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.

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

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.

You have an HR handbook, departmental training materials, and documented procedures. But do you have standards and rules for your marketing and sales database?  You should.  Without some law and order, your database will start looking like the wild West of marketing and sales data.  Here are some of our suggestions for putting these rules to paper:
1.    Create a CRM data standard sheet and separate the data elements into three categories:
a.    Information that must be there and must be correct for all of your systems to align properly (e.g. key ID’s, emails, etc.)
b.    Information that should be correct for rules within your CRM/Marketing Automation system to work. For instance, if you have set up custom validation rules surrounding addresses, outline what those rules are and how data has to be fomatted to fit within those rules.
c.    Requested information to make marketing, sales, customer support, or anyone else working in your database work better.

2.    Determine what data needs to look like within all of the key fields identified above.  (E.G. – State should always be two-letter abbreviation instead of the full name, etc.)

3.    Do a gap analysis. Understand who is in the target Decision Making Unit and make sure all relevant contacts are present that for your target accounts and prospects.

4.    Make sure this data has 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? Depending on how you answer these questions, you may want to chat with the team or person that ‘owns’ the data. That way you can make sure that the way you choose to fill in the gaps suits their needs as well.

In addition to starting the New Year with great optimism about the prospects for all of us marketers, I am excited and privileged to serve you as ReachForce’s new President.  Based on feedback from you, I plan to continue communicating within our present theme of lessons learned, insights and tips to help increase the effectiveness of your B2B marketing efforts.

In 2010, B2B marketers will face new challenges and have new priorities.  Here are three key challenges and priorities I see:

1. Budgets are stretched thin. So why not look at your in-house databases as the goldmine they could be? The hidden gems in your database are ripe to be unearthed.  Marketing data hygiene and database maintenance should be key initiatives for every marketer in 2010.
2. Increasing market reach and generating leads are more important than ever.  What are your plans for growing your contact database this year?  But sheer numbers alone aren’t the answer.  Filling your marketing database gaps with the right, most relevant contacts will be critical for success.
3. Separating yourself from the herd is crucial to differentiating yourself.  Do you have all the crucial demographics you need to slice and dice your data? If not, this is the time to act.  By segmenting your database, you can get the right message to each of your prospects and customers with laser-sighted precision.

I look forward to exploring all of this with you and more and wish you all a happy and prosperous New Year!

A lot of companies have created great online user communities filled with best practice content, forums and wikis.  But depending on your customer base, it may be difficult to get them to take full advantage of the community.  You might try sending weekly (or bi-weekly or monthly – up to you) digests a la LinkedIn Groups to increase engagement.

As a new user creates their account, let them opt-in to get email notifications.  That way, as there is new activity on the forums or when a new whitepaper is posted, they will be the first to know.

A simple test to see if your buyers are the type to want content to come to their inbox it to check out your FeedBurner stats.  Look at you email subscribers against your RSS subscribers.  (If you have a blog and don’t use FeedBurner, shame on you – it is free and easy to set up).  At ReachForce, we chose not to have the feed via email option because we use the blog to create our newsletter.  When we looked at the number of newsletter subscribers versus RSS subscribers, we were astonished.  We have 20 times more newsletter subscribers than RSS subscribers.  Looks like our buyers prefer us sending content directly to their inboxes, do yours?

Don’t have a user community?  Consider using LinkedIn as one.  With the groups feature you can email the group up to once a week and post discussions and news.  If your customers are already using LinkedIn (and my guess is they are), it will be easier to engage with them on a platform that they are already using.

A user community (whether hosted by you or LinkedIn) is not just a “if you build it, they will come” kind of thing.  You have to have a plan of action to deliver new relevant content and start discussions.  Remember it’s their community so take cues from your customers as to how they want you to interact with them.

The number one responsibility of any B2B Marketer is to keep his or her company’s marketing and sales funnel full,
with leads converting quickly to drive profits. In other words, to keep the company’s lifeblood flowing.  The continuous battle to meet pipeline and revenue projections is frustrating when using traditional techniques.

There is a better, more deliberate and predictable approach to increasing the velocity and efficiency of the
marketing and sales funnel. Hence the term Funnelnomics—the practice of extracting the most value out of the
leads as they move through your funnel.

This is the first in a series of blog posts to present a proven method for improving your Funnelnomics by accelerating the conversion of qualified buyers into profitable customer relationships. It provides a framework for integrating your marketing lead generation programs with sales execution processes to drive growth and profitability.

Step 1: Mapping Your Marketing and Sales Funnel

The traditional sales-focused funnel is a relic of the past—a product of the rapid change that has taken place over the last six to eight years. It reflects the old practice of Marketers buying lists of names to fuel programs, expecting a 2% return and then turning over all leads—qualified or not—to Sales to convert into buyers.

Today’s marketing and sales funnel must be developed and managed by understanding both the sales process and by considering the way buyers move through the purchase process. It is vital for B2B Marketers to document the customer buy cycle including the critical parties involved, process and length of buy cycle.

According to industry analysts at SiriusDecisions, only 1% of B2B Marketers consider the customer buy-cycle when it comes to planning and executing marketing and communications programs.

Understanding the customer buy cycle is an important step in optimizing Funnelnomics—enabling Marketers to deliver targeted communications that move leads from one stage to the next in the funnel in the most cost-effective way possible.

Marketers must fully map the customer Decision Making Unit (DMU) including the title and role of each person in the decision-making process. Marketers also must understand the type of information they need (based on their individual pain points) and how they would like to receive it (i.e. direct mail, email, etc.) in order to move the decision maker to the next level of the funnel.

Once the customer buy cycle has been mapped, it is time to map the sales cycle. Product Marketing, Customer Service, Sales organizations, and Marketers together should:

• profile customers and define top customer characteristics
• define target audience characteristics including demographics (revenue, employees, industry) and psychographics (personae, likes, dislikes)
• define the sales cycle including phases and parties involved
• benchmark conversion rates to move to the next phase
• define decision drivers and triggers including customer needs, events, etc.
• secure agreement on qualification criteria for lead scoring
• gauge Sales and Inside Sales capacity for engaging with qualified buyers

This must be done in order to monitor and manage prospects as they move through the funnel to optimize marketing programs for continuous improvement.

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.