Cleaning up the data
It’s that time of year again – we’re heading into the summer and in the B2B world, things start to slow down a little – particularly in August when everyone heads off to sunnier climes!
That’s not to say that at Great Guns Marketing we down tools and head for the park – quite the opposite in fact. We have been working really hard over the last few months to develop our services so our clients can use this quieter period to focus on the areas that they are usually too busy to deal with. And one of those is the perennial problem of data cleansing.
As we all know, successful sales and marketing lead generation requires an accurate and well profiled database. With B2B data decaying faster than consumer data, at 30% a year compared with 7% with B2C, if you let your database degrade then you are wasting at least a third of your annual sales and marketing budget by targeting out of date contacts. And with the economic climate bringing an increase in restructures and redundancies, your prospect database is at risk of becoming obsolete at an even faster rate.
However, not all B2B service providers realise the importance of maintaining, profiling and building their contact databases and those that do quite often don’t have the resources in place to undertake this ongoing task. But it’s critical that companies recognise the value that up-to-date data delivers to sales and marketing efforts.
A well-maintained database will ensure reduced waste by eliminating duplicates and poor-quality addresses, ensuring companies focus their efforts on ‘live’ contacts. In addition, an enhanced database will offer alternative routes to communicate – for example if you don’t hold email addresses for contacts then why not undertake some telemarketing to gather this critical data, after all, email marketing is a relatively quick and cost effective way to interact with prospects and customers.
Overall, cleansing and building your database should be something that companies get into a routine of doing regularly. To be in with any chance of generating leads, it’s essential that the people on your records are the right contacts, to save you wasting valuable time and of course, money.
Fortunately our clients are starting to recognise the benefits of data cleansing and are working closely with us to get their database up to scratch, but there are still far too many companies out there losing opportunities by the minute because of something as simple to rectify as bad data.
