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• check for and filter out contacts and accounts which are no longer active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

ReadyContacts.com was covered very recently on Killer Startups and generated a fair amount of inquiries from marketers who wanted to know a bit more about our offering and how it works. With the current financial situation it’s only natural that our customers and prospective customers are keen to know how a marketing database management solution is relevant to our times and why they should consider it. I think Vaibhav, Founder & CEO of ReadyContacts sums it up the best in his comment on the Killer Startups article when he says

Overall, accurate role-based contact data and profiling intelligence is key for sales efficiencies in this economic climate.

If there is one good fallout of the recession and global economic crisis, it’s that companies have been forced to develop more efficient practices and fine tune every process to drive the most revenue while still keeping a check on rising costs. Marketing and lead data is no exception to this and maintaining a highly accurate database of decision maker contacts and comprehensive account intelligence is a path to efficient sales and marketing campaigns.

Cultivating more leads into customers may be the main focus but it all starts with great data. The better your data, the stronger a foundation you build for your marketing and sales teams to work off and the more efficient your conversion becomes. If you are building a contact / lead database, ensure you have accurate and relevant decision maker contacts. If you are investing in email campaigns, check that you have the most accurate and up to date email addresses to ensure better results. If you are targeting specific accounts, profile each account with useful sales intelligence to help you customize your message and approach. Quality, quality and quality. Acquiring richer data will contribute to better results and clearer ROI.

Having great lead and marketing data is more relevant in our times than it’s ever been. Right?

Have you ever thought that your last b2b marketing campaign was not really as ineffective as it may have seemed? Are you sure your CRM or lead management software analytics tools are not blinding you with wrong reports? 

Alright. I’ll admit it’t completely wrong to blame CRMs, lead nurturing software, lead management tools or even email marketing applications for giving anyone wrong reports or false analytics of the effectiveness of your campaigns. Analytics and reporting are based on logic and calculations, they can’t really go wrong. If there can be anything to take the blame for erroneous reports, its the data!

Imagine you spend several days brainstorming and trying to come up with a copy for an email campaign that is so compelling and so well crafted, that it should be enough to lure readers to your sign-ups or landing pages and generate a flow of leads for you. Imagine you select 1000 prospects from your marketing database and send your “sure-shot” email to them as you wait in anticipation for the results. Imagine you watch your campaign performance results and learn that only 100 of your thousand leads actually opened your email and 5 of them responded showing interest. That’s a 10% open rate and a 0.5% sucess rate. Does that mean your email campaign was a failiure and you need to start from scratch with a new copy?

Analytics and campaign reports are only as accurate as your data. They will give you figures on the effectiveness of your campaign assuming every one of your leads and contacts was a valid, active prospect and your contact data 100% accurate. If that campaign was sent to 1000 contacts of which 500 were not really the right people to target, 100 of them were no longer with the same company as when they were added to the database and 100 email addresses were wrong or changed, you effectively ran that campaign on 100 prospects. Your open rate would have been 33.33 % and your success rate 1.67%. So when you send out an email campaign and analyze the results, ask yourself:

• Is every contact on the list a valid decision maker and receipent for this message?
• Is every contact on the list still with the target account? Have any of them left the company?
• Is every email address valid and active? Are there any on the list which are destined to bounce before an email even goes out to them?

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?

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.

Email verification software solutions have been around just as long as the need for email verification was felt and if you are looking for a solution to have your business to business email campaign lists verifed there are several options which may vary in terms of accuracy and effectiveness. Other than the pricing factor for each software have a look to see what exactly each email list verifier does and if it fulfils your expectations of accuracy?

If you have tried several email verification tools, you would know there are instances when your verifier software tells you that and email address is good while when you send an email to the same address from your webmail account, it may bounce or show you a failiure. This is because some software mainly strips the domain part of the address and validates whether the domain is correct without really checking the validity of the entire email address. This is useful for very large email lists where you may just want to filter out the complete junk records but it wont give you a very high level of accuracy. The other, more comprehnsive type of software will first check the domain with a DNS request and also emulate sending a mail and connecting with the receipients email server using SMTP. These will tell you whether the user is a valid one or not and give you better accuracy. Although there can still be issues in accuracy caused by company email security setups like anti-spam filters, firewalls and email catch configurations, there are a large number of tools that will do the job and filter out bad email addresses. Some sample options of email list verifiers are:

Advance Email Verifier by G-Lock Software 

Bulk Verifier

Maxprog’s eMail Verifier

Dynamic Mail Validator By Dynamic Software

Fast Email Verifier by Lencom Software

Atomic Email Verifier

If your marketing relies heavily on large email campaigns then investing in an email list verifier can be a good option. Here at ReadyContacts.com, while executing CRM data cleansing and email list verification for our customers, to get that extra edge in terms of accuracy, we use a combination of an inhouse email verifier software as well as a manual process. By running the lists through a combination of different software checks as well as being thouroughly scanned and rechecked by our database team, we are able to update or correct wrong emails as well as check them for bounces caused by email filters or blocks which the software checks may not be able to do as well. In any case, evalute whats best for your requirements well and if you decide that purchasing a verifier is not the best option for you, we can always help you with your email lists.  

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. 

When you are selling into mid-sized and large organizations, most likely you have multiple business contacts within your target account who drive, influence and take decisions. Depending on the industry vertical as well as the way your target accounts are organized, it is possible to have varied business contacts who take part in the decision making process. For example, if you are selling a web security product in the Education, Banking and Health care markets, you will find that the types and roles of contacts who drive the final decision in each of these verticals are varied. Understanding the web of contacts that drive and influence decisions for your product is critical for your sales and marketing success. Before you embark on expensive email, direct mail and telemarketing campaigns, the first order of business must be to acquire all business contacts at your target accounts who are expected to take part in the overall decision making process.

It is also critical to understand how every industry vertical may be different before defining who are your target contacts in each of the verticals. We recommend that you identify these by the roles and responsibilities they hold so that you get the right set of contacts to start with. Missing the mark on this critical foundational piece can lead to failure of all subsequent sales & marketing campaigns. Focus on understanding your decision makers and define them well for every vertical. Then simply build out a list of such role-specific decision makers and influencers to create your core CRM database of business contacts who you care about the most. Getting this right is crucial and its important to use the right team internally or outsource list building to the right vendors who gets it.

Fail on the core list and you will just see more failures in your sales & marketing campaigns. The list is at the heart of your sales machine, and its success or failure.