Sales people want to sell - not create perfect CRM records. We can show you how B2B marketers are integrating external information into their CRMs, sorting out their data legacies and enriching their intelligence, so they can: target more effectively, deliver superior leads, identify key customer traits.
3. The problem with legacy data…..
Companies with an address change in the last day
1,836
Companies into receivership / liquidation / dissolved in
past week
1,386
4. The problem with legacy data…..
Duplicate Data
Stale Data
Joe Bloggs Limited
• Original record
Joe Bloggs
• Duplicate record
Inaccurate Data
Job titles we’ve seen:
• Moved to a new part of the business
• Glorified Consultant
8. 1. Sort out legacy data….
“We had a lot of data
(50,000 records) –
something I am sure
we share in common
with all our
members.”
“We wanted the
data cleansed to
remove duplicates
by combining
records”
“We wanted to find a scalable solution that
would help us manage and segment our
data”
9. Create a link ….
Internal data
Common
Identifier
Externally managed data
14. Step 1 complete!
“You took a problem I had been
having for a while and made it go
away. The data of 50,000 records, was
cleansed within three weeks. We had
previously calculated that this process
would take us at least six months to
achieve manually, so this was of huge
benefit.”
15. 2. Enrich Knowledge
“We wanted to
segment data into
audience types, based
on how they had
responded in the
past.”
“We wanted to be able
to run campaigns
aimed at bringing back
people that had
previously
unsubscribed”
30. Today it is easy to have good data in your CRM!
“We can’t believe it was so easy to get
where we needed to be.”
“Campaigns are smaller and therefore cost
less, which in turn means we can do more
with the same budget.”
Successful businesses are combining their internal data with external data to: 1. Sorting out legacy data2. Enriching knowledge 3. Getting significant results
This is the problem with data – In the last day 1,836 companies have had a change in their address. That’s 670,140 a year. In the last week – companies into receivership, liquidation, dissolved – 1,386That’s 72,072 a year. And each of these is only 1 field….
So how do we keep up?Bad data can really hinder a business.Paper published by Gartner in 2011 on the cost of bad data to businesses concluded that: 1. Poor data quality is a primary reason for 40% of all business initiatives failing to achieve theirtargeted benefits.2. Data quality effects overall labour productivity by as much as a 20%.3. As more business processes become automated, data quality becomes the rate limiting factorfor overall process quality.
The good news - Today it is easy to have good data in your CRM!
In the past organisations viewed internal and external data as quite separate entities. What we actually want is a successful merger of these in order to achieve greater results.
Numerous organisations have benefited from successfully integrating our external information with their internal data including the Institute of Direct & Digital Marketing. Clair Baumforth (Corporate Business Development and Partnerships Director) from the IDM has kindly helped us put together a case study with some useful quotes which will help you to illustrate how practical and straight forward this process is.
We create a link between your internal data and our external data. This way your own records are matched against the file from an external provider & crucially the unique identification number used by the external provider is linked to your own internal records.In this way not only are duplicates removed but also the addition of new records can be controlled.
The good news is you now have the basis of a successful data strategy as this matching exercise has on-going benefits – it’s not just for removing or preventing duplicates. Once a link has been established between your record in the CRM and the matched record in the external party’s database the two systems can talk to each otherYou open a gateway to any of the information that the external party holds and maintains for this record and for starters you can start to clean up some of your other basic data issues…
For example in an external solution, like ours, the trading status of a company is updated daily with data from Companies House and with daily publications called the London and Edinburgh Gazettes.
Also, users who want to add new records to the CRM are forced to now use the third party’s company name index. Here we can also see this record already exists in the CRM as a lead – in SFDC terminology anyway.
You can also use the third party source to challenge the address fields you have.And finally having de-duped and cleansed the existing data you may want to look at enhancing what is left by adding things such as phone numbers, websites, and turnover or industry codes to records.
Lets move on to step2 - How these successful businesses are enriching their existing knowledge. Now you have a link to a cloud based information source that is effectively managing data on your behalf and taking away some of the painful (and frankly quite boring) day to day issues Having done the painful bit we now open the door to a large amount of additional information that will help both the sales and the marketing teams and we see companies with these links in place becoming more strategic in the way they operate.They want to understand their clients and markets better. They want to know more about the businesses they are approaching or already work with and try to identify key customer traits.And they want to use this data to present in the environment in which they already work which the links now facilitate
In this external platform they can segment their clients how they want, for example to look at your current client list by size or industry sectorThen they can use this information to find more companies like the ones they’re successful with
Having identified ideal prospects, you may want to bring in additional prime prospect data into the CRM to drive the next campaign & to arm the sales team with quality leads.
Salespeople can now also understand organisations prior to approach.They may want to look at an overview of a company which saves them spending half an hour on Google, and they may also want to understand how big a company is to get a feel for the size of the opportunity….
Having found and understood a relevant company the obvious next question to ask is who do I talk to and very often external providers can help by presenting data on key contacts within the business, and clearly from a marketing standpoint it helps maximise the response to campaigns if they are aimed at the right contact in the first place.
One particular good example we often see companies use is key intelligence around corporate links and ownership.Opportunities in the corporate group
This intelligence makes marketers popular with their sales teams because rather than tenuous leads they get qualified targets that are not only in the right space but are large enough and profitable enough to afford the solutions they are selling. And there are lots of other examples…I.e.Financial year end
The finance team are also happy because they are prioritising companies with a strong credit score – so they’ll be able to pay.
And, because these external databases are updated with business critical data all the time – you can use them to find sales triggers.This means you can monitor your chosen companies using your chosen criteria. If a company record is updated with a relevant bit of data, it can trigger an email alert to you or your team. This e-mail brings that "hot" company to your attention and to the top of your priority list. The most common alerts we see our clients watching for are forcompanies with new financial data or companies who had a change in directors,and companies with a change in ownership after a merger, acquisition or similar. Companies in the news…These events can all mean more opportunity for you. And it’s all about finding opportunity.