How Not to Generate Leads via Telemarketing
Posted on September 22nd, 2008 by Markitecht
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Marketing, Architecture and Everything in Between
Data Flexibility: To Range or Not to Range
Posted on July 18th, 2008 by Markitecht
We’ve all heard the term segmentation and that most companies segment their lists using various demographics such as industry vertical, company type (B2B or B2C), size of company by revenue or by number of employees, etc. For most part this information is collected directly from the end user via conversion forms on one’s website, or, from third party sites where one has posted a white paper and other such asset offerings.
What I’ve found is that a common way of collecting segment information is in ranges. For example when filling out the “number of employees in your organization” field on a form there’s always a pick list with options like: 1-10 employees, 11 - 100 employees, 101 - 250 employees, and so on. Most forms offer between 5-6 choices to pick from based on the company’s segmentation criteria. e.g. 1 to 10 employees may correspond to the VSB (very small business) segment and subsequent ranges would likely correspond to SMB, Mid-cap, Enterprise, etc. segments.
This segment information is critical because your approach to marketing to them should be different. The smaller companies might have a shorter sales cycle because most likely there are less “influencers” and you probably have the decision maker on file. Also the follow-up approach by your sales team should be different or at least their pitch should be customized to fit the needs for the size of the business. So far so good. We’ve got some data, we know how to use it, it’s pretty effective, life is great!
Problems arise when your company changes the definition of a segment. Let’s say you discovered that your approach to selling to companies from 1 to 10 employees should be the same for companies from 1 to 25 employees (i.e. their needs are the same). If your original segment ranges were 1 to 10 and then 11 to 100 you could find companies with up to 10 employees in your database but there is no way to identify the additional companies with up to 25 employees. You’re stuck with bad data, or rather the data is not flexible.
Another problem arises when using 3rd party sites for lead generation. It’s commonplace to publish white papers, webinars and videos with content syndication sites that have a large reach with your audience. For most part these content syndication sites have standard forms and segmentation criteria they collect from their registered users. Chances are the pick list options for the number of employees field does not match yours. Example: I just got a 1000 leads from this white paper program, but oops the starting employee range on the lead record is is 1 - 250 employees. Now what do I do? Should I manually look up each company on the internet and guess their employee size before distributing leads to my sales team? What if my sales team is broken up by VSB and SMB? To which team should I give my leads? I’m stuck with data that is not flexible.
So what do I mean by flexible data? Not data that can be changed easily and rapidly according to one’s whims in order to get the leads out to the sales team. (That opens up a whole new nightmare!) By flexible data I mean capturing information so that it can be used even if we change our segment definitions. If I sell apples and oranges to my customers my data capture options should be: 1) apples, 2)oranges and 3) apples and oranges. If my picklist was fruits and vegetables, there’s no way I could offer up a special on golden delicious apples to the right people.
So what is a good practice? IMHO one should try capture exact numbers from one’s audience. Agreed, there might be a tendency for users filling out forms to round-off numbers. One might even argue that creating open form fields opens up all kinds of data consistency issues. Some users will type in numbers, some text, some will use numbers and text. Also, employee numbers are fluid. Companies are growing and shrinking all the time (especially in this economy) so you’ll never have a precise number. Lastly, you’re probably wondering how do I bucket a company with say 42 employees into my SMB category which ranges from 26 to 100 employees.
These are all great questions and any decision you make will probably come with some trade-off. You could design your form field to accept a numerical values only. You would need validation rules on the form field. Although complicated there are ways to automate the conversion of text into numerical values so twenty three or twentythree or twenty-three all displayed 23. Your field desciption could prompt the user to fill in a number: Number of employees (enter a value from 1 to 10000).
The bucketing of leads is a fairly easy task. Most CRM tools like SalesForce.com and even tools such as MS Excel can be used to populate derived fields. Basically your segment field would be auto-filled based on the numerical value input into the number of employees field. So my application would check if the value in the number of employees field is less than or equal to 25 and auto-fill VSB into my segment field. The advantage is if tomorrow I change my VSB definition to less than equal to 10 employees, I can easily convert all my 11+ employee companies to the SMB segment. That is data flexibility and it suits the changing nature of my business.
I would love to hear your thoughts and opinion on this. Please leave me a comment. Thanks!
Sphere ItThis is Freedom
Posted on July 4th, 2008 by Markitecht
It’s About the Process Not the System
Posted on June 21st, 2008 by Markitecht
I recently came across this great post by Jonathan Block on the Sirius Decisions blog. He hits the nail on the head with his comments on maintaining the quality of marketing databases. Here’s what he says:
- Dirty databases abound despite significant efforts by demand creation executives.
- Most companies focus on trying to clean the entire database at once rather than fix the intelligence that matches the right contact with the right offering
- Database quality is a point in time and all data cleansing projects have an end date.
- The data is cleanest right before the next round of contacts are uploaded into the database.
- Distributed data systems are difficult to maintain and synchronize.
Very simply it’s about the process not the state of the system. No matter how many times you clean your database and bring it to a clean state, unless you create a clean process you will always find yourselves in the quagmire of unclean data. Here are some of his recommendations:
- Create a unified customer database. This helps to avoid integration and synchronization issues, lost responses, incorrectly routed leads, marketing redundancy amongst other issues and drives up the ROI for this activity.
- Couple that with a robust data quality strategy that facilitates segmenting and targeting. Implement best practices around what data points are acceptable (or enough) for your sales and marketing teams to do their jobs.
- In addition to data quality marketing operations personnel should co-own data maintenance along with field marketing and sales. A sales partner is necessary to ensure compliance from the sales side in both the marketing automation and CRM systems.
- Target “ideal” prospects based on macro criteria such as industry or sub-industry growth and maturity, behavior patterns, demographics and regulations. (This could be part of your buyer personas, more on that in a future post.) Putting this into practice helps prioritize contact discovery, account intelligence and maintenance efforts.
So if you implement good practices into your system processes you can avoid a majority of the data issues most organizations face. I will try to touch on some of these best practices such as minimizing collection points, moving records with incomplete data to a discard or holding pile, etc. in a future post.
Sphere ItNorthbound, Southbound and Tolls
Posted on June 1st, 2008 by Markitecht
Last week I was at the Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco, California. Staring at the pylons of this architectural wonder I marveled how the span supported around 2 million car crossings per month!
There were 3 basic processes being supported here — vehicles traveling northbound, vehicles traveling southbound and the trolls collecting a toll. (I’m going to leave out the jumpers because I didn’t see any!) I could not help but think how this was a perfect analogy for Markitechture.
I’d like to think of Markitechture as this giant bridge supported by mighty pillars of technology with a span that helps support 3 fundamental requirements for marketing today:
- Connecting people to people
- Connecting people to information
- Connecting information to information.
Process management is key to both businesses and people (the vehicles) achieving their respective goals. And these goals can be anything from conducting commerce to social networking. So if process management is the span of Markitechture, the four main supporting pillars would be: databases, applications, communications, and content. More on each of these pillars and process management in a future post. Time to go build. Bye for now!
Sphere It