We practice what we preach and recommend you practice it too!  You need to build a profile of common denominators or qualifying criteria for companies in your target market “sweet spot.” The next step is to identify your decision making unit (DMU). The DMU consists of everyone involved in the buying decision of your product or service.

Start by building a profile that clearly identifies the different buyers you want to target in the DMU. Don’t be satisfied with just their titles. As we know, sometimes titles can be misleading. In fact, traditional title-based lists deliver a response rate that’s usually less than 3%. Determine the actual role that your contacts play in the buying cycle and in the organization. Backed by this functional, role-based information, you’ll be able to refine your data augmentation program and standardize data collection requirements for more targeted marketing programs.

Next, pull a list of pre-existing contacts that correspond to your target accounts. With this list in hand, 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 this process, you begin to get a better feel for what you have and what you need.

You should also make sure that you’re marketing to the entire DMU. As we know, B2B purchases are typically made by a group of people, each one with different concerns and requirements. DMU members can include end users, business managers, finance specialist, technology specialists, senior management, key influencers, procurement specialists, and so forth.

The number of people in a DMU can vary greatly according to the size of the company. Marketing Sherpa reports the following statistics for purchases of $25,000 or more:

• Companies with 100 to 500 employees ― 6.8 people in the DMU
• Companies with 501 to 1000 employees, 13.5 people in the DMU
• Companies with over 1000 employees ― 21 people in DMU

By connecting with the entire DMU before the prospect moves into the sales funnel, you can accelerate the sales cycle and increase your chances of conversions.

To accurately target the right companies in your in-house database, first use what you already have ― your CRM data and your website visitor logs

With your 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.

With your website visitor logs –

• Look for visitor patterns. For example, do you see any companies from your key markets or vertical industries that you haven’t already targeted?
• Are companies visiting that are already currently in your database? If so, are you recording these page visits?
• Your online marketing and PPC advertising is driving lookers, so track these visitors as well. 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.” You should also follow these other steps as you find the right targets.

• 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 need the ability to pull your target market data easily.  It may be as simple as a field for industry or industry segment or as complex as a series of tags that indicate parcels within your target market.

• As you fill in gaps and build out contact data for new roles, consider other segmenting options.  Maybe segmenting based on employee size isn’t the way to go, can you use annual revenue as an indicator of opportunity size or maybe geography if you are targeting for a site specific event. Do this while you’re updating as well. This will help you better target your message at these prospects.

Dirty data costs companies billions every year in wasted resources and lost productivity. This is true whether the data is purchased, gathered via download offers or stored in a company’s internal database.

This problem is driven by several factors. 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.

To make matters even worse, feeding dirty contact data into a marketing automation or CRM system has a multiplier effect. This can quickly derail success by:

• Delivering multiple wrong messages to the wrong person or persons.
• 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 sales inefficiencies.

So how can a company address this problem? It’s not easy. Most marketers are overwhelmed by hundreds of thousands of duplicate entries, old data, inaccurate contact details and countless records in different states of completion. This existing data has likely been gathered by many different individuals over multiple years.

The best way to start cleaning data is by targeting the right companies, along with the decision makers who actually determine the buying process.  Develop a profile of what your ideal customer would look like, working from there you should be able to weed out less-than ideal candidates or at least give some kind of prioritization to companies in your database.

Aberdeen recently released a great report on leveraging customer data to better serve your marketing efforts. Here are some of the take-away points we thought were worth sharing:

If your database is in the slow lane:

• Start by using data for activities that will have a positive impact on revenue. Demonstrate the value of your data to justify investment in its ongoing health.
• Develop timelines and processes for cleaning your data. The importance of good data hygiene can’t be understated. If you clean it once and walk away it will get dirty again. Only constant attention will yield golden results.
• Invest in tools to help analyze customer data. Data analysis and marketing automation technologies will help you improve the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.

If your database is already on the right path but needs a boost to hit the fast lane:

• Implement a formal data hygiene strategy. Create repeatable processes for de-duping, cleaning, and appending data as well as documenting best practices for users of your data.
• Engage multiple departments for data analysis. Encourage collaboration between your sales, marketing, customer service, IT, and finance organizations.

• Democratize all customer data. Centralize your database to measure and optimize the performance of your multichannel campaigns.

Circuit City, Bank One, Enron, Lehman Brothers…these are folks you might be shocked to find still sitting in your sales and marketing databases.  What’s the common theme among all of these companies? They aren’t doing business anymore. Some of them have made very splashy exits from the scene (ehhem Enron??) and some have quietly been forgotten as acquisitions from a few years back (Bank One). Search around and you may just find them in your target lists.

As a rule, no salesperson or marketing team wants to waste time trying to talk to companies that are out of business.  It only makes good sense to weed those companies (and affected contacts) out. But how do you know who they are? Aggregating data from all the M& A activity, bankruptcies and shut-downs these days can be time-consuming. In face, it can become a full-time job.  Why not seek out some proactive solutions to keep these types of situations out of your database? Besides some shameless self-promotion here (yes, ReachForce has a solution for this), one of our best suggestions is to empower your teams to mark this kind of information in your database. That way you can weed them out as they come up. For a salesforce.com-specific tip on how to set up this weed-out process, check out a few of our past posts, Updating Lead Status in SFDC for Better Marketing Data and Cleaning Up Your  Marketing Database

Coming back from a trade show, everyone is on a high.  Your team tells you, “it was the best show EVER” and the sales team is ready to get all of those hot leads.  As much as they may want you to, the last thing you should do is just hand over the scans list to sales and tell them to have at it.  Setting up follow-up is key.

We do one big trade show a year, Dreamforce (salesforce.com’s user group conference).  We limit collateral at the show (partly because most of it ends up being thrown away and partly to do our best to be a bit greener) and promise to follow-up with more info in an email.

Most everyone that scanned me sent a follow-up email within days of the show.  Unfortunately almost all of them used the exact same subject line.  Yes, I said exact same subject line – Dreamforce follow-up.  At a show like Dreamforce with hundreds of exhibitors, that just really is not going to cut it to stand out in the crowd.  When I looked back at our follow-up email from last year I was a little disappointed that we had used that same worn out subject line.  I decided I wanted to try something new.

The subject line I ended up using this year is a little on the long side but much more descriptive.  The subject line was: Dreamforce follow-up on data cleansing and contact discovery.  Notice I chose to exclude our company name.  I did this for two reasons, it was already in the from line and it is doubtful anyone remembers who we are or what we do.

But much more interesting were the results I saw.  I grew our open rate from 16% to 36% as compared to the same follow-up email from the year before.  See if you can increase your open rates by adding more relevancy in the subject line for trade show follow up emails.

I will be the first to admit that I have been very skeptical about “setting my content free” (not using forms in front of eBooks and whitepapers.)  I feel like if my job is lead generation then I have to capture those downloading.  But after much deliberation and hearing it again and again from David Meerman Scott (I have seen him speak 4 times and I read his books, eBooks and blog), I decided to give it a shot.  I had a new eBook I wanted to promote to my in-house database.  I created a couple of different emails targeted at the segments that the eBook was relevant to.  In the emails, I had a link asking the reader to download the eBook.  Next to the link I was sure to call out that no registration was required.

I will admit that this was not true A/B testing but the results were still outstanding.  Compared to an email promoting an eBook with similar content to the same segments of the database, I saw a 1600% increase in the number of clickthroughs.

Because we can track clickthroughs in our marketing automation system, Eloqua,  the sales team did not lose any information about who was downloading the eBook.  Now, they just had more people to follow-up with.

If you are still scared to set all of your content free, try it with just a couple of eBooks or whitepapers and be sure to track the results.

Every once in a while I come across a marketing campaign that makes me say, “Why didn’t I think of that?”  Yesterday, I got a fantastic holiday email from Marketo that I just had to share.  Maybe I am just a sucker for a rhyming poem but I love this.  It is also great that they do more than just wish you a happy holiday but give you some great tips and push you back to their blog.  Love it!

Here is a preview of the great email but be sure to check out the full email for your chance to win a new iPod!

In a recent post on Al Iverson’s Spam Resource Blog Al answered a question that I think is extremely interesting (more so is the answer) so I wanted to push some of his post back for The B2B Lead Readers.

“What, exactly, are spam [content] filters picking up from a generic template that could reduce delivery? Thanks in advance for your reply.”

The thing that these filters catch is commonality. If your content has different variables in common with other messages tagged as bad (for whatever reason), then your messages get tagged as bad, too. What does commonality mean? It can mean a whole bunch of things, and nobody publishes a list of the exact variables that are checked. It probably is all of the following things, and more:

• Your from domain.
• What domains you link to.
• The domain where images are hosted.
• What images you use.
• What HTML template you use.
• What unsubscribe footer you use

Take home message – spam evolves and thus do spam filters, they do not look for some stagnant list of triggers that you can avoid.  Take a look at the things being caught in your own spam filters, it might be a good reference point on things to avoid in terms of keeping your emails out of the junk mail folder.

Somehow amongst my responsibilities at ReachForce I’ve gotten involved in helping figure out email deliverability issues for some of our customers.  As a result, I have spent a good chunk of my time lately researching, reading and generally informing myself on some of the less than obvious things that can cause email deliverability issues.   I thought I might compile some of the info I’ve found lately, mostly my information is more technically focused than content focused, but if you want to check out some great posts on how your content might be affecting your deliverability, take a look at these posts.

The root of the problem, email marketing messages get blocked because they are bulk messages, therefore they look like spam.  In Return Path’s Deliverability Benchmark Report it was found that 28% of B2B marketing email never reaches the inbox!   Are you in that 28%?  Unfortunately for marketers, there are tons of filters that get set up between you hitting the send button and things hitting the recipients inbox. The way to avoid being blocked is to improve the reputation of your domain as well as the engagement of your subscribers.

Some food for thought when considering how deliverable your emails are:

1. Track your sender reputation. Use a service like Return Path. You can get an overview of your sender reputation free at senderscore.org or dnsstuff.com.
2. Know what domain your emails come from if you use an email marketing solution (or automation tool), your reputation is linked directly to that domain.  The good news about that is that email and marketing automation vendors wake up a night thinking about things like this so they should be keeping a close eye on the reputation of the sending domain.
3. Map your domain footprint, what email domains are you regularly sending to? Look at the results and see which domains are most important to you.  Cross reference the list of domains you regularly send to with the list of folks you believe you cannot reach and those that routinely have trouble receiving your emails. Then reach out to each of those companies and find out what sort of filtering is happening and try to become white listed. This is a manual but very effective strategy.
4. Watch rendering. Know how your message renders, with and without images, in the various versions of Outlook and on mobile devices.  Be sure to create versions specific to the email clients that are most important to you. A publisher may want to optimize for the lower capabilities of mobile, while a technology company might want to optimize for Outlook.
5. Keep it simple – break your message up into shorter messages and guide subscribers back to a website or landing page for further information.
6. Avoid all image-HTML messages, lots of links and lots of images.  These things typically trigger red-flags with email filters.
7. Are you blacklisted?  You can use any number of different services to find this out (just pop ‘Am I blacklisted’ into Google and you’ll see a number of resources for that).