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Dirty Data — Think Relevance Before Repair – B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #186

Suaad Sait — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 15:17:39 +0000

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.

What businesses you need to target? Industries? Vertical markets?
Who in those businesses are involved in the buying decision for your product or services?
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

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The 6 Principles of Deliberate Marketing: Role vs. Title – B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #184

Suaad Sait — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 15:00:37 +0000

This is the third post in a series on Deliberate Marketing. Be sure to check out the first post on Intention vs. Attention and the second post on Qualified Buyers vs. Leads.

Deliberate Marketing programs do not rely simply on prospect titles for targeting potential buyers.

For example, a B2B Marketer purchases a list or accesses a contact database and pulls a list of 1,000 Communications Analysts. How can that marketer be certain that the contacts who match those titles are involved with Network Communications instead of Corporate Communications?

Titles are simply a label of rank, not an indication of the actual role the prospect plays in the organization or in the buying decision. Instead, Deliberate Marketing programs are focused on “roles,” defined by Webster’s as: a function or part performed. They target communications based on organizational role and level in the DMU as well as stage of the buying cycle.

The average B2B marketing response rate is less than 3%, and it’s getting lower every year. It’s easy to see why title-based lists perform so poorly.

Consider a Fortune 500 company with 90,000 employees.
All told, this company has 500 IT staff.
Of those 500, 150 have a title of Manager, Director, and higher.
Only a handful of those 150 is in the right role to buy your product.

But what’s a marketer to do? Using current list technology, you can only get as specific as target title. So you have to market to all 150 people with ‘hot titles’, jamming the inboxes of the majority with an unwanted, off-topic solicitation. It’s simply not a cost-effective model.

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Direct Mail on a Comeback? – B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #92

Amy Hawthorne — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 21:10:58 +0000

As a long time B2B Marketer I know I typically have to “touch” a lead 5 to 6 times before they become a prospect in my sales funnel. With that in mind, I am using multiple tactics to get suspects to raise their hand. I have a feeling direct mail is on the comeback so we are about to give it a try again. Yes, it’s still expensive and postage rates are still going up but with email boxes being filled up with spam, suspects may be more likely to act if we can figure out how to stand out in the crowd.

As Marketers, when we start to build out a campaign we spend time on the WHAT we are going to deliver, the HOW we are going to deliver our message and the WHEN the program is going to go out but when it comes to the WHO, we haven’t had many options. Our choices were either an in-house database (how old and accurate is this data really?) or to rent data from a title-based list broker. And do we know who these people are or how these names were really acquired?

So as we get ready to build out a direct mail program I’m reminded of a tragic story one of our customers told us. They had a total budget of $100,000 for a direct mail campaign. This was going to be the program of the quarter and they were very anxious to get it out the door so the responders would start rolling in. Of their total budget, they spent $5,000 on the WHO they were trying to reach. The rest of the money went to creating an elaborate piece with “exactly the right messaging”, an attractive call to action and web components for tracking. They felt good about the program and believed the number of responses would justify the cost. They dropped the piece, then waited and waited and waited. Not only did they not get the overwhelming number of responses, they only got one. Now that’s one expensive lead if you ask me.

Obviously when creating a direct mail campaign we need to create a compelling piece with a strong call to action. But the WHO is where a lot of B2B Marketers go wrong. The most successful campaigns, direct mail or otherwise, are those that are targeted at the right people in the right companies. So how do you decide what the right WHO looks like? Here’s what I’m doing –

To find the right businesses, I go straight to my sales pipeline and recent customer wins. I’m looking for where we are winning and what kinds of companies are moving through the funnel the fastest. Then I build out an initial database of other companies that match this profile. Now that I’ve identified the right companies to go after, I’m just left with finding the right contacts for my message. Lucky me, we’re in the business of building custom role based contact databases for lead generation initiatives. So I use our own role-based contact discovery service to find the right decision makers within those target companies. By paying a little more attention to WHO I’m targeting, I feel confident my upcoming direct mail campaign is going to deliver.

Just in case you’re wondering, the person who was responsible for the $100K campaign lost their job. And the person that took their place now uses ReachForce to help keep their job.

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The L-word in B2B Marketing – B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #71

Suaad Sait — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 20:56:09 +0000

As some of you may have noticed, we at ReachForce were founded on the principals that B2B direct marketing was failing due to the poor quality of lists – it was and is egregious that we get less than 1% response rate from e-mail campaigns and that the list industry had not changed in 100 years and I quote are like “dinosaurs in a marketing 2.0 world”. Then, this week I see a picture of a dinosaur on the cover of the BtoB magazine and it alludes to the “L-word”.

The article titled “The List World – List managers unable to adapt and create new products and services that dig deeper into data are in danger of extinction” is a very interesting piece. Carol Krol, great job on this article, you absolutely GET IT!

Here are some of the points covered in the article:

The “List industry” is undergoing dramatic change and consolidation is underway – the OLD way of list marketing is dying
Database marketing is emerging (my view is that isn’t that what we all learned anyway?)
Data now constitutes 2 dimensions: Analytics and the leads databases (not lists)
Custom database development is what people want with more precision
E-mail marketing emerging as the # 1 way to target 1:1 messages to the right people
Nurturing contacts using e-mail marketing is also a driver to this trend
Database analytics and segmentation is becoming a natural extension in marketing departments

As I say every day, fellow B2B Marketers, let’s get together on a crusade to put an end to the 90+% waste in marketing spend – stopping the bleeding on lists is a good start, let’s think about targeted databases built on analytics and focused messages to the right person at the right target company.

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B2B Marketing and Sales Tip #46 – The Survey Says…B2B Marketers Should Clean Up Their Customer Database

Pam O'Neal Mickelson — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 16:44:01 +0000

Apparently dirty data and 2% response rates are global problems. New survey results from UK-based marketing communications agency Godfrey show business-to-business Marketers have ‘plenty of room for improvement’ when it comes to using customer and prospect databases for direct marketing purposes. The research offers new evidence that direct marketing campaigns could be more effective if B2B Marketers would clean up their data and use a systematic direct marketing program based on database marketing fundamentals.

Lynne DeMers, strategic direct marketing team leader at Godfrey, is quoted as saying: ” Direct marketing is not about sending 20,000 mailers to a rented list and hoping for a two per cent return.” Wow, where have we heard that before? Maybe in our Funnelnomics B2B Marketing ebook?

She also makes a great point about effective direct marketing: “It is about creating a programme and a system of messages, offers, information capture, measurement and refinement.”

The survey also found that:

Only 60 per cent of Marketers use their customer database for targeted direct marketing, and only 40 per cent regularly update customers with new offers.
While mass direct marketing techniques typically yield response rates ranging from 0.5 to two per cent, targeted direct marketing technologies are considerably more effective, according to Godfrey.
B2B marketers can realize 40 per cent open rates, 10 to 20 per cent click rates and opt-out rates of less than one per cent with segmented email marketing and e-newsletter campaigns.

Sounds like it’s time for drastic change and there are many good lessons in how to make those changes in the complimentary Funnelnomics B2B Marketing ebook offered on this site.

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Marketing WTF? – Know Thy Customer

Pam O'Neal Mickelson — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 17:07:16 +0000

A reader of The B2B Lead Blog reports a B2B Marketer, who will go unnamed, recently confessed to a rather embarrassing and costly blunder that was a clear result of breaking the first commandment of Sales and Marketing – Know Thy Customer. Apparently, the newbie Marketer sent a very expensive Selling to VITO direct mailer to a UPS executive in a Fed Ex envelope. Doh!

Have any other embarrassing or costly mistakes to share with readers of The B2B Lead Blog? Submit a Post!

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Welcome To ReachForce Blog

admin — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 13:43:21 +0000

ReachForce is the worldwide provider of OnDemand Data Solutions for CRM – Driving Marketing initiatives and Sales effectiveness. ReachForce Solutions are designed to quickly highlight target market ‘sweet spots’ based on customer wins and sales funnel analysis as well as identify the right decision making unit based on their role in the organization, not just their title. By enabling marketing and sales teams to focus their demand generation efforts on the right role-based decision makers in the right target companies for their products or services, ReachForce data is increasing demand generation effectiveness and accelerating sales cycles. ReachForce customers have increased results by 20 to 30 times for every dollar spent on marketing and sales initiatives – maximizing the value of CRM investments.

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