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.

This week The Funnelholic had a great tip for marketers getting ready to go into 2009, and we wanted to pass it on to The B2B Lead readers.

“Do ‘ride-alongs’ with sales as you consider your marketing plans.”  So often we are busy putting programs and campaigns in place without even asking sales (our customer) if it’s what they need to move leads to opportunities and opportunities to customers.  “If you really want to add value as a marketer, you have to identify the ‘have-to-have’s’ for your customers, the sales team. The best way to do it, is to see for yourself.”

He then goes on to list a couple of great ideas on saddling up with your sales team to help do your job better and drive more measurable results.

Check it out and thanks to The Funnelholic for the great tips.

This is GREAT! We are both customers and big fans of Hubspot, and they released a new video yesterday and we wanted to be sure readers of The B2B Lead saw it. It already has over 200 diggs and is Number 1 in YouTube when you search “marketing.”

A prospect raises their hand and fills out a contact form for a salesperson to contact them.  Woohoo, a marketer’s dream, but do you know how quickly your sales team responds or if they respond at all?  Insidesales.com conducted a ResponseAudit to test every exhibiting company at Dreamforce, salesforce.com’s user group conference, to see how quickly they would respond to a web lead.  The top three companies were winners in the ResponseAwards.  I can happily say that ReachForce received 2nd place by responding in 3 minutes and 12 seconds.

The sales rep who responded, Chase Nall, was with us at Dreamforce and received the award in person:

Here are some interesting stats from the ResponseAudit:

“39.5% of the Dreamforce Sponsors responded by phone with the average response time by phone of 44 hours, 31 minutes, and 8 seconds. Of companies that responded by phone the average phone attempts was 1.14 times.  53.2% of the Dreamforce Sponsors responded by email, with the average response time by email of 13 hours, 14 minutes, and 24 seconds. Of companies that responded email the average email attempts was 1.45.”

I found the most amazing statistic was that over 37% of companies never responded at all.  I cannot imagine as a marketer how I would feel if I worked at one of those companies.  We work so hard to get prospects to raise their hand, and for no one to follow-up when one is delivered on a silver platter would be seriously demoralizing.

For those that did respond, the average response time was still very slow.  “Recent lead response management research from MIT shows the odds of making contact with a Web-based inquiry increases 100 times if attempted within five minutes.”  We made the five minute cut, would your sales team?  Maybe it is time for an audit of your own.

To learn more about Insidesales.com and the ResponseAudit check this out.

More great sales tips from Brian McRae, Market Development Manager here at ReachForce.

Cold calling is a discipline that every successful salesperson must adopt to be successful.

Our key steps to successful prospecting:

• Script your voicemails, e-mails, and live connects.  Then practice, practice and keep practicing.  Be mindful that you have about 15 seconds to make that first impression.  Avoid clichés, apologies, “ums” and weasel words.  Instead use strong, powerful language to get the prospect’s attention.  You have to “reach through the phone” in order to generate interest in your message.
• Approach every dial with a little bit of courage and a little bit of confidence.  Remember that you are providing your prospect with an opportunity to derive real value from your product or service.  Be bold to capture their attention and intelligent enough to keep it.
• Develop a routine for dialing every day.  Nolan Ryan says “I wouldn’t ask anybody to do anything I wouldn’t be willing to do.”  So if you’re managing a team…
• Know your desired outcome prior to the call.  What specific goal do you want to achieve with this call?  Our team’s goal on a first cold call is simply arouse enough interest to set a meeting with the prospect to further discuss our value and solutions.
• Execute.  Every single day.  Remember that the difference between amateurs and professionals is that professionals do it, even when they don’t feel like it.

If you are looking for more…here are 10 other great tips!

New stuff to do now!

I got the heads up from Chris Brogan, and now I want to share with all The B2B Lead readers about the new applications LinkedIn has released. On first glance I was really impressed. The list is not sooo long with applications (like Facebook) that have nothing to do with the business world, and I really think these apps will make LinkedIn much more interactive and useful.

So far I have downloaded the 2 apps for blogging and My Travel (to tell everyone I’ll be at Dreamforce next week), and am still exploring the others. Other applications let you show what books you are reading, upload slideshows and more.

Go check it out and start using. What other applications would you be interested in seeing?

Another sales tip by Ryan Ohls, a Market Development Executive at ReachForce.

My sales career started when I was a 22-year old kid…and let’s just say my phone skills were not very polished at that point.  However, in one of my first weeks of making calls I had a prospect ask me a very poignant question.  He said, “Why should I do business with you when there are so many other options available to me?”

I had no answer.  To this day I have no clue what kind of mealy-mouthed response I came up with.  At the time I thought the guy was just a jerk.  Looking back though, I see how significant that question really was.  In fact, it’s possibly THE single most important question every salesperson should answer.

Why should your prospects do business with you?  What makes your offer and your company unique?  How do you know you’re not being perceived as a commodity?  You should be able to wake up from a deep sleep in the middle of the night and immediately be able to answer that question if asked.

But wait – there’s a catch.  When you go through this exercise always follow each of your answers with “So What?”

“We offer full installation and a 12-month warranty…So what?”

“We use prettier colors than everybody else…So what?”

In other words, “why should your prospects care?”  Eventually you will get to the root of what THEY find important, not you.  Chances are they don’t care about the things you think are impressive about your company.

How can you distinguish your company in the minds of your prospects to the point you literally have no competitors?  A company or a salesperson that figures this out has adequately answered “the most important question in business.”

For a while now we have been focusing a bit more on the marketing side of our B2B Marketing and Sales Tips.  Here are a few great sales tips from Brian McRae, Market Development Manager at ReachForce.

1. Remember that you are selling to PEOPLE, not to rows of data on your daily call sheet.  People require you to reach through the phone and deliver an articulate, powerful, and succinct message.  Every person is different, so use the cues you hear over the phone to help you understand how best to communicate with your prospects.  I live in Austin, Texas, however, my territory is the Northeast United States, including New York.  I’ve found in my prospecting activities that these professionals prefer I be direct and exactly on point, because their time is not to be wasted.  This is somewhat different from the laid back and casual environment I work in.  But that nuance of personality provides me with the ability to understand how these professionals prefer to be communicated with via phone and e-mail.  You can bet the house that my language on a call or an e-mail is powerful, bold, and succinct, because I must connect using my prospect’s culture rather than my own.
2. People buy from people, not companies.  Be likable and easy to work with.  Develop a relationship with your prospects.  Make each one feel like they are your number one customer.
3. Develop a consistent process that you repeat every day.  As a salesperson, it is your duty to be as disciplined and productive as possible.  Develop a routine that you follow every single day to take full advantage of your working hours.  Applying that disciplined approach over time is guaranteed to keep you productive, make you a better salesperson, and ultimately close more deals.
4. Be crisp and impactful in all your communications.  Think about how many sales or marketing related e-mails the average decision-maker receives on any given day.  How many of these messages use the same tired clichés at best; and at worst are fraught with grammatical or spelling errors?  The only way to rise above the fray on the phone and in email is to absolutely compel your prospect to learn more about your services.  Create that need with clear, concise, and complete language – a language devoid of all filler-words and “ums”.  Take the time to use the power of language to your advantage.  That alone will place you head and shoulders above your competition.
5. Don’t believe the myth that people hate being sold to.  The truth is that people hate being sold to by BAD salespeople, and there are plenty of those to go around.  But if you think back to your most positive buying experiences, whether it was for a car or a multi-million dollar enterprise software package, every one of those positive experiences was driven by solid and professional salespeople.  Salespeople are the engines of commerce.  Good salespeople explore, analyze, and create a mutually beneficial need between two parties.  Good salespeople develop relationships with their prospects that lead to mutually beneficial deals.
6. Have a long-term strategic view.  The best and most successful sales professionals that I have worked with in my career all shared a single trait – they were with their respective companies for a long time, usually more than five years.  They all understood that developing a territory was a long-horizon project, and that success would come only if they executed every day.  You’ll also become an expert not only on your product, but on the entire competitive landscape.

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.

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

In this current economic crisis many businesses have a natural, knee-jerk tendency to “wait and see how everything plays out.”  It seems that business spending is put on hold, which only exacerbates the overall problem.

We as marketers and sales people feel it the most.  I’m sure we’ve all heard something like this in the past couple of weeks, “We’re going to ‘wait & see’ what this economy ‘does’ before we spend any kind of money on ‘that.’”

Yeah…and sometimes a deer in the headlights just “waits to see” what that car is going to do.

Here’s what I don’t understand – if what you sell can grow your customers’ bottom line, then why wouldn’t they buy it?  If they can’t afford what you offer “right now,” then how are they going to afford the additional cost – “right now” – of NOT having it?

I do believe that in an economic crisis it may be wise to lighten up spending on certain things if we can’t afford them (i.e. lavish parties, luxurious vacations, designer nose-hair clippers, doggy massages).  However, as sales guy at ReachForce, we have a unique opportunity to show our prospects how we can contribute to helping them through this mess.

If what you sell saves time, saves money, or adds to top line revenue or productivity in some way – AND YOU CAN DEMONSTRATE IT – then not only do you have an opportunity, you have a responsibility to tell as many prospects as possible about it.

If you’re still with me, you’re probably reading along, looking for your tip on how to get action from the ‘wait and see’ crowd out there today.  Well, here’s what I’m doing…

• I’m direct about how what I sell drives revenue
• I show real customer case studies that include customer results
• I provide best practice information around how to act on ReachForce solutions