These days, social media can be not only a great marketing tactic, but a great sales tactic as well. Our sales reps make a habit of finding prospects via LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc. This way they can leverage relationships, gain prospect insight, and do pre-call research to maximize the 30 seconds or so they’re limited to on most cold calls. I’m constantly seeing LinkedIn updates from my connections about books they’re reading, conferences they’re attending, and forum discussions in which they’re participating. If I were a sales rep, that would be a source rife with conversation points for me while doing my cold-calling.

The questions is: are you utilizing the ubiquity of social media in your prospecting? Part of a good data hygiene regimen is ensuring that your data is not only accurate and up-to-date, but also that it’s complete. For some sales organizations, the standard-level contact information is enough, but for those of you with more sophisticated sales and marketing processes, you need deeper-level data for more intelligent segmenting and prospecting. Make sure your data is as complete as possible, and you’ll have a more versatile database.

Check out our latest data hygiene results:

Customer Profile

Email marketing software company with 50+ employees

Data Provided

67,751 leads

Results

6.94% duplicates

14.31% probably no longer with the company

34.70% missing US State

47.90% social media information appended

Stop by our Dirty Data Calculator to see how your data compares.

Poor data quality can not only be a waste of your time, but a real block at the top of your funnel. Every email that isn’t getting through represents a potential lost opportunity. With our latest customer, we were able to auto-append 4,707 emails. For most companies, that represents a handful of opportunities and potentially millions of dollars. ReachForce was also able to identify 23,839 emails that need correction. All told, nearly half of the customer’s database was identified as having undeliverable emails.

Check out the results:

Customer Profile

$50MIL+ commodity trading & risk management company

Data Provided

56,088 leads

Results

32.27% missing emails

19.20% invalid emails

5.06% duplicates

8.39% ReachForce added emails

Stop by our Dirty Data Calculator to see how your data compares and stop missing out on opportunities!

How much are your email lists suffering due to poor data quality? One of our recent customers found out through our data hygiene process that over half of their emails weren’t getting through due to invalid or missing information. Check out the results and see how your data stacks with our Dirty Data Calculator

You may think that your accounts and contacts in your database would be mostly clean because those people are typically contacted and updated more frequently by sales reps, but check out the latest Data Hygiene results from a customer’s contacts and accounts:

How does your data compare? Find out with our Dirty Data Calculator

Continuing our series of real data hygiene customer results, here’s the second installment:

How does your data compare? Find out with our Dirty Data Calculator

Beginning the first of a series of installations on data hygiene, here are some real results from the latest data hygiene project fulfilled here at ReachForce:

How does your data compare? Find out with our Dirty Data Calculator

From BtoBOnline.com, here’s a good post on list hygiene best practices: 4 List Hygiene Best Practices

Good validation that data hygiene must be a frequent and persistent practice. The question is: is it even worth using a list renter with data being such an asset these days?

Happy Monday! I wanted to share a cool new tool for sales teams out there from some friends of ours.

New content is being created faster than we can consume it.  With so many new outlets for open conversation and content sharing it’s nearly impossible to keep up. We’re all busy but if we’re not listening, we’re missing opportunity. Sorting through, prioritizing and digesting all of this information isn’t just a marketing problem either.

While you’re busy monitoring your brand your Sales teams is looking for any reason to have another conversation with a hot prospect.  Your Account Managers are responsible for knowing your customers inside and out.  This requires listening to them and what’s being said about him.  Your Business Development leaders are looking for new opportunities in the channel and with partners.  Your Product Managers are tracking your competitors every move.  And your Executive team is probably listening to all of the above.

You’d think it’s impossible to search out everything being said about a company.  There’s news, published articles, blog posts, tweets, company profile updates, contact changes, status updates and so much more hidden in the long tail.

Our friends at workstreamer think it actually IS possible.  They are working on the first FREE social business listening service enabling you to listen to customers, prospects, competitors, partners and vendors all in one place.  And if you can’t tune in for live updates you get an email each morning with the previous days’ updates.

Workstreamer is in BETA and looking to their user community to help them build out both the functionality and the breadth of content needed to make real business decisions.  Signup and give it a whirl and share it with your team.

Results from a recent MarketingSherpa poll of B2B marketers reveals that generating high-quality leads is far and away their biggest challenge. The accompanying blog post brings up an interest point: it’s the quality of the leads we pass to sales that really counts, not the quantity. It seems too easy to stand behind the number of leads we’re generating when most of them are poor quality, doesn’t it? I think that’s why it makes sense to track the business you’re generating further down the funnel so you really get a feel for the impact your nurturing is having on sales execution.

Full blog post can be found here

Great post from Brian Carroll here on how to make your lead generation process one louder:

http://bit.ly/bhuXhf

What’s interesting is most of these involve a more aligned sales and marketing process, which is something we’re always striving for here. The more we make our sales and marketing processes part of a greater whole, the more measurable and predictable our pipeline becomes and the more our marketing can do to assist sales all the way through close.

Do you have integrated sales and marketing processes? If so, is it taking your pipeline fueling and conversion all the way to eleven?