There’s a vast amount of internal and external business information on companies available to the marketers who want to penetrate them. This information should be rocket fuel for the CRM. All too often, however, data marketing remains firmly grounded due to the Herculean task of finding and gathering the most timely, accurate and relevant information and keeping it up to date.
By automating the nitty-gritty involved in these processes, digital business information solutions can enable marketing and sales teams to build up a rich, actionable picture of customer and prospect organisations, while liberating increasingly squeezed resources.
Defective data delays campaigns and damages relationships with customers and prospects. And it's the 'small stuff' – common errors like incorrect addresses and product numbers, duplicates, departed contacts and wrongly assigned or incomplete records – that poses the greatest threat to marking effectiveness and your organisation’s credibility. Data quality issues lead to dissatisfied users and failed adoption, wiping out any chance of achieving the expected return on investment in the CRM.
A business information solution removes the need for manual entry and quality checks by linking key internal data to relevant high-quality external information sources, content and feeds. When a new fact on a customer or prospect emerges – in a press release, news article or analyst report, for instance – it automatically brings this into the database and dynamically updates records and documents like account profiles and financial models.
It can also help marketing teams enhance the data they have by capturing fresh insight 'hiding' in disparate structured and unstructured sources, and bringing it together to build a 360-degree view of a company. The most powerful solutions cast their net wide – using technology to scrape information from the web, social media, editorial content, and internal and external data sources – but filter out the ‘noise’ so only the information that is most relevant is pulled in to the CRM.
If this data is put at the core of the processes and workflows used by account managers and salespeople in their day-to-day jobs, whether they’re in the office or out on the road, it becomes highly actionable. The ability to access this rich, detailed intelligence can be used to develop relationships and reputation at all levels of the customer or target organisation. It turns people into trusted advisors – especially where internal barriers and politics mean their understanding of each aspect of the target business, its activities, structure, financials and values is deeper than their contact’s.
By setting up triggers on key events which change a company in a way that is likely to lead to a challenge or opportunity, alerts can be delivered directly to the laptop, smartphone or tablet of the person responsible for that account or industry. Put simply, they are spoonfed with leads – and with exactly the information they need to contact a prospect at exactly the right time, with an engaging value proposition.
Triggers are also useful for growing existing accounts, restarting dormant relationships and building back trust if reputation has been damaged. Account managers receive information on customers that helps them come up with new ideas, and become a provider of value rather than a supplier. It can also help open doors into new areas of the customer’s business. Even a call to ask “What does this change mean for you?” will deepen the relationship, showing you’re keeping up with developments in the company or industry, and are keen to help the business advance.
Accurate, relevant and timely business data has a part to play at every stage of the marketing and sales continuum.
When account teams are planning and developing strategies, it helps them take a fresh look at the company and its business drivers, and understand whether it’s growing or expanding into new markets, or contracting and needs to cut costs. At the prospecting stage, it supports salespeople in preparing for the call or email. At the nurturing stage, it can be used to make the contact feel loved and prove you’re committed to providing value. And once they’re a customer, it enables account managers to help them adapt and meet their changing needs. Digital business information solutions can take the drudgery out of providing this detailed data, and give marketing and sales teams the basis for more meaningful conversations that will lead to opportunities.
By Scott Lutter, Vice President International at OneSource.
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