This was and actual email I received last week:

Hello,

Please ensure that this is forwarded to the network infrastructure team lead.

Given COMPANY X success with multiple SaaS providers, I wanted to ensure that you were aware of our company and service offerings. We have been winning many key deals from a highly competitive landscape and COMPANY X is able to leverage key pricing advantages from Vmware licenses on a rental basis, a true cloud utility computing model with rapid provisioning of servers, support for Windows 2008, IBM platform standard for managed servers, citrix administration and support services which are handled by some of the best engineers with the most experience in the industry and still coming out with much better pricing than is provided by your other hosting partners.

COMPANY X is a consolidation of multiple, US-based, high-density data centers by Managed Data Holdings (MDH). With facilities in Chicago, Denver and Irvine, CA along with the ongoing acquisition activities for others nationally, COMPANY X is focused on providing both standard colocation services (cabinets, cages and power) as well as managed services comprised of IBM Bladecenter servers and Equilogix storage in a virtualized, outsourced infrastructure. COMPANY X is a SAS 70, Type II certified facilities company.

Our data centers are 24/7/365 managed facilities with on-site NOCs, security and network staff available to support your needs on demand. Our customer portal enables our customers to remotely manage their collocated infrastructure, network bandwidth utilization, hosted server & storage infrastructure plus enables Compute-on-Demand and Storage-on-Demand flexibility for our hosted customers. Our Managed Services products range from managed IBM iDataPlex or Bladecenter servers and Equilogix storage, security services (firewall, etc.), managed VPN, monitoring of your network infrastructures down to Load balancing, Network management and Infrastructure services (including “hands & eyes”). We have seen significant interest from major companies who have found that turning the infrastructure over to COMPANY X with the Virtual instances of VMware and the dynamic storage provisioning (on the fly) has significantly reduced their OpX as well as scope of responsibility for systems and software updates.

Please let me know if you have any projects with which I may assist you.

Thank you and best regards,

JOE

JOE SALESPERSON

Senior Sales Account Manager

Why is this is a ‘what not to do’ – a few really obvious reasons:

1. “Hello,” is that really my name?  No, don’t think so – if you’ve got the prospect’s name, you know you’ve got it spelled right, use it….don’t just write ‘Hello’ and ignore a person’s name.
2. My personal favorite – “Please ensure that this is forwarded to the network infrastructure team lead.” What does this say about your knowledge of the prospect when your opening sentence assumes you are not sending your email to the right person??
3. How long is this email?  Yes this is a real email, it was sent to a group of folks here at ReachForce (yes really personal, isn’t it?), it’s so long though who is going to read it?

This email cracked me up, how many people really respond to something like this?  It’s amazing it didn’t get captured in my junk email.  Take some time when you are crafting an email to a prospect.  If it’s follow up to a call, make note of the call.  If it’s a cold email and you’ve never had contact with the prospect before, really put some thought into what is going to stand out to the reader.  Or better yet, don’t send cold emails!

If you are anything like us, your resources page on your website is overflowing with whitepapers, eBooks, tearsheets and more.  How do you organize all that great content so your prospects can find what is relevant to them?

The most common way I have seen is to organize it by format:

• Whitepapers
• eBooks
• Podcasts
• Webcasts
• Videos
• Case Studies

This is a good way to go about it if you know your buyers want to go looking specifically for a certain format.  Like you know that those early in the buying cycle want to read whitepapers and that the final decision maker only wants to read case studies.

However, I have found that although my buyers may tend towards one type of format or another, it is the topic of the content that they really care about.  So instead of grouping, for example, all eBooks together, we have 6 different categories our buyers are interested in (obviously this is relevant to our buyers being marketers).  This is how our B2B Marketing Resources page is organized:

• Direct Marketing
• Database Clean-up
• Online Marketing
• Event Marketing
• Marketing and Sales Alignment
• General Marketing

In each category, there could be eBooks, a webcast and tearsheets.  We have found that our buyers care first about the topic of the content and then will choose from the formats available.  Ultimately you need to find the best way to make your content easy to find so that your buyers can consume it.

David Meerman Scott is sort of the Godfather of eBooks.  Case and point, his eBook, The New Rules of Viral Marketing: How word-of-mouse spreads your ideas for free has been downloaded more than 600,000 times.  David had a great post on his blog, Web Ink Now, back in June called So you want to write an ebook? 30 tips for success

Here are some of the best tips David had to offer (be sure to read his entire article before you write your next eBook):

• You should write to solve a problem that people have.
• The ebook should be authored by a person. Don’t make it by your company. You need the personal connection with readers. An ebook by “Premium Landscape Company” will not do as well as an ebook by “Mary Smith, chief landscape architect at Premium Landscape Company.”
• Have a definite point of view.
• Do not sell your products or services in the body of the ebook.
• At the end, in the biography section, have a place where people can learn more and can contact you if they want to work with you.
• You will need a great title that intrigues people.
• Use a subtitle to say what the ebook is about.
• Add a Creative Commons license to encourage people to share.
• Tell people about the ebook, especially those in a position to talk it up.
• Invest in a great design
• Focus on the cover – the first thing people see
• You should have a permanent place to point people. It could be on your blog or site or you could even make a micro site with a unique URL

Here are some of my tips based on the success we have seen with our own eBooks:

• You don’t have to reinvent the wheel.  Our most successful eBooks are a collection of blog posts by topic.
• Take out the formality.  Add some personality.
• People love valuable content so put it out there where your customers are – could include: LinkedIn, FaceBook, Twitter, monthly newsletter, advertising, etc.

Whether or not to have a form in front of your eBook  is highly debatable.  David would tell you to let your content go free and he has some very interesting stats to back this up.  I have yet to convince the higher ups to do this, so we will continue to require registration for our eBooks.  If you are going to put a form in front, try to limit the number of questions.  Also, I have seen some forms where you can choose if you want follow-up from a sales rep or not which could increase downloads.

Measuring What Matters Assessment

Peter Drucker, widely regarded as the “father of modern management”, once said, “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”.  Now, more than ever, measurement is a fundamental part of the marketing process.  Good marketers are expected to understand marketing analytics and use marketing performance as the basis for allocating budget effectively.  As a result, marketers must measure metrics that matter; metrics that can translate to strategic actions and drive accountability.

The key to measuring marketing effectiveness lies in the ability to benchmark performance over time.  Measurement is of little value unless it can be used to assess the current state of operations and help marketers determine how to optimize performance.  Ultimately, organizations can only improve marketing effectiveness if they have a baseline to compare existing performance.  Marketers should be utilizing unique metrics to measure three areas of marketing operations:

• Budgeting and Execution:  Metrics for measuring how well the current marketing plan is tracking against budget and on-time execution.   This includes a top-down and bottom-up view of budget allocation and the ability to track performance against plan and forecast accuracy.
• Campaign Performance:  Metrics for measuring closed-loop marketing on marketing campaigns; to help link marketing spend with related performance. (For example, increase lead-to-sales conversion, increase click-throughs, increase sales for a certain product, maximize form captures, etc.)
• Operational Efficiency:  Metrics for measuring the cost of marketing operations; workflow and processes cycle time, time spent managing activities, time spent on analysis, content re-use, shipping costs, etc.

The following questions will help determine steps your organization can take to improve measurement practices.

Read each question and write down the appropriate points based on an honest assessment of the current state of your marketing operations.

Does the marketing function have a set of pre-defined metrics that are benchmarked over time?

• Yes, there’s no room for improvement – Award yourself 4 points if you are confident marketing is measuring the right metrics and using these metrics to make better decisions over time
• Yes, but we could do better- Award yourself 2 points if you feel fairly confident you are measuring some metrics over time, but there is still some room for improvement
• We need to work on this- Award yourself 0 points if you know your marketing function needs to spend some time defining which metrics to measure and how to measure them

Do you measure customer lifetime value?

• Yes- Award yourself 4 points if your organization has ever tried to measure customer lifetime value, and used this to determine the maximum cost per lead.
• No- 0 points if you are not quite sure how to calculate customer lifetime value

How confident are you in your ability to measure current performance and adjust marketing campaigns in mid-cycle?

• Confident- Award yourself 4 points if your organization can adjust marketing campaign effectiveness based on mid-cycle campaign performance
• Room for Improvement- Award yourself 2 points if your measurement activity tends to be weeks or months after a campaign is executed
• We can’t do this today- 0 points if, for whatever reason, you can’t measure marketing campaign performance

Do you have access to data required to measure marketing performance?

• Yes, and it’s timely- Award yourself 2 points if you have access to the data necessary to calculate the metrics your organization uses (or would use) to measure marketing performance
• Yes, but it’s difficult to get- Award yourself 1 point if you have access to the data necessary to calculate the metrics your organization uses (or would use) to measure marketing performance, but the time it takes to gain access impacts the ability to maximize marketing effectiveness.
• No- 0 points if the data required does not exist, or is very difficult for marketing to get their hands on

Final Score

a._____+ b._____+ c._____+ d._____=  ______

How did you score?

• 0-4 Points:  You’re falling short – A final score between 0 and 4 indicates you could increase marketing effectiveness considerably by measuring and benchmarking metrics over time.  Every organization must determine pre-defined metrics for measuring marketing performance.  Start by mapping out a few different “nice to have metrics” to measure each of the three main categories of marketing measurement: Budgeting and Execution, Campaign Performance, and Operational Efficiency.
• 5-10 Points: You’re a few inches shy – A final score between 5 and10 indicates you marketing group could use some education on marketing measurement.  Consider automation and technology to help standardize and benchmark performance over time.  If access to data is a significant barrier to effective measurement, list out the different sources of data in your organization.  Then prioritize each source and start tracking small win’s by going after the low hanging fruit.  Partial data is better than no data in the eyes of the CFO.
• 11-14 Points: You’re measuring up – A final score between 11 and 14 points indicates you have a good grasp of marketing performance.  Quality data and superior marketing execution suggest you have already used marketing measurement to optimize marketing execution and operational efficiency.

The success of any business endeavor is dependent on one thing; execution. Even the best marketing strategy will fail if the organization is incapable of executing. In the context of marketing effectiveness, execution has to do with the tactics and processes an organization utilizes to market a product or service. With limited resources and finite budget, marketers need to make sure that all marketing activities are both influencing and driving demand. While it’s critical to have access to a robust centralized marketing database, the database is of little value unless marketers use the data to increase revenue.

In order to improve marketing effectiveness, marketers need to start using the data to build more intimate relationships with prospects and customers. Research proves that mass untargeted email blasts yield an average 1-2% conversion rate.

The following questions will help determine steps your organization can take to improve marketing execution. Remember to check out the marketing automation category for more about marketing automation vendors that can help you here.

Read each question and write down the appropriate points based on an honest assessment of the current state of your marketing operations.

Do you have clearly defined segments and targets?

• Yes- Award yourself 2 points if you currently customize marketing campaigns for unique segments of prospects/customers
• Yes, but we could do a better job- Award yourself 1 point if you segment your database, but you feel you could do a better job creating customized marketing messages for these segments
• No- Award yourself 0 points if you do not currently segment or target unique segments of prospects/customers

Do you currently use any personalization in outbound marketing campaigns? Award points for each applicable answer then add up all the points at the bottom (this question could award a total of 21 points)

• Mass Email (1 Point): _______

• Segmentation and Targeting (2 Points): _______

• Personalized- Name in Salutation (4 Points): _______

• Personalized- Using other database criteria: purchase date, product purchased, etc.

(6 Points): _______

• Event Triggered- Marketing interactions are triggered by customer behavior (8 Points): _______

• Total Points:_________ (Enter in b.)

Do you have one or more lead nurturing campaigns that are designed to educate potential buyers that are not yet ready to make a purchase?

• Yes- Award yourself 2 points if you have exclusive marketing campaigns designed to nurture and educate prospects
• No- Award yourself 0 points if you do not use lead nurturing

Do you know which marketing channels result in (or influence) the highest number of leads?

• Yes- Award yourself 2 points
• No- 0 points

Can you name 3 companies that visited your website this week?

• Yes- Award yourself 2 points
• No- 0 points

Final Score

a._____+ b._____+ c._____+ d._____ +e._____ = ______

How did you score?

With the right tools and processes in place, marketing execution can be quick and painless. Without those tools and processes, it can be painful and yield poor results, possible causing you or your programs to get the ax.

• 0-6 Points: You don’t quite have the hang of it - A final score between 0 and 6 indicates you could increase marketing effectiveness considerably by increasing the use of personalized email campaigns or even basic segmentation of your marketing database. Consider lead nurturing campaigns to increase the number of sales-ready leads that are passed on to sales.
• 7-18 Points: You’re getting there, keep on hacking away - A final score between 7 and18 indicates you are using a moderate level of personalization or segmentation and probably achieve average conversion rates on outbound campaigns. Consider tracking prospect performance across multiple channels (the web, email, landing pages, keywords, etc.) By tracking prospect behavior you can more accurately predict propensity to purchase and relevant materials that will have the biggest impact on driving revenue. Automation can help deliver highly relevant marketing interactions that are triggered by prospect behavior. This increases the likelihood of delivering the right message to the right prospect at the right time.
• 19-29 Points: You’re killing it - A final score between 19 and 29 points indicates your taking full advantage of your marketing database to build more intimate, relevant, personalized relationships with prospects and customers. The question is, are you measuring performance over time to constantly improve marketing execution?

The marketing database plays a vital role in maximizing marketing effectiveness.  A lack of a centralized and complete marketing database impacts the marketer’s ability to both create and execute highly effective marketing strategy.

The marketing database feeds the marketing mix, it helps determine which targets and segments a company should pursue, and it ultimately allows the organization to consistently develop better products and services and market these products and services efficiently and effectively.

Most importantly, the marketing database is the lifeblood of marketing campaign execution.  The ability to deliver relevant, timely marketing messages to prospects and customers across one or more marketing channels is directly correlated to the quality of your marketing database.  As a result, marketers need to trust in their marketing database; therefore ensure that the data is accurate, complete and reliable.

Market leading organizations heavily rely on their marketing database to build intimate, relevant, personalized relationships with prospects and customers.

The following questions will help determine steps your organization can take to improve the quality of your marketing database and ultimately the ability to execute more effective marketing campaigns.

Read each question below and write down the appropriate number of points according to your answers.  Once you’re done, add up your score to determine if you are a database slacker, an average Joe database marketer, or a database jockey with the right customer and prospect data at your fingertips all day, every day.

Rate the quality of your marketing database?

• Complete- Award yourself 4 points if you are confident in the quality of the marketing database you rely on execute marketing campaigns
• Room for Improvement- Award yourself 2 points if you feel fairly confident in the quality of your marketing database but there’s still some room for improvement.
• It’s in bad shape- Award yourself 0 points if you are confident in the fact that your database marketing practices are less than desirable and leave room for significant improvement.

Do you currently have a centralized marketing database that provides one source of the truth for marketing, sales, and service?

• Yes- Award yourself 2 points if you have a centralized database that delivers a 360 view of customers across marketing, sales and service
• No- 0 points if you are still operating multiple siloed databases or worse excel spreadsheets

Do you augment your marketing database with information to enhance, authenticate, or supplement your marketing database?

• Yes- Award yourself 2 points if you enhance the quality of existing data through third party data sources or marketing database integration tools.
• No- 0 points if existing marketing database is rarely enhanced

Do you regularly scrub the database for erroneous or outdated information?

• Yes- Award yourself 4 points if you constantly monitor the quality of the data (regardless of whether it’s manual or automated)
• No- 0 points if you can’t remember the last time you acted on the quality of your marketing database.

Do you collect multi-channel information to build customer profiles?

• Yes- Award yourself 2 points if you supplement individual leads data with information from two or more marketing channels: email campaigns received, click-through history, website visits, landing page form captures, survey questions, direct mail, etc.
• Sort of- Award yourself 1 point if you supplement individual leads data with information from one marketing channel
• No- 0 points if you have yet to integrate multi-channel activity at the customer account level.

Final Score

a._____+ b._____+ c._____+ d._____+ e._____=  ______

How did you score?

• 0-5 Points: Database Slacker -  A final score between 0-5 indicates you need to spend more time focusing on your marketing database.  Your competitors and peers are utilizing marketing database techniques that will give them a competitive advantage.  Your marketing database can become outdated and erroneous rapidly; particularly with the rapid growth in digital marketing channels.  The most effective marketing creative is useless if the customer or prospect never sees it, and poor data quality in personalized campaigns can erode brand reputation.  Consider devoting organizational resources to (1) manually scrubbing the marketing database for duplicate data, erroneous data, or missing data and (2) refreshing the marketing database through a third-party marketing data provider.
• 6-12 Points: Average Joe – A final score between 6-12 indicates your marketing database is in reasonable shape, but you should consider initiatives to improve data quality.  This could include augmenting or validating the current marketing database with a third-party data purchase or assigning resources to manually scrub the database by hand.  Consider cross-checking bounced email addresses from outbound email campaigns and removing these email addresses from the database.  Likewise, make sure you are constantly offering customers an opportunity to opt-out of communications.
• 12-14 Points: Database Jockey- A final score between 12-14 points indicates your marketing database is in great shape.  The question is, what are you actually doing with this robust marketing database to improve marketing effectiveness?

What is Marketing Effectiveness?

We’ve spent the last few weeks getting to know our marketing automation partners and friends.   They all share the goal of increasing marketing effectiveness.  This got me thinking, really what IS marketing effectiveness.

Wikipedia defines marketing effectiveness as the quality of how marketers go to market with the goal of optimizing their spending to achieve good results for both the short-term and long-term.  So essentially, effective marketing must grow top line revenue while minimizing the impact on bottom line cost.

There are three fundamental ways marketers can influence marketing effectiveness:

• Marketing Strategy: How you will engage customers, prospects, and competitors in the market.  This includes the marketing mix, product development, positioning and segmentation / targeting.
• Marketing Execution: The people, process and technology that enable effective execution of marketing strategy and highly impactful creative.  Successful execution of a superior marketing strategy increases marketing effectiveness.
• Marketing Measurement: Good marketers are expected to understand marketing analytics and use marketing performance as the basis for allocating budget effectively.  As a result, marketers must measure metrics that matter; metrics that can translate to strategic actions and drive accountability.

At its core, marketing effectiveness is about increasing revenue.    Higher returns on marketing investments are a byproduct of effective marketing. However, calculating a true return on marketing investment is no easy task.  With today’s multi-channel marketing strategies, it’s difficult to accurately allocate measurable returns to marketing spend.

By scoring best practices across these three areas, organizations can rapidly measure and identify immediate opportunities to improve marketing effectiveness.  But, remember the effectiveness of marketing is tied to marketing and sales agreeing on WHAT is handed off and at what stage. If this definition and agreement are NOT in place, marketing effectiveness and overall marketing ROI can go quickly to zero.

Interested in how you measure up?

Be sure to stop back here next week for a few quick assessment quizzes to identify areas of improvement and the overall ability for your organization to maximize marketing effectiveness.

This post comes to us from one of our friends at ExactTarget, Joel Book.

Having observed how email has become the backbone of successful one-to-one marketing solutions, I have 3 guidelines that will help you use personalization for more effective B-to-B email.

1. Remember that People buy from People.

With all due respect to brand marketers, creative directors, and copywriters, it’s important to remember that nothing is more important in selling than the customer’s relationship with the person with whom she is doing business. That person may be a dealer, an agent, or a field sales representative.

When you send email, send it on behalf of the “relationship owner” and include that person’s photo and contact information so it’s easy for the customer to contact him. This type of personalization dramatically improves email marketing campaign performance.

2. Serve. Don’t Sell.

Customers don’t want to be sold. But they do want to be helped in making their buying decision. That’s why using email to deliver information and offers that aid the customer’s decision-making process is the best way to support – and accelerate – the buying process.

Once a person has been attracted to your web site, use email to engage with and move the prospect through the consideration and evaluation stages . . . all the way to purchase. Serve your subscribers well, and they will reward you with their business. In fact, Forrester Research reports that “those who buy products marketed through email spend 138% more than non-readers of email.”

3. Put the Customer in Control.

One of the smartest things you can do to maximize email marketing performance is to personalize email content to the subscriber’s needs. When a new subscriber opts in to receive email from you, invite her to go to your preference center where she can check off her needs and topics of interest relevant to the products or services you offer. Then, use the Dynamic Content feature in ExactTarget to deliver content that’s relevant and timely. This is the essence of ExactTarget’s Subscribers Rule mantra.

Our customers, prospects and B2B Lead followers often ask us about marketing automation.  Since ReachForce targeted role-based leads are fed into many of these solutions we decided to give each of them an opportunity to explain their key benefits and features in their own words. Thanks to Colby Cavanaugh at ExactTarget for this post.

What is ExactTarget?

ExactTarget gives B2B marketers the ability to harness the power of one-to-one communications to nurture leads, engage prospects and improve customer relationships. ExactTarget supports the backbone of your B2B marketing strategy with:

• The ability to automate emails, processes and programs—from lead nurturing campaigns to welcome emails—with ease.
• A single management console that triggers mission-critical messages across emerging digital communication channels, including SMS, Voice, and Email.
• Robust integration capabilities that offer an opportunity to improve customer value management and seamless integrate your business systems, no matter how many disparate data sources you may have.
• A scalable architecture to ensure your time-sensitive emails are delivered.  Whether you’re processing hundreds of transactions an hour or millions a day, our system is designed to scale as your demand dictates.
• Precision targeting tools to reinforce local relationships and dynamically turn your emails into powerful marketing messages that your customers want to receive.
• A powerfully reliable data center that takes the worry out of your data storage and availability, no matter how much data you have.

Use what you know about your prospects and customers to improve customer relationships and increase conversion.

Industry leading research shows that integrating sales and marketing technologies can help organizations deliver more relevant communications—and improve their return on marketing investment by delivering the right message to the right subscriber at the right time. ExactTarget offers a variety of tools to help you integrate your critical business systems and allow for seamless, pain-free Marketing Automation. From customer relationship management (CRM) tools (e.g. Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics CRM) to web analytics applications (e.g. Omniture, WebTrends, Coremetrics, and Google Analytics), we’ve partnered with the leaders and done the difficult integration work so you don’t have to.

Get the support and expertise you need to be successful.

ExactTarget provides our clients with the email marketing support they need to solve complex marketing challenges. Our team combines both marketing and technological expertise with a proven approach to understanding our client’s objectives to help you develop the best possible email marketing strategy.

Serve your subscribers well and be rewarded with their business.

At ExactTarget, we believe it is the duty of every Email Service Provider (ESP) to help marketers deliver permission-based email and digital one-to-one communications to their customers, prospects, and partners. To better convey what we feel is our best-in-class approach, we have developed our SUBSCRIBERS RULE! philosophy which consists of three simple tenets:

• Serve the individual
• Honor each individual’s unique preferences with regard to communication, content, frequency, and channel
• Deliver subscribers timely, relevant content that improves their lives

We not only embrace the reality that subscribers own the inbox, but we also work diligently to develop products that provide consumers control over the manner and frequency by which companies communicate with them. By helping clients pursue more strategic segmentation and personalization efforts, we help them better deliver on the true promise of one-to-one communications—the right message, to the right person, at the right time, through the right channel.

Interested in learning more?

To learn more about ExactTarget, we invite you to visit www.exacttarget.com. You can also get tips, best practices and other marketing insight from our blog and featured whitepapers.

Having trouble seeing the good in your database?  Separating the diamonds from the dirt can be tough and time intensive, but if you map out a plan ahead of time it can save you time and sanity!

• Create a CRM data standard sheet and separate the data elements into three categories:
  • Information that must be there and must be correct for all of your systems to align properly (i.e. key ID’s, emails, etc.)
  • Information that should be correct for rules within your CRM system to work – if you have set up custom validation rules surrounding addresses for instance, outline what those rules are and what format data has to be in to fit within those rules.
  • Information that people have asked for to make marketing, sales, and customer support, etc. work better.
• Determine what data needs to look like within all of the key fields idenitifed above.  (I.E. – State should always be two-letter abbreviation instead of the full name, make a designated location for name pronunciation guides (input by sales) so they don’t clutter the name field, etc.
• Next, do a quick data quality analysis on each data element in these three categories. Score the data quality by answering questions such as:
  • Does this data element have an undisputed owner? Is it updated by a team member as a natural step in a key business process? Or can nearly anyone update it at any time?
  • What percentage of the CRM records has this data element missing, clearly incorrect, or duplicate? Determine the best course of action for filling in the gaps, do you have the resources in house or do you need to find a vendor who can do this?

Based on the results of your scoring (step 3), you’ll have a better idea of who you can assign items to for fixing and where you need to focus your efforts in terms of filling in the gaps.  Assign them out to the people who can fill in the gaps and make sure to supply everyone with the same set of ‘rules’ or standards for what the end result should look like.

Once you’ve got your data cleaned up, make sure your data standards sheet is up-to-date with any changes in process you may have made during the clean up process and then circulate it.  Your teams will be much more likely to keep the data looking the way it needs to if they know what the standards are.