I’ve been talking to a lot of people these days about database hygiene. Many have asked for best practices amounting to a “get well, stay well” healthy data routine. We do have a great white paper on this subject, Is Dirty Data Sabotaging Your Marketing Results?

One step is to make sure that users of your CRM system have a handy/easy way to “flag” inaccurate contact records.

If you are a salesforce.com customer, here is a way to help in this area:
The instructions/advice below requires administrative privileges in salesforce.com.

FINDING DIRTY DATA/EXCEPTION REPORTING

1. A field must be designated for data quality/lead quality to be reported through.  For instance, here, we use our “Lead Status” field and have created custom values in the pick-list to accommodate the error reporting.  Example: Bounce Back (Email); Wrong Phone Number; Contact No Longer There, Company Closed/Acquired.

a) A pick-list type field is best for this because it standardizes the options for reporting.
b) We have found it useful to go beyond the simple “Bounce Back, Wrong Phone Number” type of justifications for a contact being wrong and include information such as Company Acquired/Closed (with a custom field allowing users to input the company it was acquired by), Company No Fit: No budget/need, Wrong Contact: Need higher level contact/lower level contact, etc.  Once you have a basic infrastructure for error reporting customizing the field to your organization’s needs is easy.

2. After the field is in place and has begun being used, create a custom report that pulls the data you wish to report on.  It is typically much easier to report on the exceptions (the wrong data) rather than the correct data.

• Go to the “Reports” tab, select “Create New Custom report”
• Choose “Leads”
• Use a tabular report format
• The columns we use are:
• Lead Owner
• First Name
• Last  Name
• Title
• Company/Account
• Lead Source
• Lead Status
• Created Date
• Created Month
• Street Address
• City
• State/Province
• Zip/Postal Code
• Country
• Phone
• Email
• Website
• RF Internal Project (*Custom field, created to denote what project each
• contact came from)
• Nothing needs to be summarized on the standard summary fields
• Any changes in the placement of columns is strictly based on personal preference

For report criteria the following is important:
a) View – choose All leads.  Date/Duration/Start & End Date – leave the standard “Create Date” and “Custom” settings but delete the date in the “Start Date” field – leaving it blank ensures all possible data is captured in the report.
b) Advanced Filters:

• Field – Lead Status (or whatever field you have elected to use to report the error data in)
• Operator – contains
• Value – Whatever error messaging you have input, for example “Bounce Back, Wrong Phone Number, Contact No Longer There.”  If you have used a pick-list to populate the field then you will be able to use the look up (looking glass icon next to “AND”) to select all relevant information.

Here at ReachForce, we run this report on a weekly basis, but companies with less sales reps or reps who make fewer calls won’t necessarily need to run the report that frequently, conversely companies with lots of reps or reps who burn up the phones will want to run an error report more often.

RE-IMPORTING NEW/CLEAN DATA

To avoid lead duplication, it is best to export the bad data with a unique identifier (like the Lead ID provided by salesforce.com) and then re-import  the data using the same identifier. By using the Lead ID, you can ensure that notes and activity history that were previously attached to the record are not lost in the process.

It is important to remember to reset the Lead Status field once the data has been cleaned up (or whatever custom field designates the data as bad) so that sales reps calling on the data know it is ready to be called on again.  Here at ReachForce we also have a “born on date” for our refreshed data.  In that field we import the date that the records were updated in salesforce.com so that the rep calling on the record always knows how current the information is.

After data has been cleaned up, it is important to continue to keep the data up to date, using the error reporting discussed above and setting a time-table for how long it takes for a lead to “expire” allows you to keep all of the data in your database fresh.  For example, if a lead is new on 9/1/2007, it is safe to assume that by 9/1/2008 it might be in need of an update.

DATA SCORING/RECORD COMPLETENESS

We have found it useful to leverage a free AppExchange program put out by salesforce Labs called “Data Quality Analysis Dashboard 1.0″ to give better visibility into the completeness of records and what deficiencies exist. This package installs a set of dashboards and reports that give scores to each type of record within your CRM and then provide high level views of how your records score.  Using this tool can give you a better idea of where your records need improvement and/or if particular types of records are better kept than others.

Last year, we at ReachForce declared January 15th the “Oh $#%@!” Day in Marketing.

Here’s why:

Are you prepared to deliver sales-ready leads in January? December is typically a slower month for B2B Marketing teams, since most organizations slow down current marketing programs and instead spend their time preparing for the next year. Then, you leave for the holidays happy to have completed the painful process of planning and budgeting for the next year’s activities. But once the holiday haze clears, it’s January and everyone is ready to kick off the New Year with new customer wins. Your sales team wants to know, “Where are my leads? I’ve got a number to hit.”

The “Oh $#%@!” moment…

If you wait until you get back from the holidays to begin developing your marketing programs, when are you going to have leads to pass to sales? End of January? Beginning of February? Can your sales team land those deals by the end of Q1?

Instead, start developing your 2009 programs now and be ready to execute your first week back. Remember to go back and look at where you’ve been before getting started. With the economy on a roller coaster, we’re all being forced to do more with less. It’s more important than ever to analyze and target your lead generation initiatives at the right buyers in YOUR target market. I promise your sales team will thank you.

If you’ve been doing B2B Marketing for any length of time you know who Brian Carroll is.  If you don’t know who he is, you should.  His eBook, Eight Critical Success Factors for Lead Generation, is a must read for “lead generation specialists committed  to the long-term proposition that digging for leads, educating prospects, navigating the nuances of the complex sale and creating new, high-level return on investment is what has brought lead generation to the position it enjoys in the marketing hierarchy today”.

I read this eBook a couple of years ago but I was due a refresher.  While all 8 factors are important to lead generation success, I pulled out a few things we could all benefit from doing or ensuring on a more regular basis.  My summary and highlights by no means replaces reading the eBook.

• Remember you are creating conversations, not campaigns – “Companies don’t buy, people do.”  With each lead generation initiative we are developing an ongoing relationship with the prospect.  We are educating and providing value with each touch.  Or at least we should be.
• Be sure you have identified an Ideal Customer Profile before getting started – we’ve talked about personas many times on The B2B Lead. Building out the ideal customer profile makes everyone’s job easier.  Why wouldn’t you do it?
• Universal Lead Definition – it’s key that both Sales and Marketing agree on this.  “There is consensus that sales functionaries fail to act on nearly 80% of the leads they get, largely because most of the leads aren’t qualified, or because appropriate buyers haven’t been identified and targeted.”
• Your database – your most valuable marketing asset.  “The properly designed and well-maintained database is the hub of all lead generation activity and communication.”
• Lead nurturing – we all know it takes multiple touches to turn a contact to a lead and a lead to a real prospect.  “Lead nurturing is not a single marketing campaign, but rather a series of steps and communication tactics with the objective of developing and building a relationship with the potential customer.”  Automation tools make this easier than ever.  No more excuses to not nurturing.

This is only a few highlights from the eBook, now go read it yourself if you haven’t already.  If nothing else, the pictures/diagrams are worth your time.

Brian Carroll, CEO of InTouch, Inc. part of the MECLABS Group that owns MarketingExperiments and MarketingSherpa and author of Lead Generation for the Complex Sale (McGraw-Hill 2006) and the B2B Lead Generation Blog with expertise related to B2B marketing, lead generation and complex sales.

Once you’re done with this one go ahead and download next week’s eBook – HubSpot’s Get Found Online.  We’ll be chatting about it next Thursday here on The B2B Lead.

Written by Ryan Ohls, a Market Development Executive at ReachForce.

Before joining ReachForce I was a sales guy with no marketing department.  Knowing how important and effective marketing strategy can be, I set out to try and do my own lead generation. I can remember investing days and days of work on this one project.  As a sales guy, I had a particular interest in automated lead generation (that’s right, sales guys are typically lazy) and had been studying it for months.  I finally grasped the concept of doing it right, I thought.

So, having never been blessed with the spiritual gifts of patience or discernment, I decided my next step was to find and buy a list of 1,200 names to send my message to.  The plan was to do an email blast with an offer to download a new report.

The report looked great – guaranteed to attract plenty of hot prospects, turn them into customers, and make me look like the Dalai Lama.  The email was perfectly crafted, engaging, and sure to catch the eye.  I told my wife to get ready for the commissions to start pouring in.

So, with palms sweating and my reputation at my company completely mortgaged (side note – companies don’t like spending money on things they don’t understand), the time had come for launch.  Three…two…one…CLICK.

Within 15 minutes my mailbox was full!  The response was unbelievable…from “System Administrator, Address Unknown.”  The list of 1200 contacts turned out to be about 60% accurate, at best.

I believe whole-heartedly that a company’s biggest asset are customers and happy ones are even better. I’ll even take that a step further, though.  A sales and marketing person’s biggest asset is a database of FUTURE customers (prospects).

** WARNING – Here comes the ReachForce promotion.  Your prospect database should be 100% accurate, up-to-date, properly targeted, and relevant to your business.  Each name you have listed should be the right person inside the right company.  You’re thinking “in a perfect world…”

If you’re not a ReachForce customer and you’re reading this, here’s a few interesting data points to consider:

• Industry listed (rented) deliver less than a 3% response rate
• Sales people can spend up to 1/3 of their time hunting down the right buyers in a prospect company
• According to Gartner, 30 million people out of the 138 million employed in the US will switch jobs in the next 12 months.
• 2.5 million businesses will move, according to the U.S. Census Bureau

If you’re interested in cleaning up the data you already have, check out this post on Dirty Data.  If you’re interested in hearing how ReachForce can help, please contact me.

Sales people out there – please jump in here, tell your marketing counterparts to help you out and make sure they are marketing to the right people in the right companies so you can spend your time selling, not hunting.

Thinking about how to make the biggest splash with your next mega-launch? Think again. Emerging companies are getting smarter about how they “launch” and opting for a slower community building process that takes place over the course of months. Turns out it is not only less expensive but it proves to be more valuable over the long term.

The process involves getting out months ahead of your product availability and building relationships with key influencers, contributing relevant valuable content to your market and attracting a loyal following with a blog or community. We did something like this at BreakingPoint, although it happened in a far more condensed time frame, and it has indeed been very valuable for reaching our hyper-niche market.

There’s been lots of controversy on the topic of launching at Tech Crunch 50 vs. DEMO lately. Robert Scoble triggered a firestorm of commentary when he posted a blog series about how “companies launching at DEMO suck”. (Why is it that blog posts that include the word “suck” always generate so much buzz?) This triggered Paul May of BuzzStream to blog about the economics of launching a startup at TechCrunch 50 or Demo. According to Paul:

“The cost and time required for the traditional, big-bang, big conference launch adds up quickly…and yeah, I know, TechCrunch 50 is free, but the entry fee is just where your costs begin.  Let’s look at an example.  My co-founder, Jeremy Bencken, was invited to present at DEMO to launch Tenant Market a couple of years ago.  In addition to the entry fee, he calculated the following costs for even a bare-bones approach:

1. Devote 80 hours to prep time.  At $100 an hour, that’s $8K.
2. Speaking coach – $5K
3. Travel – three nights for three people – $6K
4. PR rep – $10k to $20K (lots of variation depending on the quality of the PR professional and the required retainer)
5. Booth, collateral, SWAG, etc. – $3K to $5K”

Wow, that’s a hefty price tag for a startup—bootstrapped or funded. Years ago when I launched a startup at Demo, it was well worth that investment. Why? Those were the early Internet Boom days when startups had to shell out $30,000 to $50,000 per month in retainers to PR agencies. We netted 17 pieces of very high profile coverage from our Demo participation in major trade publications and even The Washington Post. It was such a success that I actually considered going this year with BreakingPoint.

Today, however, most of those publications are no longer around—at least in print. Buyers get their information in different ways and focusing your efforts on laser targeted database marketing combined with a strong push for building a community using social media are the keys to success for startups. If you have a B2C play, those events may make sense for you. But for us, I had to pass.

So, back to the topic at hand: launching your company online. There’s absolutely no reason to wait until you have a product to launch to get started. Why not start engaging with your customers now? Reach out and conduct a little market research. Build tight relationships and a nice following for your blog. Funnel your money into building a detailed, role-based database of your target market. Hire an intern to discover the top thought leaders and start building tight relationships by interacting with them in social media circles.  Start generating a slew of inbound links so that you will rank at the top of the search engines when you introduce your product or service. The possibilities are endless.

B2B marketing is all about driving sales, right?  The most effective teams know that alignment of marketing and sales is a requirement for productive lead generation and customer growth.

We’ve had sales pipeline metrics in place forever, I sometimes wonder why we as Marketers got to skate along all this time with no accountability…that’s a post for another day maybe…

With today’s sales force automation and marketing automation solutions, we as Marketers are now able to prove our worth with every campaign or program we launch.

Here’s a few metrics we here at ReachForce track to ensure we are driving valuable sales activity and customer growth.

• # of net new companies from our target market sweet spots are added to the marketing mix each week
• # of net new contacts (right role, not just anyone) from our target market sweet spots are added to the marketing mix each week
• # of contacts being touched with a marketing message each week; net new contacts vs. those in nurture programs (and of course, we track opens and click throughs)
• # of inbound requests
• # of people hitting a landing page, then jumping to corporate site for product/service info.  (we do newsletter and search engine advertising driving people to best practice content accessible via a landing page)
• # of people originating at The B2B Lead (ReachForce blog) and jumping to the ReachForce corporate site (product pages, solution pages)
• # of new sales meetings set from marketing lead generation programs
• # of marketing leads moved to the qualification stage of our sales pipeline
• # of marketing leads moving to a proposal, and of course closing

Once a new customer is onboard I then go back and identify what activities were involved in moving this lead to being a new customer so I can be sure to do more of it.

Now of course there is a list of metrics similar to this for each initiative you take on.  It’s always important to outline goals and expectations of each program so that you are sure to spend your time and resources on the best producing programs.

Do you measure anything not on this list?  If so, please share.

Dirty data—whether purchased, gathered via download offers or aged and stored in your internal database—costs companies billions every year in wasted resources and lost productivity.

Today’s mobile workforce is changing jobs faster than ever before. According to Gartner, 30 million of the 138 million workers in the US will switch jobs in the next 12 months. Now add that to the number of businesses that move or get acquired every month. It’s easy to see how they dirty data piles up and piles up fast.

Feeding dirty contact data into a marketing automation or CRM system has a multiplier effect that can derail success by:

• Delivering the wrong message to the wrong person
• Annoying customers and prospects with redundant messages
• Losing credibility due to botched attempts at personalized communications
• Failing to leverage multi-modal marketing capabilities
• Misinterpreting campaign success metrics
• Creating more Sales inefficiencies

Even with so much at stake, tackling data cleanup issues is a daunting proposition. 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. It is often too difficult to know where to begin.

Before you undertake any data cleaning, segmentation, or augmentation initiative, be sure to map out your plan. Here’s an outline to get you started.

Targeting the Right Companies–
Use what you already have access to first – your CRM data and your web site visitor logs

• CRM data
  • Profile your top performing market segments – where are you winning?
  • Identify your best target markets – what kinds of deals close the fastest?
  • Determine key qualifying company characteristics and buyer roles.
• Website visitor logs/Unknown visitor logs
  • Look for visitor patterns – ex. are there lots of healthcare companies visiting you that you haven’t directly targeted?
  • Are companies visiting already currently in your database, if so, are you recording these page visits?
  • Your online marketing and PPC advertising is driving lookers, just because they don’t announce themselves doesn’t mean they aren’t potential leads.

This analysis will help you determine where to find your target market “sweet spot”.

Once you’ve built a profile of common denominators or qualifying criteria for your target market “sweet spot,” now you’re ready to identify your decision making unit. The decision making consists of everyone involved in the buying decision of your product or service.

Start with a decision making unit profile to identify the types of buyers involved in the buying process and the roles of these buyers both in the buying cycle and their role within the organization. It is vital to understand the responsibilities for each of your buyers. With this information, you will be able to refine your data augmentation program and standardize data collection requirements for more targeted marketing programs.

Now that you have your buying unit profiled, pull a list of pre-existing contacts that correspond to your Target Accounts so you can begin the process of de-duping, identifying missing fields such as addresses or contact details, and identifying gaps such as key buyers, roles and other relevant details.

After your de-duping process, you now know what you have and what you need to fill in. When filling in the gaps, remember to look for role-based contact resources, like ReachForce. Shameless promotion I know…but remember the title-based lists we’re all used to using are still delivering a less than 3% response rate. Isn’t it worth the risk of trying something new?

A few extra data hygiene tips from our Marketing Ops Guru, Lauren, here at ReachForce –

• Mark all records that are included in your current target market, you don’t necessarily want to delete the data you aren’t using but you want to be able to pull your new target market data easily. You’ll be thankful you did this, I promise.
• Add a ‘born on’ date field to the record and once you’ve refreshed it, add the date, everyone touching the record will be happy you did this.
• As you are filling in gaps and building out contact data for new roles, consider other segmenting options. While you’re updating you should go ahead and do this too. This will enable you to laser target your message at these prospects.

I’m at the SiriusDecisions Summit this week and feeling really energized about all of the great ideas I’m planning to implement when I get back home. Of all of the great presentations today, Tony Jaros (of SiriusDecisions) presentation, ‘The Demand Ecosystem: Progress and Problems’ really stood out, so I thought I’d share. These ideas could have stood out to me because they really reinforced our beliefs at ReachForce. It was nice to hear someone else validate what we’ve been saying all along. If you’re not a ReachForce customer, feel free to call us after reading below. We can help.

• “The Power of your database is what you OWN, not what you RENT.” We at ReachForce couldn’t agree more. We believe B2B marketers are tired of the poor results rented lists deliver. Where did all of these names come from anyway? And how long ago were they collected? ReachForce contact databases are built custom for your business and are yours to keep for continued marketing.
• “Targeting is a function of probability, not possibility.” If we do our homework on the front end by identifying the right companies and the right buying roles within these companies we are increasing the response probability. By not targeting, we are only able to say there is a possibility we may get some responses. I don’t know about you but I wouldn’t bet my job on possibilities.
• If you are marketing to the CXOs, you are more than likely not targeting the right people. “Typically CXOs enter the buying process at the end of the sales process.” Everyone knows that the possibility of getting a CXO to actually respond to a marketing program or pick up the phone to talk to sales guy (they’ve never heard of) is very slim, right?

Attention Conservation Notice: This article discusses using Sales Win analysis to be able to create a profile of best customer accounts enabling you to identify matching companies that you are not currently marketing to. By narrowing the target market, lead generation programs can speak specifically to the buying audience, increasing response rates and ultimately ROI.

By laser targeting a narrow group of prospects, Marketers are able to deliver a message that resonates with their target audience and creates better leads for Sales. Spraying a large list of contacts with a generic message and praying that message will reach the right people has led to average response rates of less than 3%.

Instead of spraying and praying, consider building a database of targeted prospects based on where you are winning customers today. Identify these companies with customer wins analysis. Once you’ve identified this winning profile, start the search for other businesses that match that profile.

A good starting point is your in-house database of current customers and prospects. Find the companies that match your wining profile and start there.

Narrowing the focus allows Marketers to deliver a targeted message that has a better chance of resonating with your audience. Instead of cleansing an out-of-date, in-house database, review your sales pipeline and customer win data and to identify your top market segments and determine key qualifying characteristics. Look at the size of the open and closed deals, as well as the velocity of those deals as they move through the pipeline to answer the following questions:

• In which market segments am I closing the most deals?
• In which market segments are deals closing the fastest?
• What are the common characteristics of companies in those market segments?
• What other market segments share those common characteristics?

Relevancy is key here. The more relevant the data used to feed Marketing Programs or Automation systems (like Eloqua, Marketo, Loopfuse, Vtrenz, Aprimo, Market2Lead, Manticore, etc.) the better and more powerful the results will be.

With Sales wins analysis, you can also build a profile of your best customer accounts to develop qualifying criteria. Do you close more deals with Fortune 1000-size enterprises or are you moving more deals with Small and Medium-size businesses? Is the number of employees of an organization a critical success factor or is a global, distributed environment more important? Are there key trends you can identify in certain industries that are driving the need for your product?

Now that you’ve documented your top markets and qualifying criteria, you can use this information to discover other target accounts. While these companies have not yet purchased from you, they share many of the same characteristics of your best customers, and therefore will likely have a higher propensity to purchase your products or services.

Next, complete an enterprise buying profile to identify the roles of buyers involved in the buying process. Just as you identified the profile for targeting new companies, you need to have an understanding of the role and responsibilities of the buyer within those companies. You’ll want to understand their role both in the buying cycle and within the organization. It is vital to be aware of the responsibilities for each of your buyers and which organizational role typically corresponds with the role in the buying cycle. With this information, you will be able to refine your augmentation program and standardize data collection requirements for more targeted Marketing Programs.

Creating your wins analysis can be done with a low-tech approach using a business analyst and a spreadsheet, but you may find that business analytics tools such as ReachForce Insight can save time and money and provide insight into pipeline changes in real-time. Once you see the results of wins analysis in action, you’ll want to monitor your pipeline closely to uncover new opportunities so it’s best to automate if possible.

Sales wins analysis is providing a new breed of B2B marketers with a more effective way to continue to build databases of accurate, consistent, and comprehensive role-based data used for multi-modal, segmented Marketing campaigns. By using sales wins analysis to understand best target markets and profiling their common characteristics, similar prospects can be identified in the same market segment, as well as additional market segments in which there are a higher propensity to sell more, faster.

I just read a great post by Robert Rosenthal on his Freaking Marketing blog titled It’s the Data, Stupid. In his post, Robert says:

But there’s really just one variable that consistently makes or breaks direct marketing campaigns, and that’s data.

When I was a kid in this business, a mentor shared this maxim: send a so-so presentation to a great list and you may turn a profit, but send a great presentation to a shit list and you’re automatically dead.

Someone else gets it! I have been saying this for years. I don’t know how many millions of dollars I have seen (and also have myself) wasted on brilliant marketing campaigns that saw abysmal results because no one spent any time on the data. As we have gotten more sophisticated with the delivery of our marketing messages from direct mail to email and now through integrated marketing campaigns, the data has never been more important.

If marketers are out there wondering why their expensive marketing automation tool has not delivered increased response rates, it is because they are still pouring in garbage data. Garbage in, garbage out. Targeting is key – more customers in segments where you are winning is as key as the person you are trying to reach. 100% accurate contact data for the RIGHT person is money! If these automation tools are your marketing engine (ones like Marketo, Vtrenz, Eloqua, LoopFuse, Vertical Response, Exact Target, Constant Contact, Aprimo, etc. to name a few) then you need to fuel it with high-octane data, not sludge.

We started ReachForce to solve this very problem. I hope more marketers will realize that with quality contacts at the top of the funnel, truly targeted lead generation is possible, ultimately resulting in increased revenue. I applaud salesforce.com for driving the SFA (sales force automation) aspect of it as it has created a greater awareness on measurement – now it’s time for us B2B marketers to do the same, starting with the data.