This is the fourth post in a series on Deliberate Marketing. Be sure to check out the first 3 posts: Intention vs. Attention, Qualified Buyers vs. Leads and Role vs. Title.

Deliberate Marketing techniques make it possible for Marketers and Sales teams to predict the results of their efforts because they know their direct marketing programs are focused on the right buyers in the right type of company. Deliberate Marketers do not spray a rented list of contacts with a generic message hoping the right buyers will respond. Instead, they deliver a highly relevant message to a targeted audience.

Based on preparation and research, they know they are using the right messages and the right medium to deliver that message based on the buyer profile (or persona). They also know that they are delivering this message to buyers in companies with a similar combination of characteristics as their best customers so their propensity to purchase is higher.

With this approach, Marketers can rely on repeatable lead generation efforts to provide a steady stream of qualified buyers to Sales.

Craig Rosenberg from The Funnelholic recently interviewed Suaad on where B2B marketing is headed in 2009.  Check out the interview to see what Suaad had to say on the following topics:

• What are the three trends you see emerging in 2009?
• What are the biggest challenges for 2009?
• What are three metrics that B2B marketers should care about and why?
• What are the top oversights marketers are making regarding lead generation?
• What will you prescribe to marketers to carry out effective lead generation?
• What three Web 2.0 applications, cutting-edge technologies or lead generation sources do marketers HAVE to consider to be successful?
• What do you hope for in B2B sales and marketing for the new year?

Thanks for the interview, Craig!

I know not every company has the option to hire someone specifically for online/social media marketing and here at ReachForce I do have other responsibilities, but my main job is to get ReachForce more interactive online.

There are many reasons companies aren’t taking on social media initiatives – they’re scared, they don’t have the time, they don’t understand the value, etc.. And you already have enough work as it is, right? All true, but as you have probably heard by now…social media is worth investing some time into. To help, I have listed below what I do at least once every day (I have sort of made my morning routine around it), and hopefully you can pick out some things you can start doing on a regular basis too so you can get started online.

Google Reader – This is most important to get started in social media. Every day I read our Google Reader we put together with blogs in our space. I go through reading (skimming) and pick out posts I think would be good for us at ReachForce to comment on.

Twitter – I have my own account and ReachForce has a company account that I update a few days a week. If you aren’t twittering today you should at least be checking out search.twitter.com to see who is talking about your company.

LinkedIn – I scan LinkedIn Answers for ones I think ReachForce can help with or we may have an opinion on. And there are many times our Marketing Director (Amy) is able to offer some good marketing advice. This process has been made easier with the help of groups I have joined and the weekly email I get with discussions, and with inbound marketing system HubSpot.

Facebook – We have a ReachForce corporate page. When needed, I upload photos or videos, put our events coming up or send a message to our fans. I usually always have to update our RSS feeder from our blog…for some reason it doesn’t do it on its own? Anyone else having this problem?

Social Bookmarks – I use Digg and StumbleUpon the most. I feel right now we get the best traffic from them. I recommend using it for your own blog if you have one, or recommending other people’s post you like. (Use your Google Reader to find these)!

Blog – At ReachForce we do have a blog and we post at least 4 times a week. I don’t write all the content, but I do manage it.

To help stay on top of what is going on in the social media realm I look at mashable.com and subscribe to Chris Brogan’s blog and newsletter as a start.

Okay, so this is most of my morning routine (yes it is a little time consuming, but this is what I was hired on to do). Hopefully you can pick out bits and pieces and start putting it in your routine. For those of you who do use social media on a daily basis, what else do you do every day?

As we kick off the New Year, we’re typically in an “out with the old, in with the new” mindset.  While that may be true for a lot of things, it doesn’t have to be the case for your marketing database. As we ponder in 2009 how to do more with less, think about what you can do with what you have.

Most Marketers are overwhelmed by a customer or prospect database with hundreds of thousands of duplicate entries, old data, inaccurate contact details and countless records in myriad states of completeness. This existing data has likely been gathered by many different individuals over multiple years.

Did you know?

• More than 30 million people out of the 138 million employed in the US will switch jobs in the next 12 months – Gartner Group

• In that same 12 months, some 2.5 million businesses will move, according to the U.S. Census Bureau

• “The Company that markets with a healthy data-cleansing routine can realize nearly 70% more revenue than an ‘average’ organization, based purely on data quality.” – Sirius Decisions

Dirty data, whether purchased or collected from download offers hampers your lead generation results and drives up costs.  So sticking with the same theme from my last couple of posts, doing more with what you already have, consider this.

Before throwing out your dirty data and buying new or taking on a massive database clean up initiative, think relevance.

What lead data do you have in your database that is relevant to your target markets and buying roles today?  From there you can put together a repair program.  Here’s a starting point for determining what relevant data you already have at your fingertips.

1. What businesses you need to target?  Industries?  Vertical markets?
2. Who in those businesses are involved in the buying decision for your product or services?
3. What are you going to do with the data? (Email campaign, direct mail, telemarketing)

Now it is time to repair that relevant data.  Start with what’s missing.  Here’s a list of things to consider:
If you are doing segmented email programs, do you have the right buying roles within your target markets?

• Do you have all of the email addresses you need for each role in the decision making unit?
  If you are doing a direct mail program, do you have accurate mailing addresses for everyone you are targeting?
• Are there more companies out there that are in your target market that you currently don’t have in your marketing database?  If so, find these and add them.
• Is there data older than 6 months in your database that needs refreshing?  Remember how many people are moving around and how many companies are merging or going out of business on a monthly basis.  Consider refreshing this data.  **This does not have to be a manual solution.

Thousands, tens of thousands, or maybe even hundreds of thousands of records in your database, there’s bound to be gold there, you just have to uncover it and dust it off.

Here are a few resources for you to consider as you ponder your marketing initiatives in 2009 and the value of your current data.

Is Dirty Data Sabotaging your Marketing Results?
Dirty Data: Even More Expensive Than you Thought
Understanding the Role of Role

On with the 5th drop in a series (#1) (#2) (#3) (#4) discussing Customer Experience Indexing (CEI™) as a way to measure, plan and act on customer feedback. All questions and comments are extremely welcome and I do appreciate those who have already jumped in.

Working our way down a list of six areas:

1. Planning
2. Optimizing the flow of both loyalty and satisfaction feedback
3. Analysis of feedback and calculation of actionable CEI metrics
4. (We are here) Using the data for short, mid and long term account plans for retention and growth
5. Using the data to locate new prospects using rule based company profiling and role-based targeting
6. Using the data to plan and deliver action plans aimed at reshaping customer attitudes and opinions

In the last installment (#4), we rolled out some quick analysis of data from a recent ReachForce Customer Experience survey ― zeroing in on the different angle we took by measuring prompted versus non-prompted advocacy  — and what differences exist between companies that are a reference account (92% spending x amount) versus a full blown advocate (73% spending y amount).

It is, glory be, nice to have such high numbers for both reference accounts and advocates at ReachForce. And it’s even nicer to know that as satisfied customers (x) evolve into proactive advocates (y) they also tend, as explained last drop, to buy software and services more often, and in greater amounts (#4). So as a Customer Success team planner it becomes imperative to first figure out why it happens – and set out a continuous plan of improvement to make it more predictable.

To get there, we first establish the Key Weight – or how long and how often does a customer “experience” your company? I have been scolded for this approach in the past by people who say it’s not fair or smart to weigh qualitative feedback from new or infrequent customers more lightly than older ones, and I understand the concern. But I don’t think of it as lower weight = less important (all feedback is important) ― rather, lower weight = less sure.

To work a very simple example, if planning 2009 MBOs for our project managers requires a comparison of two key accounts assigned to the same Project Manager, the following analysis might be used to help step us in the right direction:

For key account planning these numbers tell me the project manager (PM) assigned to these two customers is delivering high marks on both quantitative (data accuracy?) and qualitative (expertise?) fronts ― and with two very different scenarios (new customer/once per month and old customer/once per week). This is good. But because the lower of the cross tab scores are from the (quantitative) ‘PM expertise?’ question, I can foresee the MBOs assigned to the PM in the case of both customers will be warm, fuzzy and relationship directed in order to bolster the customer’s perception of the PM’s expertise. Or maybe the PM gets more training. And closing the planning loop, I’d probably use “Moving Customer 2 up to weekly engagement” as another measurable objective. A higher level of meaningful contact would help.

And as you can see by looking at the % Analysis Scores above, without factoring the Key Weight in the above example, you’d only be fooling yourself about Customer 2 data accuracy and PM Expertise ratings, because you would not be taking newness, or lower frequency metrics into account and an important danger or opportunity might be overlooked. To some, planning account by account MBO strategy this way may seem overly analytical, but I have found no better way to customize and create MBOs to and pinpoint action plans right where the rubber hits the road.

To get some ideas about which cross tab questions to use as lenses for various situations, think of it in terms of Value Delivery (quantitative) versus Obstacles for Value Delivery (qualitative) ― as in our example of Data Accuracy versus Project Manager Expertise ― wherein bad Project Management would be an obvious obstacle to delivering high Data Accuracy.

I’d be happy to provide further example scenarios here, but I think you get the drift. Remember, I think it’s less of a service to create some sort of template, than it is to just spark some thought and let folks craft CEI indexing tools that mean the most to your specific world.

Next week we’ll look at a few more of these CEI ‘planning lenses.’