The tip this week comes from a Senior Account Manager in our Fargo office, Lorael Arnquist. She has more than eight years of high tech marketing experience and has spent over four years deploying, implementing and optimizing lead management solutions.

Data is the heart of all you do as a marketer. Without clean, accurate, complete data, all the whiz-bang features in the world (CRM integrations, ROI reports, automated campaigns, etc.) are no good. All this great functionality revolves around the data in your database. Here are five tips for keeping your data in order:

1) Keep it clean. The heart of marketing automation is a centralized database. It's important to perform regular maintenance and keep your database free of duplicates. If data is disparate and fragmented across duplicate records, you won't be able to see the big picture of your contacts' actions and responses.

2) Focus on email addresses. Email is a critical ingredient in the marketing mix. Email addresses must be accurate, working addresses, but it's equally important to analyze your database to see who hasn't taken any actions - such as submitting surveys, clicking links in emails or visiting your website - on your communications. Depending on the length of your sales cycle, if people haven't interacted with you during the past six to nine months , you should consider removing them from your marketing database or at the very least suppressing them from receiving email messages to enhance deliverability.

3) Progressively capture more data. The more information you gather from prospects the better, because you can incorporate it into your lead-score model, as well as your lead-management and lead-nurturing programs. The information you gather - including BANT, demographic and firmagraphic - gives you an indication of who your targets are, what their needs and preferences are, and where there are opportunities for relationships.

4) "Standardize" your data. Data comes into the marketing automation system through multiple sources: integration, manual imports and forms. The goal is to align the data for targeted segmentation. Standardizing data can include formatting all your state and country values (e.g. making all variations of USA, U.S. U.S.A. into US), categorizing job titles/functions (e.g. changing VP of Mktg and Vice President of Marketing into VP of Marketing) and more. This can be a painstaking process as you initially prepare your data for implementation or integration with a CRM system, but the benefits of doing this will pay off. Once you have your initial batch of data standardized, make the most of dropdowns on survey forms, limit use of open text fields, and run manual one-off data file imports through a standardization "key" prior to importing into your marketing automation system.

5) Identify segmentation opportunities. The more targeted your communications, the more effective your marketing efforts will be. Take an inventory of all the data you have available today and analyze it to pinpoint areas for segmentation. Find similarities and differences in your segments and break out your audience by needs, interests and behaviors. Engage prospects and customers on their own terms, be relevant and provide value at the right time, place and in the best format.

The benefits of keeping the data clean, accurate and standardized will be realized in all areas of your efforts - improved email deliverability, a centralized marketing history, targeted communications and more comprehensive lead-score models - all positively impacting your company's bottom line.

Posted by Will Schnabel at 5:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The tip this week comes from our Client Care Specialist in the London office, Greg Staunton. Greg has a Master's degree in Marketing and more than six years of implementing lead management solutions for high-tech clients.

Many B2B marketers know their companies could benefit from a lead scoring model, because they've read the case studies and seen how the program, when done right, can align sales and marketing teams and increase marketing ROI. However, many of them don't know how to start.

Typical scenario: When marketers market to the leads they've garnered, they send the marketing reports to sales. Soon, a back log arises because sales teams do not have the time to go through every single contact, and review the raw data. This is meaningless. And as the quarter roles by, sales is increasingly under pressure to win deals. Feeling the pressure first hand, sales can begin to view marketing as an ineffective operation that sends them poor quality leads.

To alleviate this issue, many B2B marketers will attempt to develop a lead scoring model to determine at what stage in the buying cycle each lead is at and moving those deemed ready-to-buy to sales. The problem is many B2B marketers will read lead management best practice whitepapers and attempt to develop the final stage of a lead scoring model tied in with a nurture program first versus starting from the beginning. This usually ends up in failure.

The solution: Start off simple. Sales and Marketing must sit down together and implement a lead scoring model. The lead scoring model is based initially on BANT and demographic information provided by the prospect through lead generation. Rank leads according to how well they fit with your sweet spot. For instance: A = perfect fit, E = no fit.

The outcome: Marketing will send sales the kind of leads they'd like to receive to ensure their time isn't wasted trying to qualify leads that should be held in a lead nurturing campaign. Once you've achieved a high MQL to SAL rate, you can start looking at the next phase of lead scoring, which includes scoring leads based on their behavior.

Posted by Will Schnabel at 11:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The best ideas are oftentimes the simplest. They seem to make so much sense once you review the issue before you. Then, they make you wonder how you missed it before.

The recent ah-ha moment for me was in planning how to best share ongoing advice to B2B marketers as it relates to lead management (thus fulfilling the mission of this blog). Well, the answer was right under my nose so to speak in the form of Silverpop's own marketing team, product consultants, and client account teams who are defining and implementing lead management best practices each and every day. Through the implementation of hundreds of marketing automation implementations, they have been fortunate to work with leading B2B marketing organizations engaged in global lead generation tactics and processes. Therefore, I decided to see if I could get some "volunteers" to provide their insights by means of a Tip of the Week.

So over the coming months, look to hear Tips from product marketing, field marketing, lead generation, Engage B2B (fna Vtrenz) product consultants, account managers, and maybe even a client or two. These are the people who don't just discuss the theory, but actually put this into practice every day.

Like I said, simple, isn't it!

Posted by Will Schnabel at 2:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)