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?

This is about the time of the year when B2B marketers and sales professionals start sharing their forecasts of trends we are all likely to see in the year ahead. We all think about them, debate them, place our bets and take these into consideration and keep them in mind while developing sales and marketing strategies for the year ahead. So it just seems to make sense that we here at ReadyContacts share some of our views on what we can expect to see with marketing lists and data for 2009.

Marketing lists and data??? Change? Ofcourse. Why not? If you asked the same question just 15 years ago in 1994, the B2B marketing list would have looked quite different. For starters, it would either be a written list or perhaps an MS Excel, Dbase or FoxPro list which simply had company names, postal addresses, telephone numbers and possibly a fax number. It wouldn’t be unusual to see lists without “website urls” and “email addresses” which became a standard field in most company databases some time later. So if you are a skeptic, take my word for it…marketing data and lists do evolve!

Moving a few years ahead, 2008 has seen a lot of activity and technology which has impacted the way we sell. It’s been the year of Twitter, inbound lead generation, online marketing, SEO, content development, marketing automation, lead nurturing and a whole lot more. The absolute fundamentals of sales and marketing may not change but the approach and tools certainly have been so its only natural that the lists that we use and the data in our CRMs also get impacted by these trends and we will demand better and higher quality data. If I had to pick one word to summarize how data in the form of CRMs, cold calling lists, email marketing lists and others would change in 2009 it would be “Rich”. Marketers will demand richer data which will be reflective of what data they need to equip themselves for the kind of marketing and sales programs that are relevant in 2009.  What has become relevant is the multi-touch approach that companies have been adopting where they use multiple channels from email, phone calls, website content, newsletters, direct mail, social networking like Linkedin, Twitter & blogs to connect with companies and decision makers rather than sticking to just one or two modes of communication.

Whats the result on lists and data? I believe we will start seeing more companies need richer data on their target accounts and decsion makers. We will see data points such as Linkedin account, company blog and Twitter id become standard fields in many databases. Companies will demand these details to connect with their customers, comment on their blogs, follow them on twitter and connect with them through these channels. Even inbound leads through online form fills which are incomplete will only be really valuable with complete contact data and the more information you have on your accounts and customers, the more you understand them, the better informed your own reach out will be. 2009 will see a shift in focus on quality of data i.e.

• Richer company or account data including detailed profiles, product lines / offerings, news, intelligence, blogs and online channels
• Inbound leads that have been cleaned, completed, qualified and enriched with additional data points
• Decision makers which have been qualified, relavent or useful for the database and can be nurtured till ready
• Complete contact details for decision makers including direct phone numbers, email addresses, profiles, blog links, social/business network profiles, Skype / Twitter ID, RSS feed etc

Know your customer well. It’s the golden rule. We have all heard about it. We all know it and yet so many will still take a chance picking up the phone and dialing a random with a number from a list or their CRM hoping to charm their prospect and coax them into buying. It’s not just phone based, emails and direct mails are often send with a hit or miss strategy without really doing some background research on where they are headed. Even if they are not interested in buying what you have to offer right away, prospects always respect the fact that you know something about them or their companies. If you’ve done some homework on them the chances are they will at least have a first impression good enough to hear you through or read what you have to say.

That homework or brief background need not be a detailed dossier or deep intelligence. Sometimes a simple 50 word description on the company is all that is needed to seperate someone who knows ’something’ and someone who knows ‘nothing’ about your company and first impressions are made quickly. Most marketing lists and CRM databases will have a link to the account/company website and this is usually enough to quickly go through before connecting with a prospect. However i’ll admit even I would prefer having some kind of excerpt or company description which tells me about the company, products and background on the same screen or list to avoid that additional effort of having to open and research a site myself.

Good data is not just about volumes. Just like selling and marketing has evolved and become smarter, more information driven, CRM data and lists have evolved into more than just a set of names, phone numbers and addresses. Data enrichment and data append solutions can help add valuable data points to ensure you’re better informed and updated on prospects a quick glance. While for the complex sale, investing in more comprehensive pre sales research is worth the extra effort, for most, it’s important to identify what additional data can help you make a difference and invest in enriching your database. After all, those first impressions are important.

Every marketer should be proud of his/her database. It’s not till you actully run into a situation where you wished you needed something more from your data that you actually realize that thiings would have been more efficient “if my data had this” or “if only my data didnt have that”. It’s a good practice to run through your marketing database from time to time and ask yourself if you are happy with what is in it or is there something that needs to be done.

We didn’t really want to do a “Cosmo” style self test but here is a very quick check with few of these questions you can ask yourself to know if you are happy with your marketing database and how we at ReadyContacts can help you with anything you need to make you happier with it. Check it out!

So are you happy with it? How did you fare?

Now I’m not talking about sitting your dying leads down and giving them a pep talk to help them see the light. When I say “giving your dying leads a new purpose in life” I simply mean “give them that ever so important email address they are missing” and give them some new purpose by putting them back into your lead nurturing cycle.

A lot of customers we have spoken to have leads that they have spent good money generating and they have been lying in CRM’s or spreadsheets over time simply because they were missing an email address and were not of much use within their email nurturing campaigns. Its common to have these leads from conference lists, purchased business lead lists, downloads and other lists and often, after the first contact or call which doesnt yield immediate results, these leads fade away into the background simply because they are missing an email address. While calling leads and qualifying them is great for the ones that are sales ready, the others should go into a nurturing process where they are touched multiple times, periodically, before they are sales ready. However since email address is often the most critical data point for carrying this out, leads without valid working email addresses are often dropped out of the cycle unless you use a suitable email append service which works for you.

Running a simple email append on these records can breathe new life into leads which would otherwise end up just sitting in your CRM database with no real purpose. The process is usually a two step process of identifying the missing email address through research (cost effective but slightly less accurate) or by a calling based method (more expensive but very accurate) followed by an email verification process which ensures whatever method was used to identify them, the end results are working email addresses. The process can be time consuming to execute but the results are certainly worth it and it ensures you are getting the most out of your data.

If you have dying records and leads lying around which are not in your lead nurturing cycle, try an email append solution and give them new purpose. They could be your next customers.

The one trend we have been following consistently in business to buiness marketing technology is how it’s moving towards being able to identify prospects for your business even before you have spoken to them. Right from lead data capturing, lead nurturing to lead qualification, technology has been evolving to help automate the demand generation process and help marketing and inside sales work smarter.

Website lead capturing for building marketing data has been right at the forefront of most marketers strategy to build in inbound leads this year. It’s scalable, the leads are more qualified and often already partly educated on your offering. Whether they come from form fills, landing pages, rss subscriptions, webinar registrations or downloads, these are now regarded as some of the most qualified and actionable kinds of leads that can be generated. But these are business visitors who have committed enough to give you their contact details and are ready to speak to you. How about the more casual visitors who are interested in reading about your offering or company but perhaps not warmed up enough to fill in any information. Do you have to let these slip through?

Not any more. There are a few very useful applications which not only allow you to track the volume of visitors and their content viewing patterns but also go a step further to help you identify which company those visitors came from which effectively capture potential leads from a simple visit and not necessarily a form fill.  Netfactor’s Visitor Track - Web Leads Technology is one forerunner in this field and helps capture visitors to your company website and also translate which company they are from. Some others include OpenTracker and LeadsExplorer which help identify companies who have been showing an active interest in your website. Although it may not always yield completed data such as the actual visitors name and title if coupled with a data append and lead qualification service, these can be great ways for sourcing more leads which can be nurtured and then developed into actionable business leads.

This is certainly a step in the right direction for marketing automation and online lead generation in making the process more intelligent.

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!

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!

When it comes to sales, marketing and looking through good crm data there is a quick acid test that I use. If you can look at a record and it helps you completely visualize the company/customer and instantly help you profile or score it as a good prospect or not…then you have good data. It may not be as comprehensive as a lead profile created by having conversations with a target account but good data gives you enough key information points for you to answer a few questions with a quick glance and give you a fairly clear idea of what kind of an account it is. When you look at a target account, the least it should answer is:

• What is the name of the organization?
• Where is it located?
• What is the website url?
• What vertical is it in and what do they do?
• How many employees does it have?
• Whats their annual revenue?

From these data points you can conclude the kind of company, where they are located and its size in terms of revenues and employee strenght and see if it fits your criteria. However based on your product or offering, there are always other questions that you can have answered by adding additional data points to your crm data. For example:

• Is the company listed on an exchange?
• Does it have a holding company or what is the company structure like?
• How many outlets or locations does it have around the world?
• How many locations does it have operating within the United States?
• What were the last major press releases and news events related to this account?
• What are the divisions and product lines of this organization?
• Which countries does it operate in?

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