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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Thats right, as much as 16% of the marketing budgets allocated by global B2B companies are reserved for database and direct marketing according to the CMO Council’s “Marketing Outlook 2009” report. The findings of this report was published in a story on BtoBOnline Magazine titled “CMO Council report: Many budgets up” by Kate Maddox. 

According to the story based on the report:

It found that 50% of marketers plan to cut their budgets this year while 29% plan marketing budget increases and 21% will keep their budgets flat.

This is fairly good news after heavy budget cutting over the last few months and a good sign. The other interesting find was the different programs that the marketing budget will be allocated towards which goes something like this:

• Database & Direct Marketing     16%
• Sales Collateral & Lietrature      15%
• Trade Shows & Conferences       12%
• Print Advertising                             8%
• Online Advertising                          8%
• Search Marketing                            8%
• Social Media & Viral Marketing       7%

The top spot went to database and direct mail marketing which is a clear indicator of how heavily companies rely on their databases to generate revenue. Although this year will see budgets slowly move over in areas like search marketing, online marketing and social media, currently companies are still dependent on their customer and marketing data to hit those targets. What would be interesting to learn is from the spend on database marketing how much of that budget would be allocated to:

• Acquiring new data and building the database
• Cleansing & updating existing data
• Technology to manage data and leads
• Nurturing & marketing automation
• Other

How would you allocate your budget across these 5 areas?

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.

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

Building a large rich database in Salesforce is demanding but only next to cleansing and maintaining it. Data cleansing and maintenance go hand in hand and make up a significant part of the challenge CRM managers and sales operations professionals have to face in their goal to keep their Salesforce CRM delivering at its optimum and there are a number of issues to keep in check. Duplication prevention, de-duplication, data updation, data append, email append, email verification, address validation or junk record removal there are some good applications out there which you can check out which could help you tackle each of these problems and keep your CRM data in check.

Here are some data cleansing solutions and applications to evaluate:

• ReadyContacts CRM data Cleansing / Enrichment by ReadyContacts – to remove duplicates, correct addresses, remove junk records, append missing data points, verifiy email addresses, urls and more
• Duplicate Contact Trigger by Salesforce Labs – to remove duplication
• Data Quality Analysis Dashboards by Salesforce Labs – for recording and analysing salesforce data completeness and quality
• Mass Update Wizard by Salesforce Labs – to bulk update data points across parts of the database
• Record DeDup by Salesforce Labs – to prevent duplication during entry of records
• DemandTools 2.0 for AppExchange by CRMFusion inc – to mass manipulate data, remove duplication, validate addresses and more
• Dupe Blocker by CRMFusion Inc – to prevent duplication of records
• Data Trim by d2b International – to clean and validate addresses, email, urls, remove duplication, monitor data
• RingLead DeClone by RingLead – to prevent duplication of records
• Lead Look-Alike by Compro Technologies – to remove duplocation
• ActivePrime CleanCRM by Active Prime – to normalize and clean messy data, remove duplication and more
• JunQue Lead Filter by SalesLogistix  - to remove junk records from various sources and filter leads
• PowerExchange for Salesforce CRM by Informatica – for migration, integration and cleansing of data

These are just some of the data cleansing tools and solutions for SFDC. Each of these can play some role in keeping your Salesforce data in perfect shape, it’s upto you to decide what works best for your data.

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 

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

It’s back to the office and back to work for most of us after the holidays. Its time to kick off the new year with some serious selling and everyone is charged up to drive more revenues this year. If you have been making resolutions for 2009 and any of them involve better practices to generate more leads and generate more revenues, then here is one which will really yield results:

Keep your B2B marketing and lead data as clean as a whistle

We have done a number of posts over the last year on b2b lead data cleansing, how to go about it and how valuable it is to have regularly cleansed and updated data. If you need re-affirmation just how valuable it can be then you really have to read Ardath Albee’s recent post “Lift Revenues 70% By Cleaning Up Dirty B2B Data”

The finds of the SiriusDecisions study that organizations can realize 70% more revenue from data quality just resonates how important data quality is to better results and increased revenues. Like any new years resolutions it’s easy to resolve that you will ensure high data quality standards in your CRM or marketing data but the success lies in carrying it out with a dedicated and constant effort all year round. It has to be an all round initiative to check data quality and integrity at each and every source, cleanse existing data, weed out dead contact data, add newer records and append data points to add value to existing ones. 

Investing time and money in clean and higher quality data is the resolution that every marketer should think about making this year. Why? Isn’t the chanace to increase revenue by upto 70% a good enough incentive?