Sales & Marketing Effectiveness for Sustained Growth

Lead Scoring and Data Quality: How Much is Dirty Data Costing You?

Qualifying, coding and ranking your leads so the hottest opportunities are the first to get distributed to your sales teams is vital to your company’s sales and marketing success. That’s a given.

Yet, what many companies fail to understand is that data quality is core to an effective lead scoring system.  

A SiriusDecisions study, “The Impact of Bad Data on Demand Creation”, shows that following best practices in data quality generates a 66 percent increase in revenue. 

The study summary cited in a CRM Magazine article, “Looking to Score”,  offers some key insights for B2B organizations, such as:

• 10 to 25 percent of customer and prospect records contain critical data errors.
• The amount of data doubles every 12 to 18 months.
• It takes $1 to verify a record as it is entered, $10 to cleanse and de-dupe it, and $100 if nothing is done, as the ramifications of the mistakes are felt over and over again.
• From inquiry to marketing-qualified lead: A data strategy that solves conflicts at the source can lead to a 25 percent increase in converting inquiries to marketing-qualified leads.
• From marketing-qualified lead to sales-accepted lead: Unifying the data, whether into one database or by using technology for virtual integration, can lead to a 12.5 percent uplift in conversion rates to the next stage.
• From sales-accepted lead to sales-qualified lead: Clean data can reduce by 5 percent the time spent conducting the kind of additional research that precedes initial contact with a prospect.
• From sales-qualified lead to close: Given that the average field-marketing function spends no more than 10 percent of its budget in support of this final conversion, accurate data is a must for applying the right tools and resources to the right audience at the right stage of the buying cycle.

Jonathan Block, author of the report and senior director of research at SiriusDecisions, writes, “A best-in-class data strategy is shared by marketing and sales, and is focused on quality from [inquiry] to close. Although it is a job that consumes both money and time, paying more attention to data quality is not only worth it, it is something that your organization simply can’t afford not to do.

I couldn’t agree more.  Have you reviewed the quality of your data lately? 

Getting New Business: Adapting to Current Market Conditions

Guest Author - Richard G. Melecki

 
In virtually every industry today, businesses have to do more with less.  This includes all of the marketing activities necessary to get new business in a challenging economy. 

In past recessions, marketers have concentrated their efforts on market segments, geographies, and customers which have proven profitable in the past.  But the current world economic situation is changing virtually every market.  Just doing what worked in the past to acquire new business risks wasting scarce marketing dollars and increasing your cost of new business acquisition.

To reduce your marketing costs and to increase your return on dollars spent to get new business, follow these steps:

1. Examine every current geographic market, market segment, and customer to determine if they are in fact viable prospects in the current economy.  Ask yourself how your products and services might sell in markets and in geographies you have not previously served.

2. Concentrate on no more than one to three profitable markets or market segments at any given time.  Like an army on the attack, your business must achieve strategic focus in order to maximize the use of scarce resources.

3. Fine tune your product/service design and your pricing strategy for each market in which you do business. 

4. Make sure you have identified the real buyers in each market segment.  Buyers are individuals who have the authority to make purchase decisions and who own the budgets used to make the purchase.  Concentrate your marketing and sales efforts on reaching these individuals.

5. Profile each buyer type for every one of your products.  At a minimum you should know their titles, their professional background, how they find out about products and services like yours, and how they make purchase decisions.

6. Use communication channels that have the best chance of reaching buyers for the least cost.  Active business acquisition methods, such as business-to-business referrals, direct mail/e-mail, and cold calling usually are the most cost effective.  Other less direct methods, including Internet and print advertising, can also prove effective if selected carefully to reach your targeted buyer

For more information, feel free to contact:
MPI Achieve, Ltd.
330-622-4038
info@mpiachieve.com
http://www.MPIAchieve.com