It’s a reasonable assumption that most marketing
organizations have some form of marketing automation technology in play to
support their lead generation efforts. It’s also likely that it’s working well
and generating a healthy level of inbound traffic and leads for your sales
organization. Implementing an effective marketing automation tool is not always
easy, but implementation is only the first step.
In fact, effective marketing automation can be both a blessing and a curse—and
for the exact same reason. The blessing and curse are your outreach has piqued
a prospects’ interest enough to make them hit your landing pages and submit
their information in some capacity. Now you’re probably thinking, “That sounds
like a blessing. So where’s the curse?”
Here’s what I mean. Inbound leads are fantastic, but only if
you’ve got a regimented cleansing and appending process in place to triage them
before they get to your teleprospecting team.
Here are the three steps in the process you need to take
before submitting those leads:
Step 1—Assess your data. Here are the key things you
are looking for in this step:
- Record Completeness: Regardless of quality, how many of your inbound leads have complete personal and corporate profiles (email, industry, title, revenue, phone, etc..)?
- Data Quality: Test each email address and phone number. How many personal emails are in there (Gmails, etc.)? Use spam trap detection and check for duplicate records.
- Does the data match your ideal profile: job function, job level, number of employees, revenue, geography and industry? Does this data contain your ideal customer or something other than that?
Step 2—Cleanse and append your data.
- Pull out the information in each record that you’ve found to be suspect (spam traps, invalid contact names, personal emails).
- Fill in the holes identified when you assessed record completeness. Replace the bad records with new ones at the same target companies.
Step 3—Add information to your existing database.
- Now you’ve got some idea as to what you want your data to look like, use a trusted source and go get some “net new” contacts that match your profile.
Failure to put that comprehensive three-step process in
place will cause you to populate your database with bogus names, titles, phone
numbers and even fake companies. That’s the potential curse you want to avoid.
The fact is that many people submitting their contact
information to your company in exchange for your content don’t actually want to
hear from you. That doesn’t necessarily mean they aren’t great prospects, but
they are just playing hard to get. (i.e., They’re interested, but may not have
budget to make a purchase right away, or maybe they just endured a tough
quarter and are feeling uncertain about the future.)
You can’t control that situation, but an effective cleanse
and append program will ensure that every new contact from your inbound
campaign is forwarded on to your teleprospecting team with the accurate title,
phone, email and company information for your targeted decisionmaker. The
takeaway here is to set your standards very high for your inbound data quality
and map out how you are going to verify it.
Whether you build your own process or outsource it to a
partner, it’s critical that you do something. Not only does it make smart
business sense, but there is no faster way to damage your marketing team’s
credibility with sales than setting them up to close sales with inaccurate
data. Ensure ROI and sales acceptance by taking the steps needed to close the
loop on your inbound campaigns with the right cleanse and append process. I’m
confident you’ll be glad you did.
