CRM has been widely adopted across organization of all sizes over the past decade for effectively managing all customer relationship functions, though a large focus has been on sales force automation. Sales and lead management has been streamlined a lot with CRM systems and though there are newer challenges, the sales management process would be terribly cumbersome to manage without a CRM. However, as organizations have been into CRM for a few years now, a fresh new challenging has been staring at them – the challenge of managing lead data to keep it complete, accurate, relevant and actionable. Leads and business contacts have a shelf life as contacts change their roles, leave and take up other jobs and in doing so create a dead lead in the databases of vendors who were selling to them. And if this happens with 1000 leads out of a total of 40,000 leads in the CRM database of a vendor, then how do you really keep track of those 1000 leads and deal with them? More and more companies are loosing significant amounts of budget to campaigns that are sent to dead or no-longer-qualified leads. This is not an easy problem to solve but it is an important problem to address. I call it Marketing Database Operations. Over the past few quarters I have come across marketing managers whose sole responsibility is lead data management – its a dire need and a new marketing role is being defined around building and managing marketing databases that are to be maintained on an ongoing basis. Its a tough job as lead data grows every day and an unknown fraction of it becomes unusable everyday. Here are a few recommendations for marketing database operations managers to constrain the problem and potential create a system that works: 

• Focus on quality of data over quantity. This will help you reduce the enormity of the problem on an ongoing basis. 
• Lay strict rules for new data that is added to the system from the perspective of completeness and verification status. Any data that is not complete or verified should not be added to the CRM database. 
• Don’t use web-t0-form features of CRM application as this is a major source of junk leads entering the CRM system. 
• Don’t allow website traffic data to be pushed to your CRM system without verification and acquisition of role-based contacts at the companies that visited the website. 
• Purge bounced email records from the database on a regular basis to remove records that no longer seem valid. If the email bounces (which was not bouncing earlier) you can safely assume the contact is no longer at the companies, unless a sales person shows call activity on the contact. 
• Remove and build a plan for data that has not shown any activity in the past 90 or 120 days depending on your specific scenario. Chances are that leads that are not called or have not shown any email responses in the past 90 days are not valid or dead anyway. One way to deal with this is to export these from the CRM database and create a strategy to re-verify/re-connect with them and if some of them respond or qualify themselves then, those can be loaded back into the CRM system. 
• Purge duplicate data on an ongoing basis across leads and contacts databases if you are using Salesforce.com. 
• Get a clear perspective of all the lead records that are missing critical contact data like email addresses and phone numbers. Other data like industry, number of employees might also be critical for segmentation and do consider that as well. This will give you an idea of how much of your past data needs to be fixed for it to be truly usable and will also prompt you to consider what you need in the new data for it to be ready for upload to your CRM database. 

Marketing Database Operations Managers must invest in build a customized dashboard to have clear perspective of all these parameters that matter the most of them to be able to structure data cleansing and enrichment projects to keep getting better in terms of data quality. This is a challenge as well as an opportunity though, and companies who are able to get a good handle over their marketing databases will win.

I came across Mike Damphousse’s interview on Craig’s Funneloholic blog (which has a lot of great reads!) and thought this answer of Mike was right on – something we educate our customers on all the time. 

5.    What will you prescribe to marketers to carry out effective lead generation?

Don’t spend the budget on every idea you know. Diversify, but stay focused. Pick a handful of effective programs as opposed to all of them. Use experts, use technology, but DON’T use your sales team. Serve the leads to them in a quality package that’s ready to be sold to. Don’t inundate them with names, numbers and email addresses. They shouldn’t be doing the marketer’s job.  They should be face to face with prospects that have real issues to solve.

This answer has a lot of different dimension to it but the central theme is how marketers can serve their sales team with leads that may result in conversations – so sales can focus on identifying opportunities than on identifying decision maker contacts, gathering account intelligence or finding email addresses. Leads that are ready to be sold to are critical and its important for marketers to focus on 

• Quality of leads being passed over to sales. Make sure the leads are accurate role-based decision maker or influencer contacts. 
• Completeness of leads sent to sales. Make sure the leads are complete with direct or one-hop numbers (Don’t just pick a company number you get from the website or Hoovers) and email addresses. 
• Qualification of accounts done specifically for every campaign so that sales understands the account intelligence before they pitch. 

Laser focus on lead lists that are sales-ready and you are bound to see increased effectiveness of your sales programs. 

A strong opinion or statement can invoke an equally strong challenge and thats one of the wonders of blogging. It’s also what just happened today when the marketing team at Hubspot posted a strong email to Stephen Kearney at United State Postal Service insisting direct mail is dying. The message to the USPS spelled out that direct mail marketing is a dying medium and there is no point hanging on the hope that it will help offset their $2.8 Bn losses last year and possibly bigger losses this year. Hubspot cited that high costs, lack of data, availability of plenty of cost effective options and the fact that no one likes to read them as the reasons that direct mail marketing is on its way to a quick and sure demise. I would tend to agree with these points and acknowledge direct mail marketing as a popular medium has declined.

However, readers came to the resuce and made in my opinion, a strong case for direct mail marketing and highlighted why it’s not dead and still a viable marketing tool if used correctly. Just because there are other options available like online marketing, it doesn’t mean that direct mail marketing is completely irrelavant. Whether you use the online medium, telephone or direct mail really depends on your scenario and there are still many of them where direct mail is a good option.

The effectiveness and cost of direct mail has taken a beating over the last years and sometimes due to poor execution. As others have shared, one of the mistakes that people make is sending out direct mailers to unqualified prospects which is a waste of time, money and paper too. Even the most well crafted direct mail which creates interest and prompts response can be ineffective if gets to the wrong receivers. Commenters on the post have left very valuable suggestions on how to leverage the advantages of direct mail marketing and make it work for you. We have just one more for you:-

Invest in qualified, accurate and higher quality direct mail lists

Different marketing tools for different situations. Choose whats best for you. As for direct mail, looks like we can’t call its time of death. Not for now at least.

If you liked this post, paste the following in Twitter:-

Direct Mail Marketing May Be Dying – Direct Mail Is Surely Not Dead! - http://is.gd/eSh1

Jigsaw is a clear innovative in the B2B business contact lists space. All outbound B2B marketing is completely dependent on the quality of the list and Jigsaw came up with an innovative idea that made it possible to buy contacts at a small price, buy lots of them on demand and with a fair bit of accuracy in terms of contact data update.

Having said that, there are clearly two separate camps. Some who clearly hate Jigsaw and some who clearly love it. Here are some reasons why one might not like Jigsaw:

• Jigsaw makes it possible for any person to find your business contact information and put it up on Jigsaw without your permission for all of the Jigsaw users and buyers to use it.
• TechCrunch has a whole slew of privacy related complaints that you can read about here.
• The quality sucks for a range of different verticals including government and manufacturing, which we have tried ourselves and have seen less than 30% accuracy.
• The core model allows a user to upload a contact and get a contact or equivalent points in exchange, which is cool but their TOS allows the company to then sell that contact to any number of customers without giving back anything to the end user who added the contact in the first place.

If you ask any sales person though, they love Jigsaw for a number of valid reasons:

• Jigsaw is the easiest way to get a whole bunch of contacts for any campaign in the shortest period of time with a certain level of accuracy.
• Its better than a lot of other so-called contact databases which are just not as deep-rooted or updated.
• The benefit of getting the contact email address and direct phone number is invaluable to say the least.
• Jigsaw is a great way for someone to quickly get a few names in the target organization at their key accounts to quickly get to their decision makers than having to struggle with door keepers who just won’t let them in.

I am sure there are more pros and cons and I’d love to hear your thoughts as well. I am split right now. I love their model to address this very large and fragmented market opportunity of business contact lists, but I think their model needs to evolve to address some of the downsides. I hope someone there is listening.

Over the past 18 months, we have received a number of inquiries from customers and prospects about building a list of their target accounts and decision makers for major accounts in India. The inbound leads that companies are receiving from India had gradually increased to a significant level as well over the past few years and the most important part is that a lot of these are genuine leads with interest and budget. One of my cousins’s startup that does caching and multicast stuff for large data transfers just opened up their Mumbai office after receiving inquires from a lot of digital cinema chains about their solution for movie theaters to transmit large movies from HQ to all theater locations. This is a real deal. India is fast emerging as a large market for technology products and services and global companies are starting to pay attention to it. You must too, especially if your products are a good fit for the fast growing domestic market in India.

I have seen most companies still not ready as yet, though. They are not sure of how to proceed in terms of marketing and selling in India. They don’t have an office there. They don’t understand the market and culture and they don’t know where to start. Its a genuine problem and one that will be solved in stages only. There is no easy answer. The opportunity is real though and hence we believe companies must take it seriously and start to put together a marketing plan for India.

Here are some of the first set of things you might want to consider to proactively cultivate and slowly build your marketing in India:

• If you are already getting inbound leads, then move quickly to put in place a comprehensive lead qualification process where every lead is called back within 24 hours or sooner to qualify their interest and move them along the process to put in the nurturing bucket or pass on to the field sales team.
• To understand the potential market opportunity, build a list of target accounts in the Indian market which qualify as your A list accounts. Gather all the account intelligence you can to understand these accounts.
• Next, identify your key decision makers and influencers at these target accounts. The hierarchy and titles in India are fairly different than the ones you will find in the US and getting used to those is important for lead scoring etc. at a later stage.
• Unless you have presence in India or Asia, it might be challenging to do all this yourself. The best option is to engage a local sales firm (There are few, if any, in India right now who understand how US sales and marketing works and how to adapt it to the Indian market. ReadyContacts is one of the few in the list building and profiling space that can service the Indian market with a local team, and there are few others who can do appointment setting as well.) who can do all this much better. If you can strike a performance-driven engagement model with them, then you can ensure a good ROI with your investment.
• Once you have a systematic lead followup process, a way to identify new target accounts and decision makers, and a local sales firm, then next step is to get a systematic lead nurturing process in place to reach out and cultivate relationships, follow-up interested leads instantly and repeat the process until you can transition the warm leads over to the field sales team.
• You can scale this process once you have consistent metrics that the process is able to deliver.

This is a basic market development process that I would recommend most technology companies to get up and ready as soon as possible, especially in these times of recession in the US. You might be surprised to see that the domestic market in India may not have slowed down so much and their technology requirements are still growing and budgeted.

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?

It’s intriguing how marketers are turning to explore new strategies to change their game plan during this time of recession and how blog posts and articles that address this topic are quickly gaining in popularity and demand. As Jon Miller “Sign Of The Times: Marketing In A Recession“ 

For the past two months, the number one post on my blog has been “7 Strategies for B2B Marketing during a Recession: The Definitive Guide“.  Originally published in June, what’s really dramatic is how quickly it’s ramped up since September when the crisis really took hold. Take a look at the Google Analytics report:

Put another way, that’s a 1,300% increase in searches, clicks, and page views on that topic in just seven weeks, and yet another way, each and every day more than 35 people are typing “marketing in a recession” into Google and clicking through to read that blog post.

Similarly other blog posts from marketers that tackled the subject right from the first signs of the banking crisis and discussed possible effects as well as solutions for business to business marketers have seen constant search traffic and even increases as teams are re-alligning their strategies to the current global economic conditions. Some of the other related good reads with helpful insight into this are:

• Don’t Cut Marketing In A Recession – Dianna Huff’s MarCom Writer Blog
• 4Ps Of B2B Marketing During Recession – Eddie Choi
• Should I Change My B2B Marketing Strategies During a Recession? - The OneIMS Blog
• Hiring A Lead Generation Team For Less Than One Persons Salary To Beat The Recession Blues - Neil Sequeira / The B2B Marketing Data Management Blog
• Dealing With The Downturn – Kate Maddox 
• When all are pulling back on marketing during recession: take advantage - LeadsExplorer Blog
• Marketing During Recession - Harish B’s Marketing Practices Blog
• Marketing Your Way Through a Recession – John Quelch of the Harvard Business School Blog
• Five Tips For Marketing In Recession – Glen Gow on the MarketingProfs Blog
• Marketing In A Recession – Seth Godin on his blog
• Should You Up Your Marketing During A Recession? - Jake Swearingen on BNET Intercom
• Strategies For Interactive Marketing In A Recession – Josh Bernoff of Forrester
• Marketing During a Recession? Get The Wind at Your Back. – Scott Clark
• Effective Online Marketing In A Recession - Adam Boydens

Business to business technology marketing has it’s own learning curve and comes with it’s own set of challenges. Likewise, the demands on having the right kind of marketing data for effectively selling specific technology based products and services also vary and a lot based on the nature of what you sell.  If you sell technology to a more generic market like a simple accounting software or document management software its perhaps more straightforward to source data suited to your campaigns simply by determining a market segment, target company size and perhaps revenue. Then ofcourse you need to locate a source for technology decision makers who are broadly responsible for accounting software or document management software. Purchasing a list of technology leads or subscribing to a database of IT decision makers should give you a decent source of potential leads for your CRM and you are good to go. However, when your product or service is depenedent on another technology generic lead sources are just not good enough and you need to be able to qualify your company and contact data much more thouroughly before its ready for your campaigns. With selling products dependent on another technology the market is not as obvious and its absolutely crucial to know whether what technology your target company is using before it can be added to your ecosystem of potential leads. If you’re not doing this, you’re trying to kill a fly with a gatling gun.

Qualification and lead account profiling is the solution to this challange and what does not qualify should not enter the lead pipeline or you will end up with a very inefficient marketing machine. For example, a company selling a salesforce.com appexchange application needs to qualify every target company in their system at the very least for “whether the company is using salesforce CRM”. Further lead profiling for the number of salesforce users in the company and other more specific questions will only improve the quality of the marketing data you are working with and provide you with more to base your approach and message off. Although there is more work involved in qualifying, profiling and building your marketing data more slowly and steadily,  having good data will pay off in the long run as you are building a more qualified base of potential customers rather than going after companies which may turn out to be dead ends.

We have worked with a company previously whose software testing tool is built for companies that use Java, a company whose application performance software works only in data centers that use EMC, a software services company who support only companies who develop in Microsoft .Net and database application company who needed to know if their target companies use Oracle. The common trend is their products depenend on the use of another technology and to build their marketing data they needed target lead profiling and qualification to build better marketing lists for their teams. It needs that extra time and effort but is it worth it? Absolutely!

There was a time when business visiting cards were the most valuable forms of contact information and having a rolodex with as many phone numbers and postal addresses meant you had all the data you need to do some serious selling. Times change. While contact address, contact phone number, contact name and contact title still make up most of the contact information a business to business marketer or sales person needs, its still incomplete without one of the most sought after pieces of business contact data needed today. Contact email. 

While it is one of the most important data fields for a contact record in anyones CRM, its also perhaps one of the most guarded bits of information which is well protected and not easily available. This probably explains why in so many organizational CRMs you will see a blank in the contact email field. The amount of marketing messages directed towards a business professionals email address as well as the stricter spam regulations has lead to companies as well as individuals being more cautious about their email addresses and also why several lead sources that are used to populate CRMs with contact information dont come with an email address.  

However if you have good customer data which you can’t make use of simply because its missing that crucial contact email, then its time to run your data through an email acquisition or email append process and enrich your data so its complete and ready to use whether for email campaigns or just good enough to communicate to an individual via email. Remember, your marketing and sales contact data is only valuable to your team when it is complete!