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?

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?

Having checked out Mike Damphousse’s blog post Ethics & Wonder/Amazon’s Mechanical Turk/Kiva on his experience getting a data related task done through the new online marketplace, I had a chance to check it out myself and ponder what this means for us as a B2B Marketing Database Management company. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk has been making buzz waves among marketers among other professionals who have been exploring to see just how they can leverage this to get some of the more routine tasks done. Also getting them done at a very competitive cost by putting them on the listing for providers to bid.

Essentially an Odesk or Elance of task related work, Mechanical Turk is a market place for both providers and requesters of very process oriented tasks like researching, identifying, labeling, transcribing and data related tasks which need some amount of human intelligence as opposed to tasks that can be automated. With several willing providers who can work from the comfort of their homes a lot of these jobs can get done for a fiercely competitve price which even outsourcing companies wouldnt be able to match given their operating costs. Will this mean all marketing data related work is going to head towards this?

I’m not sure it will. A good part of what we do at ReadyContacts does involve that “human touch” simply because there is a difference in quality between automating that process and using human intelligence to get the results. For example we could simply build B2B decision maker lists by pulling records from an internal database and delivering them at a competitive price but we don’t. Our team calls into every target account and locates decision makers by asking others in the company for their specific job role rather than their job titles. Eventually a sales person will need to go through this step to identify if they are really talking to the right decision maker. Calling in to build a list is a lot more expensive but in the bigger picture, we deliver something that will save our customers time and help them get to their decision makers quicker. 

Similarly there are de-duplication applications available that will help you clean your CRM data and remove redundancy and help you lower costs as against hiring someone to do this. Will it work the same? Not entirely. For example, it would help remove two accounts titled “Citi Group” or two leads named “John Smith” but it wont know “Peoplesoft” is a part of “Oracle” or know if a certain company has been taken over, merged or a lead is no longer working in the same company. The same goes for email verification and appending. There is some human intelligence required in most of these tasks to do them better. Does this mean there wont be room for ReadyContacts and other B2B data companies?

Well Odesk and Elance have been doing millions of dollars worth of software development projects for the masses with very capable developers as far as India, Israel, Ukraine and Singapore sucessfully delivering projects. So I’m sure this can be replicated with Mechanical Turk for other tasks. However Odesk and Elance haven’t put larger software companies like Infosys out of work, its only opened a door to the masses as an affordable option to getting development support and Mechanical Turk should have the same effect. We’ll have to wait and watch.

Any readers with experiences having used Mechanical Turk for any of their projects?

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everyone who is visiting your website is atleast somewhat interesting in your products and services or something within the domain. Most traditional analytics solution give you just a purely digital description of web traffic. That is helpful but not actionable, atleast for B2B marketers. Most B2B marketers want to know WHO it was who visited the website and if she is coming back again, and how many times and what is she looking at. That is actionable information and now there is a superb tool available for anyone who wants to do this, for FREE. Its the newly launched Demandbase Stream solution that has a slick interface for keeping you and your team abreast of WHO is coming to your website. I would highly recommend using a data cleansing and lead qualification process to whet the leads before calling them “actionable” from a sales perspective. Give it a swirl and post your comments here. 

While directing marketing and sales dollars on phone based, email and direct mail campaigns are a necessity to most businesses, wasting them by running them on poor quality un-verified lists or contact databases would rank on the seven deadly sins list somewhere between greed and sloth. If your business contact lists have been sitting a while before they were actually put into use the chances are a good percentage of those contacts are no longer active contacts and you will still incur expenses on every phone call attempt made to them, every mailer sent to them or every email that bounces or remains unread simply because all those contacts were dead ends to start with.

Using a list verification service on your sales data before running campaigns on them may involve a small initial cost to get done but will leave you with a verified list which will give you better results, clearer metrics of your success rate on the list and help you cut costs by preventing waste of time, resources and money that would have been put into connecting with business contacts who were either unqualified or no longer in those roles. Depending on what type of campaigns you intend to use your B2B list for, verification can be done for contacts, roles, addresses & location, phone numbers, titles or any details which are essential. If you have a new recently developed list for your campaign where you can rely on its quality then go right ahead but the next time you plan to use a list which you are not too sure about consider getting it verified and you’ll be happy with the results.