This is the third post in a series discussing the RPM (Remediate ― Provision ― Maintain) Contact Data Management strategy. Last week we covered the first track, “Remediate,” or the proactive process of fixing problems within contact data that, among other things would at best hinder, at worst prevent effective market segmentation and different types of post remediation analysis.

The next track up for discussion is Provisioning. This hinges on post remediation analysis of firmographic and contact data to create what we call a “Smart Contact Data Provisioning Plan.” A simple way to describe this is to think of provision planning as being analogous to your weekly trip to the grocery store. One of the best pieces of advice my Mom gave me as I left the nest:  “Never go grocery shopping when you’re hungry … make a list first.”  As time passed the benefits became clear. Checking my pantry and refrigerator to know what I did and didn’t have, and making a “fill the gap” list saved me money and time. It also ensured that at meal preparation time throughout the week I had exactly what I needed.

Post remediation analysis is the same thing. It’s an automated way of looking at your in-house data to check what you do and don’t need before you start planning your funnel-filling programs and calling list vendors to buy contact data for fuel. The different types of analysis needed to form a Smart Contact Provisioning Plan are:

Title Density Analysis – First step toward human-level segmentation. It is based on grouping contact records that have similarities in title. An effective way to structure this is to break the data by 1) IT versus non-IT records 2) departmentalization of non IT records and 3) high-medium-low ranking based on seniority of title. The results provide three useful views:

-   To see if you have enough records in the right areas of existing target organizations, i.e. high-medium-low ranking titles, and by silo in IT and non-IT departments ― and provision accordingly

-     To cross-tabulate contact groups with wins-analysis to see if certain contact data  “sweet-spot” sets should be provisioned in similar target companies (existing & net-new) in order to replicate success  

-   To see and quarantine records for contacts working in areas and/or have titles which aren’t relevant to your sales and marketing mission. This helps ensure outbound efforts are not wasted in trying to engage with the wrong people          

 Title Clustering Analysis – Very useful in maximizing the yield of targeted data pulls when provisioning or sorting lists based on business function. This is the inclusion and sorting of custom fields to define areas of responsibility. For example, if you wanted to aim a message or program at a “Sr. Sales Leadership” audience, Title Clustering maps all associated Title Groups to the desired persona. This broadens search matches for obvious keyword hits such as “VP Sales,” as well as less direct hits where more ambiguous titles (in relation to the function) such as “VP Business Development” are less likely to surface using typical search techniques.               

 Contact Gap by Persona Analysis – Every sales and marketing organization needs to have an acute understanding and categorization of the various Personas within an organization’s Decision Making Unit (DMU). The science of Persona development captures and communicates relevant insights about such things as the target buyers’ roles, responsibilities, priorities and problems. Each contact record you are working through the deal making process needs to be tagged with this important information for human-level segmentation purposes. At ReachForce we use an automated Role-Title correlation application to assist customers who want –but don’t already have– Persona tags in their existing records. Once these tags are appended, your database can then be automatically examined for “gaps” to show which DMU Persona types are and aren’t present on an account-by-account basis. This information is then used to create a provisioning plan to fill the gaps.        

 Contact Darning Analysis – Guides the Smart Contact Provisioning Plan in terms of pinpointing which contact records are needed (by Persona) as replacements for older records that have proven to be inaccurate or outdated during the remediation process (counter-attritional).

Our last post previewed the RPM (Remediate ― Provision ― Maintain) Contact Data Management strategy as a way to maximize your investment in Sales & Marketing Automation systems. It follows a very logical, yet sometimes difficult to execute progression … 1) clean the data to add and/or replace missing or incorrect information 2) analyze it to pinpoint gap fill and net new persona acquisition provisioning requirements and 3) maintain and continually compile objects that generate the most business benefit to the end users.

The first of the three RPM tracks is Remediate, which simply means fixing a problem. A good place to start is fixing your data so you are able to configure targeted deal making activities with precision. The best business case for data remediation is for market segmentation purposes. With or without automated B2B sales and marketing applications, I have rarely been in a situation where “one message does it all” in terms of relevancy. Whether configuring lead generation campaigns or selling directly, the thoughts and values you are communicating in your messages have to directly relate to your target. That means the type of business they are in, the characteristics of their organization, and the job they do. Opportunities increase when unique target groups with varying needs, wants, and what we call “segment vernaculars” are recognized.

This concept (taken from the Wind & Cardozo Model) is known as Two-Stage Market Segmentation.  It is based on “broad two-step classifications of macro-segmentation and micro-segmentation.” That sounds complicated, but it’s really not. In fact, it’s one of the most commonly used methods in B2B marketing and is often extended into more complex models that include multi-step, and three and four-dimensional models which many Marketing Automation systems support. To make segmented campaigns happen, the data in your system(s) needs to have the following (at the very least) segmentation data points to sort, slice and dice by:

• Segmented Messaging by industry – If you market to more than one industry segment, your outbound communications need to take into account unique industry-by-industry needs, wants and vernaculars, which is a good approach for application-based selling. You need SIC and/or NAICS codes in your company and account records for this type of segmentation. However, the former is based on very basic and standard industry classifications and shouldn’t be relied on exclusively. For instance, many industries that have a lot of technologies, or have new, innovative products are classified as ‘other.’

• Segmented Messaging by company size – Messaging that pinpoints needs and wants relative to the size of a company can be a big deal when it comes to being relevant to whoever is on the receiving end. You need to append employee headcount and reported revenue (when available) for this type of segmentation. It’s best to have both since many companies don’t report earnings. This is one of the most practical and easily identifiable criteria. It can be good indicator of the potential business for a company. However, it needs to be combined with other factors to provide a reliable picture.

• Segmented Messaging by geographic region –A company’s location is just as important as its size because it’s very important to relate to its culture, language, general business attitudes, and communication requirements. For example a company would adopt a different selling strategy with a prospect if it’s based in EMEA instead of the U.S. Geographic segmentation is another important element, especially for multi-national and global B2B businesses and brands. Many marketers have regional and national programs which alter their messaging strategies to meet the individual needs, wants and (obviously) languages of geographic areas.  You need to append complete postal address information for this type of segmentation.

• Segmented Messaging by role or function – Too many marketers fail to take good segmentation practices to the human level and rely solely on a person’s title to decide whom to target and with what message. It’s best to go through a process of determining what personas make up the ideal decision-making unit (DMU) for the product or service you’re selling, and craft a messaging approach that highlights your value in a very personal way. This borrows from the concept of Micro-segmentation and focuses on factors that matter most to people in the course of daily business. At ReachForce we use proprietary software and data processing tools to conduct title density and clustering analysis in combination with role title correlation tagging to append role-function information for our customers who want to add this important segmentation capability.

Wikipedia defines “RPM” as Revolutions Per Minute (abbreviated rpm, RPM, r/min, or r•min−1), a unit of frequency of rotation: the number of full rotations completed in one minute around a fixed axis. It is used as a measure of rotational speed of a mechanical component.

I’d like to borrow from this a bit for the sake of discussing strategy for Contact Data Management for Sales and Marketing Automation applications. Since the bottom line objective should be accelerating the B2B sales cycle, all things that optimize how fast and efficiently prospect contact information & sales intelligence data rotates into and around your deal making processes are important. Hence, our product development group is starting to see and define the acronym “RPM” in a new, data-centric way ― Remediate ― Provision ― Maintain.

It’s relates to sales funnel velocity ― how fast deals make it through from qualification to close ― but it is specifically about drilling down to those little noticed things that go on within the data and systems themselves to facilitate fast, efficient and predictable deal making.

Over the next few posts we’ll take a detailed “check the boxes” look at the three components of an “RPM” Contact Data Management strategy.

Here’s a quick preview:

1. Remediate – If you are serious about leveraging all of the benefits that sales and marketing automation systems offer, think of these systems as your “engine.” Then, think of the data you are feeding into your engine as the “fuel.” Clean, high octane fuel means data that has complete, valid account/company level firmographic segmentation data for list sorting and targeted messaging purposes (If you target by industry, size of company, geographic location etc). Also, business card information contained in your database degrades at a rate of 3-6% per month. The RPM Contact Data Management strategy puts the power of automation to use in stabilizing and transforming your existing data assets into actionable, campaign ready lead generation assets.

2. Provision – Not accidentally, the best thing about a great contact data Remediation process [above] is it helps you understand things about the data you’ll need to plan the purchase for additional contact data wisely. I compare this to going grocery shopping, because before you start buying you should look at your provisions carefully to identify what data you do and don’t need. A good contact data provisioning plan helps you understand which contacts you need to buy to fill in gaps left by “Remediation Fallout” ― that is, replacing or updating outdated contact information you had in your database. You’ll also be smarter about what contacts you need to buy to expand your audience from a net-new perspective. Some RPM techniques used here are 1) title density and gap analysis to pinpoint missing personas within your existing target organizations and/or 2) identifying new organizations and persona-groups that you don’t already have on your radar with sales funnel wins analysis and “looks like” list profiling.

3. Maintain – Sales and marketing automation systems need a built in “fuel filter” and synchronizer in place to make sure that the investments you’ve made in them are not diluted by the effects of dirty data. Data is perishable and once introduced into your lead generation engine it starts aging and dying. Good data maintenance is a process of automatically monitoring and stress testing records by comparing them to trusted, up to date sources. This sort of data rationalization is the use of meta data to determine the best assortment of objects that generate the most business benefit to the end users and not only keeps data in a high state of campaign readiness, it also creates an opportunity to enrich standard business card records with valuable details that can transform a run of the mill lead or contact record into a much more powerful sales intelligence compile.

If you have any thoughts as we go through this, please chime in!

To get more from your in-house data for lead generation, you need to keep it clean ― but that’s like hitting a moving target. With companies merging or going out of business and a workforce that is constantly changing, marketing databases get dirtier at an alarming rate.

In fact, 2.1% of data goes bad every month, according to MarketingSherpa. This means  over 25% of contact data goes bad per year.

The only problem is knowing which 25%.

The good news is that marketers can dramatically improve their campaign results by using the right strategies to consistently update, clean and refresh their lead-generation database. According to SiriusDecisions, “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.”

Lately, we’ve been talking about the best ways to start with data cleanup, what to consider when marketing to your in-house database, important signs that your database might need help, and more.

Armed with this information, you should be in a better position to optimize your in-house database, reduce wasted efforts, improve conversions and get more revenue from your marketing dollar.

Do you have some great tips for starting the clean up process?

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.

Like it or not, data fuels the engine of your business. Your sales teams need it to prospect, cross-sell and upsell. And your marketing teams need it to create viable campaigns so your sales team has a message to sell. With that in mind, what exactly are you doing with that ever growing pile of information?  Do you have someone to keep it fresh, or does it sit untouched, unmaintained and just plain unloved?

No matter what, you need a plan for organizing the monolith that is your database. SiriusDecisions estimates that in a typical B2B company error rates are as high as 25%. That means that if you have a team of sales reps working with that data, 25% of their efforts are wasted.  At the same time, it means that 25% of your marketing departments’ messages cannot get through and likely are falling on deaf ears.  That’s pretty wasteful.  In an economic climate like ours you have to be lean and mean. Wasting 25% of your sales efforts and marketing messages just isn’t in-line.

Ok, so the baby (your database) is ugly, but how do you fix it? Set up error reporting so that you empower your users to point out the problems (see Cleaning Up Your  Marketing Database). Then assign some ownership, giving someone the responsibility to oversee, fix and police your database to ensure positive change.  You have to have a continual focus on data quality, because constant improvement will lead to gains across the board.  If you need proof, SiriusDecisions estimates that B2B companies that address the root cause of data errors can realize a 25% increase in converting inquiries to marketing-qualified leads.

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.

Engagement Systems is one of the newer players in the marketing automation space. We let them “speak for themselves” earlier this week, but I wanted to dive further to check out some of their content.  So far they only have a few whitepapers and case studies, but I have to say I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of their content.  Their whitepaper, Influence the Buying Process with Automated Marketing, is a quick read packed with great tips.  The whitepaper promises 10 tactics for improving revenue and ROI now.  After the explantion of each tactic they offer a take-away (great idea for your next whitepaper or eBook).  Here are the take-aways from the whitepaper:

1. Don’t let prospects fall through the cracks. Protect your marketing investment and maximize resources through better lead qualification and lead nurturing.
2. Unify sales and marketing in the pursuit of common goals.
3. Continue generating leads, but put greater emphasis on nurturing activities as well as retention and winback strategies to maximize customer lifetime revenue.
4. Make sure that you have all the materials in place to be the resource for information to support your buyer.
5. Map out the buying process and help prospects and customers navigate their way to a buying decision.
6. Automate the sales and marketing process by setting event and behavior triggers that utilize intelligent marketing automation to autoexecute marketing touches.
7. Deploy one-to-one communications for more meaningful dialogue with prospects and customers to shorten the buying process.
8. Commit to an ongoing learning process; employ a valuable exchange of information to align your product and service offerings with the changing needs and interests of each individual buyer.
9. Deploy multiple means of outreach to ensure that your message is received, and to move the customer towards a purchase position relative to their individual needs and interests.
10. Establish ongoing contact with customers to preserve satisfaction, increase up-selling and cross-selling, and decrease customer defections.

Be sure to read the entire whitepaper for the full story.  It is definitely worth the read.

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 Rob Hampton at Engagement Systems for this post.

What is Engagement Systems?

Engagement Systems helps companies leverage their CRM investment and maximize sales and marketing resources to grow sales revenue and improve ROI with an automated marketing campaign system.  The web-enabled software works with existing CRM systems to access prospect and customer information and make that data actionable to more efficiently capture and nurture leads, retain customers and win-back defecting clients.

From single communications to multi-step, multi-channel campaigns – utilizing email, direct mail, pURLS and landing pages – each personalized communication is automatically created, delivered, tracked and reported within the CRM record; eliminating time-consuming manual processes and ensuring consistent, relevant, timely communications that move prospects through the buying process and build valuable relationships with existing customers.

What Makes Engagement Systems Different?

True Multi-Touch, Multi-Channel Communications

Engagement Systems is the only CRM integration that truly automates the execution, delivery and tracking of multi-channel communications via direct mail, email, and personalized web pages (Personalized URLS) from within a single application.  Eliminates the need to coordinate multiple vendors.

1:1 Personalized Marketing

Both single communications and multi-touch campaigns can be executed to one contact at a time or to a segmented group of contacts.  There are no minimum orders.

Trigger Automation

Engagement Systems automated campaigns are governed by a set of business rules that create automatic triggers to initiate and manage what communications are sent and when. The configuration and integration is completely handled by Engagement Systems; there is no manual intervention on the client’s part to create, set up or kick off communications.  This eliminates the need for additional marketing resources or IT involvement.

Customer Lifecycle Optimization

Engagement Systems addresses the entire prospect and customer life cycle with custom-developed campaigns and programs for lead generation, lead nurturing, customer retention, and customer reactivation, up-selling and cross-selling.

Integrated Reporting

All automated communications are written back to and tracked through the CRM system. Clients have the option for custom reporting and metrics or can use the tools inherent within their CRM system.  Because of Engagement Systems’ complete integration, all data resides in a single location.

Value-Added Services

Engagement Systems makes it easy to adopt and use the system by providing a combination of optional marketing services that delivers an end-to-end solution. Unlike other systems, Engagement Systems is virtually hands free for both sales and marketing, requiring no one to upload or manage artwork or to initiate campaigns.  This makes implementation pain free, quick to deploy and low-maintenance to sustain.

Cost Effectiveness

Engagement Systems’ automated direct mail, email and Personalized URL production systems streamline the creation, execution and delivery processes, making multi-channel marketing campaigns cheaper and faster to execute.  All aimed at increasing your sales, profitability and ROMI.  This eliminates the need for additional marketing resources, consulting, IT and training expenses.  Additionally, there are no expensive recurring seat charges.

For more information, visit www.EngagementSystems.com, call 866.938.3658 or email info@EngagementSystems.com .  You can also check out an Overview Demo of Engagement Systems at  http://www.engagementsystems.com/onlinedemo.  And be sure to look at our Resources (Case Studies & White Papers) http://www.engagementsystems.com/resource-center/resource-center.html