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?

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?

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. 

Trade Shows are a predominant source of leads for companies in a number of segments. While I know that trade shows don’t deliver high quality leads to companies in some verticals, there are other verticals like healthcare, telecommunications and biotech where trade shows are invaluable in generating qualified leads and opportunities. 

The most valuable outcome of a trade show, other than a on-the-spot-sale or opportunity (which is rare), is the list of attendees. A natural thing to do for most marketers is to take the list and upload it to their CRM system. But that is probably the worst thing one could do with that list, as doing this leads to trade show lists getting lost  once uploaded to CRM, become tough to measure for what they delivered in terms of opportunities and sales and most importantly are tough to monetize if the data is not complete or qualified. 

Here are 3 simple things that everyone can do right after the trade show to maximize the value and ROI: 

• Cleanse the list fully and ensure that the data is both, complete and accurate. The best way to do this is to use internal marketing operations team or an outsourced lead generation or data cleansing vendor to ensure that all name, company, URL, address and phone number data is accurate. The next thing to do is to verify all the email addresses of the contacts by doing a simple email campaign thanking them for their time at the show and may be add a plug or two. The main objective of this to test and ensure that the email address is correct. However, if you do not have email addresses for the contacts as the trade show administrators don’t provide those, then it is a MUST to acquire and append emails to all contacts using publicly available information leveraging a good email append or email verification service. All this ensure that you have lead data that is complete, accurate and actionable. 
• Next, qualify the list to ensure that you are not going after accounts and contacts who are just not the right prospects for your company. This process may be quick for some of you and not-so-quick for others, but essential for everyone. An automated way to segment and qualify is by checking for data that helps you qualify like location, number of employees, revenues, contact titles/roles, and such other high level data elements. For a more deeper qualification, its best to use an outsourced lead qualification service provider who can call and research the target account to qualify against your parameters. For example, if your solution works only with the SAP ERP system, then accounts who do not have SAP are simply a waste of time for your team. The net result of this is a qualified list of target accounts with complete, accurate contact information that is ready for the sales team to call on. 
• Lastly, before you upload the list to the CRM system, make sure how you want to allocate the list across the sales reps and add any parameters that are required for this to the list. This is critical to ensure that you can make the sales reps accountable to call, qualify and report on the status and quality of the lead for you to generate a trade show ROI report. This last step is as important as the first two and almost critical for your ROI calculations. 

All this will definitely take more time than simply pushing the list as is to your CRM system but it will pay for itself with a happy sales team that values your leads, a happy boss who can clearly understand your trade show ROI sheet and overall a scalable process that puts you in complete control to drive leads from trade shows to revenue. 

One last point. In a recent conversation with one of our prospects, I heard an interesting point. He said trade shows drive 80% of their leads and one policy they follow is to only attend trade shows that give them a full attendee list WITH email addresses. If a show doesn’t give them a list with email addresses, then they just pass!