http://www.biztechmagazine.com/article.asp?item_id=660

Every reptilian instinct in my body wanted to find a way to bad mouth the agency’s work. But their creative, positioning and the execution was brilliant. We couldn’t find fault in the agency’s work.

We dug deeper and asked to look at their new CRM – the foundation for the entire product launch and the basis for all of their prospecting efforts. It fueled their direct mail, email newsletters, catalog mailings and sales outreach.

The problem was immediately obvious. The turd in the proverbial punchbowl was data quality. The client had spared no expense building world class creative and but left the task of data hygiene to a group of marketing interns who would rather mop the floors than scrub data.

In the post mortem, we learned the interns received various Excel files containing old data, questionable lists, incomplete lists and exports from a variety of personal contact management applications. Then, with bubble gum and bailing wire, the master list was normalized, checked for obvious data format requirements and imported verbatim into the million dollar CRM.

In hindsight, the client was incredibly candid. No one wanted to own the data hygiene. It wasn’t sexy and it cost a lot of money to do right.  So, in the hopes of prevent future CRM data quality disasters, here are few tips you can use to get the biggest bang from your CRM dollar:

1)    Data quality is not a one-time event. Your data will get dirty and cleaning it is an ongoing set of activities so it helps to design processes that keep data clean. For example, after an email blast, a single individual should be responsible for removing or updating undeliverables. In addition, sales people should also be responsible for keeping data clean. They own the accounts and it is in their best interest to champion the data. Additional quality checks such automation of duplicate record checks also stops problems before they get out of hand.

2)    Duplicates cost you. A single company record should be tied to a set of addresses and contacts. Failure to tie together information about an account to a single company record dilutes the effectiveness of the data – especially in key account selling.

3)    Humans matter. While automation of data clean-up is useful, humans are essential to the process. Computers miss things that are usually obvious to a human such as a division’s relationship to a corporate entity.

4)    Protect your data from good intentions. With CRM, it is far too easy for individuals without an understanding of data hygiene practices to import data from external sources. An equal opportunity automated and a manual review process should always be applied to external data before it is imported.

5)    Find a balance. It is easy to be compulsive about data quality but it is not practical. Your data changes every day, making sure it is always accurate is not financially feasible. That is why it is important to strive for “good enough.”

Good data is the foundation for effective CRM. In B2B it is impossible to build strong marketing unless you know the names of the people most likely to buy from you. Maintaining a clean CRM punchbowl requires more than a summer intern.

NOTE: This article originally appeared on the ZoomInfo blog: http://zoominfoblogger.wordpress.com/tag/ben-bradley/

We’re rolling out a new website. It is in early beta right now.

The idea is simple – we ask IT managers 4 or 5 questions about their experiences with specific technology and we specifically ask them about implementation “gotchas.”

We conceal everyone’s identity and publish those answers and various gotchas in a document. That document is available for for anyone to download free of charge.

Our first document titled Before You Buy Microsoft Dynamics NAV was just released. We expect the people that download this document will be people who are contemplating a first time installation of Dynamics NAV. We have a few more documents in pipeline now on topics such as CRM, accounting software, various incarnations of SharePoint, Professional Services Automation and ERP.

I expect these documents will be updated regularly as new insight becomes available.

You can get a copy of the first draft of the first document here: http://beforeyoubuy.it/before-you-buy-microsoft-dynamics-nav/

I don’t know if this will work but it seems like a good idea. That’s where you come in…

What would you do differently? Is this report useful? Should we dive deeper? Are the questions the right questions?

Any feedback would be greatly appreciated. Please email me ben@benbradley.net with comments. Thanks!

I am constantly asked for “strategies/’secrets’ for surviving the recession.” I try to appear wise and informed—and parade original, sophisticated thoughts. But if you want to know what’s going through my head, read the list below:

http://www.tompeters.com/entries.php?note=010922.php

JungleDisk uses Amazon’s web services and allows easy transfer of files to and from our local machines to a file server in the cloud. It is simple to use. I simply map a remote folder to my local Z: drive and can save files or even access my files from Panera.

The price is right. 1GB can be stored for just $0.15 cents per month. The hardest part is signing up for Amazon’s S3 service. The sign-up is confusing and since I am not a developer I had to read some of the instructions. I prefer not having to read instructions and like sign-ups that are more intuitive.

Yet agencies are not set up to do this. In fact, clients aren’t set up for this either. Agencies earn their fees by trading time for dollars and some earn commissions on media spend or printing. Marketing departments manage their vendors as cost centers. There is nothing wrong with this age old model, it just means that an agency is motivated to do what it does.

Likewise, clients have learned to manage the agency as a cost center. So it makes sense due to the inherent inefficiency of the agency model, that you have high client turn-over and pressure to reduce price on work that is essentially a commodity

What would you call an agency with no graphic or interactive designers on staff? An agency that is proud of the fact that it has never produced a brochure. What kind of agency would this be? How does an agency explain how simple tweaks that integrate interactive with the sales process and measuring engagement instead of exposure and building branded content that supports informed decision-making are the killer competencies that clients should buy?

So what does an agency do? So what should an agency become?

In my company, there is the growing realization that reinvention will happen. Agencies must become an accountable piece of the sales process. The problem we’ve had growing this approach is that most large clients are not prepared to address real performance based compensation plans. There are too many complicating factors that make program measurement too complex.

On the other hand, the inevitable convergence of sales and marketing drives the realization that one-to-one communication is becoming more important than mass marketing messages, especially in B2B. Our ability to impact the sales pipeline is truly our core competency. The question is how do we reframe our business model so we are massively rewarded for helping our clients meet their sales goals?

Mark Sellers, author of “The Funnel Principle,” explains how the traditional sales funnel is flawed and should be flipped on its head as the Buyer’s Funnel. Starting with problem recognition (and an economic cost to the problem) and a commitment to doing something about the problem. Everything in the funnel requires a commitment by the customer. The traditional sales pipeline is a fiction created by the sales person. The problem is that it focuses on selling activity.

The prospect is not a prospect unless the prospect has stated a need and admitted a pain.

I went to the website. My immediate comment…insanely great, deeply differentiating and long overdue.

I followed some links and arrived at the blog of one of Valorum’s founders. I read the first article. Again. Insanely great, deeply differentiating and long overdue.

Here’s a quick excerpt about the troubled economy and what it means to professional services firms…we must find the silver-lining…

“The moral of these posts is that the economy is a once in a century meltdown, things are not getting better yet and the magnitude of these problems is such that one must anticipate profound change in the profession.

There, I said it. Profound change in the profession. I using the C word given how it has become the centerpiece of the US Presidential election and there both overused and misused. But here is the inescapable fact: General Counsel, indeed all in-house lawyers (save, perhaps those in the oil and gas industries) are facing unimaginable pressure to lower legal costs. The pressure is no different than that experienced by those in charge of procurement, sales and others responsible for the business of business. But the key factors are (1) the pressures to save are enormous, and (2) law department leaders are not immune from the pressure, or the accountability that goes along with it.

I recently was having a discussion with an in-house lawyer about cost control. He said his boss was very interested in the topic. His next sentence will stay with me forever: “What interests my boss fascinates me.” I’m sure that line or at least the sentiment has been used by many, but what a lesson for we outside lawyers.

The title of this post asks if there is a silver lining in the black economic cloud hanging over our clients’ heads. If you don’t see the opportunity to restructure relationships in ways that produce savings for your clients while at the same time strengthening your relationship with that client, you need to open your eyes. There is no formula–I’d write about it if there was–because each client’s situation is unique. But there is surely a topic of discussion there that all should pick up on. If you do it right, you’ll like back and say that your response to these unprecedented difficult times was your finest hour (with my respects to Sir Winston Churchill).”

What is your monopoly?

Xerox sales training basically can be summed in in a few words: Find your monopoly. This is my summarization, not theirs, but I think it speaks volumes. Every premium priced product has more options then a standard priced product. Think Lexus vs. Toyota or Sony vs. Sanyo. If you are sold those products in a way that makes you believe that you cannot live without one of the premium options, and that is emphasised in presentations again and again you start to really believe it. Soon, that option is more important to you than price. If this is all done correctly it actually becomes your(the customers’) idea that that option is 100% necessary. It is developing this Monopoly in your customers mind that is so powerful in sales. Without it you are only competing on price. Every product has a Monopoly, even commodities. If you cannot find it, you are simply not a good sales person. So I ask you: What is your product/companies monopoly?

http://20somethingsalesrep.blogspot.com/2007/01/xerox-sales-training-find-your-monopoly.html

http://blogs.pathf.com/uxd/2007/09/design-doesnt-j.html

I quickly discovered that some people hear the word ‘design’ and automatically associate it with the look and feel of the GUI, regardless of what else is being said. Until I understood that, their argument that there was no need to call out an entire phase for design made absolutely no sense. To me, using design in this context means to figure out how to do something at all levels, i.e., taking the requirements (Discovery Phase) into high-level schematics (Design Phase) to better understand their relationships, dependencies and impact in the end-to-end process. Obviously, I hadn’t explained that well.