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.

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.

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?

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!

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 

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

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

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

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