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• Expired Data - contacts who are no longer active, company addresses which have changed, companies which have been acquired or merged.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

Here is the report on the conversion of qualified web leads to oppotunities generated between Saturday and Sunday with an estimated closing time of between 2 and 3 weeks. Here is another report of total leads generated by various channels and the return on investement for the first half of last month. Here is the ratio of emails sent with projections for revenues of next month based on last years open rates. Just because your CRM software gives you a million reports and does analytics like nobody’s business, it doesnt mean you need to use all of them.

With all the analytics features available now, it can get confusing if you are tracking 30 different metrics every week to understand where your lead generation or sales figures stand at that point of time. Printing and analyzing unnecessary reports can actually become more a bottle neck in your lead management process rather than being  a source for information which can help you better it. In short, if you spent half a day on reprimanding your sales team for a reduced number of sales calls and number of hours spent logged onto the CRM as compared to last month when your monthly revenue from qualified opportunities was actually higher this month…..then you are missing the point.  Too many data points to analyze can often create a wrong impression and shift your focus from results to questions on how much activity was there?, how many campaigns were run, how many raw leads were added? 

Good reports have only the metrics you need to track. Additional ones that need to be pulled up to solve certain problems or take a closer look into how a particular campaign worked can be done when required. Here are a few pointers that can help remove the noise created by distracting analytics reports and still give you visibility into your lead management:

•  Create a dashboard which has only the metrics you have identified as important to track on a daily or weekly basis. Any other report can be pulled on a need basis.
• Track the simple metrics which show you the results and where you stand in terms of those results. In the end the aim is to generate results from all the activity and not just generate activity since thats what lead generation entails.
• When you compare metrics, compare them with the right context. As we mentioned, if your sales people did less calls than last month but still got more customers than last month, then they did something right, not wrong. 
• Tracking metrics is pointless if you cant convert what you leanrt from them in to tangible action items and use them to improve on the results.

Maybe there should be a report on all the pointless reports some of us end up reading just because we can. Or, we could simplify it and get what we need to know and filter out the rest.
 

Continuing from our last post on Linkedin Vs Jigsaw For Your B2B Business Contacts, we’ll move on to two more heavy weights as sources for B2B marketers and sales people to build their target lists of leads and locate business executives. Hoovers and Zoominfo are well established sources for locating business contact information with different approaches. Both of them have their pros and cons which is what has to be weighed out before you decide which one best suits your needs. Here is a an overview of the two contact sources:

Hoovers

• What is it?
  • Hoovers is arguably the largest proprietary company information database with detailed company profiles and information on over 25 million business organizations. The database has detailed company overviews, locations, addresses, financial figures, competitors, news releases and key executives for each of these companies making it the gigantic resource on company information it has been known for.
• How do you locate contacts?
  • Hoovers is a subscription based database and while there are a set of free access companies, to get the most out of it you will need a subscription to get started. These can range from $75 per month for the most basic to considerably more for an enterprise subscription. The search criteria is quite extensive and you can search for both companies or contacts and even generate lists based on some parameters that matches your target set of accounts and contacts. Hoovers does offer Salesforce integration to populate a companies Salesforce accounts with the company or contact information they may need straight from its own data. Alternatively, lists of companies with executives can be exported into csv sheets and used
• What are the pros of Hoovers as a business contacts source?
  • With over 25 million organizations in the database its easily one of the most comprehensive sources of company information you can have access to. Along with its network of sources, Hoovers has managed to keep this enormous database up to date and the company information is quite reliable
  • Each account or organization is profiled with rich company intelligence which is valuable for sales persons and each contact or executive comes with a title and often with other details such as a bio and email address
  • The database is ideal for building target B2B lists and the export function ensures you can put all the data you need into a csv format and upload to your own CRM or application
• What are the cons of Hoovers as a business contacts source?
  • Not all the contacts will have complete direct contact information like direct phone numbers, direct addresses and email addresses so from a campaign perspective some amount of work may be required if you wish to make contact with these executives via email or direct mail
  • Hoovers provides users with high level key executives within companies which are mostly C-level to VP level heads of the important functions of the company. It may not be suited to your sales or marketing efforts if your best target contact is someone deeper within the organization like a manager or director level decision maker

Zoominfo

• What is it?
  • Zoominfo is an intelligent search engine which is built for searching company information and profiles. With about 3.9 million companies and 42 million people that can be searched, it provides a good source for business contacts and has two products ZoomExec and ZoomPower Sell specially made for sales and marketing to generate their lead lists
• How do you locate contacts?
  • Depending on whether you need high level executives at your target accounts or a wider range of business contacts you can select between the ZoomExec and ZoomPower Sell paid subscriptions. Once you are a registered user you can search by company names, revenue ranges, industry, contact job titles, level, geography and more. Each of these contacts comes with required contact information in terms of phone numbers and email addresses. Company information and profiles are also quite extensive and will provide most sales perons with the details they would need to know
• What are the pros of Zoominfo as a business contacts source?
  • With the Power Sell version having utp 25 million contacts at 3.9 million companies Zoominfo may not be the largest database but definitely more than sufficient to meet the needs of most b2b marketers and sales persons
  • If you need only higher level key executives the option of being able to subscribe to the smaller ZoomExec helps provide a more cost effective option to subscribing for what you may not really need
  • The search functionality is great to generate exactly the kind of lists you need by selecting your parameters and its ideal for building b2b target lists that can be exported and uploaded to your CRM
  • The contacts come with an email address and a phone number making it perfect to use for phone based reach outs and email campaigns as well
• What are the cons of Zoominfo as a business contacts source?
  • It may not suit your requirements if your target contacts are more specific in role as the contacts are a mix of contacts across different organizations and not role based contact which may be better suited to those selling more niche products to specific decision makers
  • Since most of the data is from search based technology and the size of the data is vast, over time the quality of the data can deteriorate or may not be as relevant
  • If you don’t require a full years subscription or are not likely to make the best use of the volumes of contacts or data throughout the year it may not offer a cost benefit as a pay per use model might since you are paying a subscription fee

All said and done, both of these are proven sources of company data and offer great value in their own ways. Evaluate them carefully see whats best suited for your own requirements. Stay tuned for more businiess contact sources!

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!

Do you sell into companies which are are Salesforce.com customers? If the answer is yes then I can relate to your need to build a database of very specific contacts who are directly responsible for managing Salesforce.com for their companies in order to get any traction with sales and marketing campaigns. While the higher level Vice President of Marketing or Vice President of Sales are usually the final decision makers for salesforce.com application add ons and related products, the sales operations or SFDC manager is the person who often makes a great point of contact to start selling. It is this contact which is a perfect example of some of the valuable role-based contact discovery we have done here at Ready Contacts.

While building a target list for companies who sell into Salesforce.com companies there are two universal questions they need to know about each account they plan on selling into:

• Does this company use salesforce.com as their CRM?
• If yes, who is the person directly responsible for salesforce.com operations and managing the use of SFDC within this company?

While in some companies Salesforce.com is directly overseen by a VP, Marketing in others it can managed by a Sales Operations Director, CRM Manager, Salesforce.com Manager, Marketing Manager or others based on the structure of the company. In certain cases this person could also be within the IT department and directly oversee Salesforce administration and day to day operations related to the CRM. Knowing who is the best person within the organization to speak to discuss Salesforce.com related requirements is essential to approach these accounts and locating these contacts and building your lead database can be a time consuming task but should be worth your effort. A consistent effort of navigating marketing departments at target accounts and qualifying them to understand whether they use Salesforce.com will help build a steady pipeline of leads and then talking to folks within marketing and sales will really help you determine who to sell to within the organization and give you that dependable database on which you can build an effective sales effort. So if you sell into Salesforce.com customers focus on building a great list. The rest will follow.