No Lead Left Behind

The wise man built his house upon a rock

There’s a children’s song about how the wise man builds his house on rock while the foolish man builds his house on sand.  A storm hits and the house on the rock stands firm.  The house on the sand… well, imagine a bunch of kids spreading their arms wide out and then bringing them all together to demonstrate the sound when it falls FLAT!  How is this relevant to lead management systems and automated marketing?  The rock I’m talking about is your marketing database.  If it’s not solid, any program you build to manage leads will eventually fall flat. 

I believe in a marketing database that is separate from CRM.  Sales people do not need the additional noise of every person that should/could be in the market for your products or services (someday).  In order to do what they do best, which hopefully is to sell, they should only be working with existing customers and really strong, qualified leads.   Marketing however needs the whole universe; customers, prospects and leads.

Here’s a real life scenario to ponder:  Every time client X does a newsletter eblast they have to query from 4 databases; customers come from the ERP and CRM systems, prospects also come from CRM and a database they’ve been building in the marketing department, leads come from the lead management system.  Once all sources are brought together, the list is de-duped and scrubbed for competitors and opt outs.  Finally.  A list is ready!  Sound familiar at all to your company?

You may think this works out just fine if you have the process down to a few hours each time but consider the following:

• How do you post opens, clicks and other activities (downloads, offer conversion, etc) back to the record if it originated from four different places?
• Can you append the record with a campaign code for overall success tracking?
• If you segmented the list at all (by vertical or industry) and version it, can you pull the same list easily next time for follow-up messaging?
• Where do you track which campaign prompted action, moving the record from the status of prospect to lead or lead to customer?
• And most importantly, where is the 360 degree view of the record? This is the row of data that tells you every touch that ever occurred on this record by marketing or sales and every action the person ever took when communicating with your company.

A solid marketing database is a key tool for next generation marketing.  If you’re going to send the right message to the right person at the right time, you need to really know that person.  This means stepping back and gathering up your data sources, creating real-time integration points with CRM, ERP, Lead Management and other existing databases.   Sound daunting?  Technically it’s completely feasible and many leading-edge companies are doing it right now. 

Stop sending the special discount offer emails to the prospect that just received a proposal (at full price) from their sales rep last week.   Don’t send a case study on how you helped solve problems for a bank to a school.   Don’t send your enterprise solution promotions to SOHOs.  These will fall FLAT.   

Think about your foundation (your rock)… the marketing database.  And feel free to disagree with me… comments appreciated!

See why we call the marketing database the TouchPoint Recorder™ – http://www.marketnetservices.com/solutions/lead-distribution-database.aspx