account and contact data they already have. A company  selling a Salesforce.com dependant application would need to know if their target account uses Salesforce CRM in addition to their standard data. A company that sells services to small local branches of large banking corporations would need to know the locations and network of the branches. True “quality” data is rich enough to help you with all the information you need to know to make better decisions and help drive better results. If your company data is lacking certain data points which would make it more useful, data enrichment could help complete it with what you need to know. Quality is subjective to the purpose of the data and if its not complete, it lacks quality.

If it lacks quality, it isn’t really information.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

If there was a prayer that would automatically de-dupe all the leads and contacts data in your Salesforce.com or other CRM applications, would you say that Prayer? Everyday? If you answered yes to that, we’d love to talk to you today.

Unfortunately, as we all know there is no such prayer but answering the question above will help every marketing manager realize and take notice of this grave problem that is eating away at your campaign effectiveness and sales team productivity everyday. See this post and this report for more on how bad data can be bad for business.

Duplicate records is one of the most critical problems in CRM databases today and I am positive that majority of organizations who have this problem have not yet figured out a good solution for it. Before researching any tools and service providers, I think it is important for marketing managers to first define how they want to attack the problem and what logical methods they think they can live with. Figuring this out is a great first step to the problem and here are some of the best ways to look at your de-duplication problem: 

• De-dupe and merge all records that have the same email addresses. 
  • This is perfect except that you must account for common problems with this logic and excluding all info@, careers@ and such other email addresses. 
  • Another way is to first look at all info@, careers@ records and see if that are of any value to you and purge those records. 
• In the absence of email addresses in contacts and leads tables, the next best way is to de-dupe and merge based on “firstname + lastname + companyname” and this will most likely work. One thing you must do is to export the list of such records as you merge them so your marketing operations team can eye ball them to find any discrepancies. 
• For all new leads that are being added to the database, the best way to avoid an ongoing problem of duplicate records being created is to use a product or service that compares and remove duplicates from any list before it is added to the CRM system. The ReadyContacts service or RingLead or CRMFusion tools are an example of this. 

What are other tactics and strategies that you are using for de-duping and what has worked and scaled for you well? I’d love to know your experiences and ideas. CRM database cleansing and enrichment is a crucial new area for all marketing organizations and we are seeing an increasing number of marketing departments that are recognizing this as a priority for 2009, when doing more less has become important due to economic recession in the markets. 

The interesting thing about the economy slow down and its impact on marketing as well as sales is that it’s driven us all to do more with less. Yes budgets are tightening, recruiting is reducing and the workforces are either downsizing or remaining constant. Sales and marketing quotas? No, they haven’t reduced. They have gone up. However it’s not just the recession and low budgets which are making businesses think of alternatives to increasing workforces to do more. It’s part of the evolution of businesses in general and how staying lean and being able to contract certain activities to dedicated providers started becoming a logical strategy. The noose around budgets in this recession is just going to push this trend further as businesses seek alternatives to scaling their interal workforces and operational costs while scaling their business.

How The Virtual Workforce Is Changing Everything by Jack M. Germain is a great read on how perceptions on workforces are changing. Marketing data management is an area this applies well. Building, maintaing and managing lead and marketing data is a time consuming and tedious process but it needs to be done and needs to be done very well. Working with virtual teams at other locations or professional solutions providers in this area is a good alternative for marketers to explore at this stage especially if they are considering hiring more staff to manage marketing data. There are several companies with expertise in list building, lead qualification, lead profiling, CRM data cleansing, email list management, data append and enrichment and more. Other than the more obvious benfits of cost and flexibility paying for support as and when you need it, it can really help free up your internal teams time to focus on other areas such as inbound marketing, lead nurturing programs, social media marketing and generating newer sales ready leads instead of spending it on data.

Perhaps you’ll run some risk of engaging vendors or providers who don’t gel with your requirements till you find one that works for you and build a relationship but this is a risk you face while recruiting a new person for the job too. While considering how to re align your existing marketing team to meet lead quotas give some thought to using vendors for your marketing data needs. It may just give you the edge you need. 

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