12StepsTo Ensure You Are Marketing To The Right

B2B Prospect Lead Database

A

E-Book

Courtesy of

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Marketing managers know that the best messaging, graphics and drip campaigns are doomed to fail

if they don’t reach the right person at the right company. But it has never been harder to ensure that a

marketing campaign hits a target that seemingly is in perpetual motion.

According to Gartner, 30 million of the 138 million American workers will change jobs over the next 12

months. That means workers, jobs, titles and companies are constantly being shuffled. Research from

DemandGen Report found nearly half of all B2B organizations feel inaccurate data affected their

ability to reach the right people in prospect organizations.

Nevertheless, today’s marketing managers are under increasing pressure to generate high-value leads

that ultimately produce revenue. To do that, a marketer must start with a database fueled not only by

well-performing information, but also the best B2B lead data available.

The key to moving a prospect from a high quality lead to a paying customer is clean, accurate

data. But it doesn’t stop there. Each campaign is different, so marketers are constantly refreshing,

augmenting and segmenting data. Combined with intelligence collected from channels such as

streamlined web tracking, landing pages and social media, today’s savvy marketer has multichannel

tools to target a prospect like never before, shortening the sales cycle and increasing revenues.

Executive Summary

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This E-book will provide lead data strategies and other critical components necessary to fuel high

performance campaigns, starting with connecting with the right prospect. The E-book breaks down

these actionable areas into the following steps:

1. Clarify the Unique Data Needs of Marketing and Sales

2. Give Your Data A Tune-Up

3. Augment & Enrich Your Database

4. Automate The Data Management Process

5. Segment Your Database

6. Target Campaigns to Narrower Audiences

7. Communicate Across Channels

8. Integrate Inbound Intelligence Into Outbound

9. Increase Landing Page Fill Rates

10. Improve Funnel Conversions

11. Use Data To Improve Sales & Marketing Alignment

12. Consistently Address Common Lead Database Issues

Learning Objectives

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Sales and marketing contacts are different creatures. When sales

representatives are building their own contact database, they often

settle for incomplete or inaccurate records that are passed along from

events, purchased from third-party list providers or even crowd sourced.

However, when sales is handed a lead from marketing their expectations

increase dramatically. Many organizations subscribe to the “holy grail”

of lead qualification based on traditional BANT criteria, which stands for

Budget, Authority, Need and Timing. Following this model, the marketing

team gathers qualifying information on whether the prospect attending

a webinar or downloading a paper is a serious buyer with power to pull

the trigger on a deal, or just someone doing initial research.

In order to qualify leads and build out their profile, marketing needs

deeper data and intelligence to effectively filter and nurture contacts

into truly qualified leads.

CRM systems provide powerful functionality to help marketers get this

done – if they’re fed the right data. Thanks to the growing number of rich

data sources now available, marketing teams have the ability to gather

intelligence such as:

• Complete contact information, which includes specifics on title

and role;

• Important company information and attributes; and

• Industry data to power micro-targeted campaigns.

“The need for more complete contact records has never been greater to

drive high performance demand creation campaigns,” explains Shawn Dyer,

Director of Data Strategies for Televerde. “Fortunately, there are also more

opportunities than ever before to close data gaps. Marketing automation

enables tracking of digital behavior on a lead-by-lead basis, and all that

intelligence can then be embedded into the contact record. At the end of

the day, a more complete contact record enables a more relevant set of

touch points with each prospect, and relevance can improve conversion

rate and accelerate lead movement through the pipeline.”

Step 1 Clarify The Unique Data Needs of Marketing and Sales

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Marketing campaigns are like Formula One racecars: both need the

right fuel for optimal performance. In marketing, that means having

the capability to quickly assess a database to ensure that it is delivering

up-to-date, accurate information. Research conducted by marketing

automation vendor Eloqua has shown that a high quality B2B prospect

database can dramatically improve lead conversion by up to 260%. Yet

for some marketers, data quality still remains a low priority.

One of the first steps in the tune-up process is conducting a needs

analysis to find out what your marketing database should look like in the

future. Part of that exercise is clarifying how marketing’s data will differ

from the sales team. Once

those structural steps are

addressed, the harder

work begins with digging

into the existing data to

determine the health of

your existing database.

Many B2B marketing executives

inherit a database that has

been handed down from the

company’s CRM system, and

is often filled with outdated,

inaccurate and incomplete

records. This makes it extremely

challenging to effectively analyze

campaign results and conversion rates.

“The longer an organization goes without addressing that quality, the

worse it gets,’’ continued Dyer. “Our experience has proven that a

deliberate focus on filling data gaps can dramatically improve lead

performance. Many organizations that we work with come to us with

their own data or data from other sources that typically falls below

what SiriusDecisions says is a standard 25% rate of unusable records for

organizations that deploy average data quality management practices.

We’re seeing 35% unusable records and in some cases even more.

Step 2 Give Your Data A Tune-Up

A high-quality B2B prospect database can dramatically improve lead conversion by up to 260%.

- Eloqua Research

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With a blend of strong data practices, including comprehensive and

ongoing data diagnostics, that unusable record rate can improve

significantly, which makes marketing programs much more targeted,

improves conversion rates, and ultimately results in more closed-won deals.’’

The process of identifying and analyzing those gaps typically reveals the

problem areas of a marketing database, which often leads to the next

necessary steps of cleansing, appending and refreshing.

• The cleansing phase identifies duplicate and incomplete records.

Ideally, de-duping names, titles and companies repeated in

inconsistent ways, such as spelling, abbreviations or initials, should

result in a single record with current information matched to the

contact’s profile.

• Appending adds information from other areas of an organization’s

database, such as email addresses or phone numbers.

• Refreshing helps to remove records that are outdated or invalid,

and replaces old names with current information.

Industry estimates show that data decays at a rate of 25% to 30% per

year. Therefore, just to maintain a given database, marketers need to

grow that database by that same percentage each year to replace the

contacts whose information has become inaccurate. Marketing teams

now need a strategy to augment and enrich their databases after the

cleanup phase.

Database augmentation becomes even more critical when companies

are launching new products and expanding into new regions or

vertical industries.

In these cases, marketing teams

are relied upon to support the

sales team with fresh prospects,

or new opportunities within

existing leads. For example, if

a company expands into Latin

America for the first time, the

sales team will need some initial

prospects to pursue.

Step 3 Augment & Enrich Your Database

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While the criteria for leads may be lowered initially, marketing’s

involvement is even more vital to help sales get up to speed in learning

the needs and nuances of a new market.

Keeping databases

“campaign ready” can

have a significant impact

on revenue. Working with

a comprehensive B2B

lead data enhancement

service provider, marketing

and sales teams can

standardize all account

and company information.

These services also score

email addresses for deliverability and augment contacts and leads with

more information to help power segmentation and targeting.

A data enhancement service can also fill in the database’s “white

space,” replacing the missing email addresses from outside industry

sources. It also assesses the database to identify and quantify fill

gaps, as well as calculate the financial opportunity in making a

database campaign ready.

Industry estimates show that data decays at rate of 25% to 30% per year. Therefore, just to maintain a given database, marketers need to grow that database by that same percentage each year.

Case In Point: Eloqua Uses Role-Based Contacts To Support New Geographic Rollouts

Marketing automation provider Eloqua worked with Reachforce to build a targeted custom database of role-based contacts focused on four key geographic locations. It used that information to fuel an automated, multi-touch, multi-modal campaign. The fresh leads were scored and passed off to sales.

“Quality of data has been key in getting our new sales team ramped,’’ said an Eloqua sales VP. “We can directly correlate the role-based contacts to the people we want to talk to and efficiently target them to fill our sales pipeline.’’

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Every month marketers lose about 3% of their leads, based on job

switching alone. Depending on the size of the database, this attrition

can quickly add up to a substantial loss in value from a financial

standpoint, and contributes to labor drain when identifying and

replacing those contacts.

By implementing automated contact management solutions, B2B

marketers are able to work inside their CRM systems to clean, grow

and enrich their database with up-to-date and accurate information.

In addition to increasing the completeness of their data and leads,

marketers are using these services to purchase highly targeted and

segmented net new leads to support upcoming campaigns and events.

This automated approach to data enables marketers to monitor and

manage the overall accuracy of information, as well as source new

records in a very smart way that reports what blanks and gaps need

filling relating to target markets and personas.

Step 4 Automate The Data Management Process

Case In Point: nCircle Protects Data Investments

Susan McCorriston, Director of Marketing Communications at

nCircle, realized the financial drain on her organization.

“We spent so much of our budget on acquiring names, I couldn’t

stand to see so many of them simply `go dark’ when we couldn’t

make contact,’’ she said. “When someone hits the delete key, we

flush $25 of marketing spend down the drain. It was gut wrenching

for me.”

McCorriston “stopped the bleeding” by bringing in an automated

system that did more than just standardize, de-duplicate, merge lists

and append missing information prior to CRM implementation. It

added missing attributes such as phone, mailing address, industry,

company revenue and flagged the number of employees.

Duplicate records were identified not just by names, but by

addresses, titles and phone numbers. Standard industrial

classification (SIC) and North American Industry Classification

System (NAICS) codes were appended and email deliverability was

scored. Overall, in the first quarter after working with ReachForce,

nCircle was able to identify over a half million dollars in sales that

grew out of lead records that were candidates for deletion.

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In the current business climate, every marketer must demonstrate

real value and show how marketing spend contributes to the top and

bottom line in ways that are measurable. The days of batch and blast

emails where campaigns are tossed over the wall in hopes of landing

leads are long gone.

Best practices have shown one of the best ways to achieve these

goals is by segmenting lead databases. The more a database is

segmented into smaller, similar groups, the easier it is to target the

marketing’s message. Targeting your lead generation activities can

improve your revenue outcomes by 781%, according to a recent

study by Jupiter Research.

Some of the segmentation criteria marketers are using to increase the

intelligence and value of their data include:

• Geography; • Special interest group;

• Industry; • Company size or revenue; and/or

• Prospect title; • Technology install base.

• Role (decision maker or end user);

Once a database is segmented,

it becomes easier to create

profiles of top customers

and identify their similar

characteristics. For instance,

an organization may be more

successful selling to larger

companies, companies with

several divisions or smaller businesses.

After those common characteristics have been established, an

organization can identify those companies with the highest propensity

to buy. By matching those profiles to the database, the marketing team

can determine where contacts are needed and fill in the blanks on

empty fields or with additional contacts.

Step 5 Segment Your Database

Targeting your lead generation activities can improve your revenue outcomes by 781%.

- Jupiter Research

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To target more effectively, organizations can ask questions like:

• What is the need that the customer wants to address?

• Who is the customer’s end user?

• What is the contact’s role in the organization and are there other

people you must consider?

In addition to providing the answers to many of these questions,

segmenting campaigns can also help companies better understand

their prospect profile, based on their activity. By combining

segmentation strategies

into nurturing campaigns,

marketing and sales teams

have also developed

deeper intelligence into

typical buying cycles.

Not every marketing campaign can be all things to all customers. In fact,

the average response rate for a generic marketing campaign is less than

3%. To determine which customers should be included in a narrower

campaign, start by asking “who” rather than “how many,” as in who are

the most likely prospects.

As marketing and sales teams become more sophisticated with their

measurement and execution, SiriusDecisions’ Managing Director

John Neeson recently pointed out that segmentation and targeting

capabilities have emerged as key competitive differentiators. Neeson

said segmentation and targeting are especially important as companies

look to “get into new segments, or consolidate” existing verticals or

product lines.

Industry analysts have also cited an emerging trend around behavior-

based segmentation in driving personalized/customized content to distinct

buyers. Progressive marketing organizations are now working more closely

with sales to define campaigns for very targeted groups of prospects.

Step 6 Target Campaigns to Narrower Audiences

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Using online prospect intelligence tools, marketing teams are able to

build and execute campaigns for very refined groups with a specific call

to action.

These targeted prospect groups are often modeled based on the

attributes of current customers. With access to profiles of similar

prospects, sales and marketing are able to narrow their focus and

deliver a targeted message that has a better chance of resonating

with an audience.

By reviewing recent pipeline activity

and customer-win data, marketing and

sales can map their campaigns around

key qualifying characteristics and key

questions such as:

• In which market segments am I

closing the most deals?

• In which market segments are deals closing the fastest?

• What are the common characteristics of companies in those

market segments?

• What other market segments share those common characteristics?

This focus on narrower, more targeted audiences, augmented with more

sophisticated demand generation and marketing automation tools,

often results with a renewed appreciation for the quality of leads over

quantity. By having relevant data on a targeted group of prospects, both

marketing and sales can establish a digital dialogue and greatly increase

their chances of progressing a contact to a customer.

The average response rate for a generic marketing campaign is less than 3%.

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B2B sales and marketing strategies have historically focused their lead

generation initiatives on traditional channels such as email or telesales.

However, the reality is most B2B buyers now start their research process

with a Google search and continue across multiple channels. Therefore,

it is essential that marketers develop databases that have complete

records and enable them to communicate with prospects across media

and channels.

The good news, according to MarketingSherpa, is that knowing how

customers want to obtain information on the web can increase

average conversion rate by 21.6% or more. Looking at it another way,

organizations can drive an extra 250 leads for every 1,000 that are paid

for. Marketers need to develop a multi-touch contact strategy that works

across multiple channels.

For instance, some people like to get their information by listening rather

than reading. For that audience a podcast would be appropriate.

Other people are visual learners or like interacting with people. To get

their attention try a webcast. Additionally, marketers can connect with

prospective buyers via social networks or through partners and colleagues.

In order to build a relevant conversation with prospects, it is critical to

have a two-way dialogue that is able to identify the needs of buyers. For

B2B marketers, this means building strategies that integrate both inbound

and outbound intelligence.

Inbound leads strategies can help prospects discover an organization

organically. The trick, of course, is converting those inbound leads

by having web site visitors voluntarily give their contact information.

Inbound-generated marketing leads can deliver up to 10 times more

revenue than outbound campaigns. In its 2012 Search Marketing

Benchmark Report, MarketingSherpa found that “using social media

boosts leads by 30% and

revenue by 114%.” Additionally,

“revamped and optimized web

content was found to double

lead conversions.”

Step 7 Connect Across Channels Step 8 Integrate Inbound Intelligence Into Outbound

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Name:

Title:

E-mail:

Company:

Of course, integrating inbound intelligence into outbound efforts

assumes marketers have the appropriate level of contact data to

fuel those campaigns. This level of needed data, as well as battling

abandonment rates, requires landing page form best practices,

including better designs, to make the experience fast and easy.

Through the use of progressive profiling and intelligent database

solutions, B2B marketers have dramatically improved their ability to

convert anonymous visitors into named prospects by eliminating the

need to ask peripheral firmographic questions, such as company

revenue or number of employees.

Industry best practices have recommended that marketers limit web

forms to the following four fields:

Step 9 Increase Landing Page Form Fill Rates

“Using social media boosts leads by 30% and revenue by 114%.”

2012 Search Marketing Benchmark,Marketing Sherpa

These are the primary 4 categories to effectively profile and categorize site visitors.

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With intelligent database solutions running behind the scenes on a

landing page or web form, companies can append a wider set of

attributes, such as:

• SIC Code;

• Employee Count;

• Annual Revenue;

• Company address;

• Phone;

• Country code;

• URL; and

• Headquarters or branch.

These intelligent data solutions have proven to be an effective way to

balance the need for shorter forms, while at the same time building

complete and accurate profiles on inbound traffic. More complete and

accurate inbound traffic profiles arm the sales team and accelerate the

sales cycle.

As B2B marketers increase their sophistication with demand generation

campaigns, analysis and metrics associated with those campaigns

have also evolved. Broad analysis has given way to a far more

detailed examination of key stages within the sales and marketing

funnel. Marketers and sales are now spending more time analyzing the

progression of raw leads to qualified sales opportunities and, ultimately,

closed deals.

One of the best paths to increase conversion rates is having accurate

and actionable data at each phase of the funnel. “We have always

recognized the critical role of accurate data in demand creation

programs,” said James H. Hooker, President and CEO, Televerde. “Data

impacts all stages of the sales pipeline, with the biggest impact at

the early ‘top of the funnel’ stages of demand discovery and lead

generation. The data must be pristine at this stage in order to achieve

the ultimate downstream objectives of top-line revenue growth and

maximum marketing ROI.”

Step 10 Improve Funnel Campaign Conversions

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By having deeper intelligence into an early stage lead, marketers are able

to send more targeted nurture messaging and accelerate conversion to

the opportunity phase. This deeper intelligence also supports the closed-

loop process many B2B marketers are looking to achieve, where they can

track what type of buyers are converting at various stages and then use

that information to influence future campaigns.

When marketing and sales are aligned, prospects move quickly from

“hearing about an organization online, to engaging with sales to,

hopefully, taking the final step toward a purchase,” according to David

Thompson, CEO and Co-Founder of marketing automation vendor

Genius, and author of “Sales 2.0 for Dummies.”

Unfortunately, in many B2B organizations, marketing and sales teams

plan separately, act separately and report separately, which contributes

to the problem of inaccurate data. By aligning their data management

processes, progressive organizations are building a shared sales and

marketing funnel that delivers measurable results.

These aligned organizations are seeing tangible benefits such as:

• Reducing the amount time wasted by sales on bad contacts;

• Unclogging the pipeline and directly affecting the conversion

rates within the demand waterfall; and

• Decreasing opt-out rates due to irrelevant messaging.

Step 11 Use Data To Improve Sales and Marketing Alignment

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The Data Warehouse Institute estimates that bad data costs

American businesses $600 billion a year. The three most prevalent

and economically damaging lead database issues are duplicate,

incomplete or obsolete records. But the list doesn’t end there. Bad data

can include non-standard formats (VP for Vice President), inappropriate

data (notes in the wrong field) and undeliverable emails.

DemandGen Report found that

almost 2/3 of B2B organizations

rely on data that is largely

incomplete or inaccurate. This

starts with CRM or SFA databases

containing bad records and then

continues into marketing.

With people regularly changing

jobs, titles and companies, reaching the correct person at the correct

company has become a daunting challenge for marketers. With 3% of

today’s new information useless within a month, having the best B2B lead

data is essential.

Step 12 Plan For Data Consistency: Address Common Lead Database Issues

“Almost 2/3 of B2B organizations rely on data that is largely incomplete or inaccurate.”

- DemandGen Report

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There is a growing need for alignment and collaboration among marketing and sales in today’s business

environment, but it also is important to remember that marketing has unique needs for data and

intelligence into prospects. With the continued adoption of automated systems and better processes,

marketers are now expected to generate higher quality, more impactful leads. In order to continue to

improve in this area, B2B marketers need deeper data and intelligence in order to effectively filter and

nurture contacts into opportunities.

As this E-book has outlined, data plays a key part in solving all of these challenges. In order to efficiently

manage their valuable investment in building an accurate contact database, progressive marketers are

automating the data management process. They are taking steps to clean and refresh their data, augment it

to support key business initiatives and segment that data for more targeted messaging.

Ultimately, by ensuring that they are marketing to the right contacts, marketers are seeing significant payoffs by

generating more qualified leads and converting those leads into revenue.

Conclusion

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About ReachforceReachForce delivers high-performance marketing lead data services that accelerate revenue for B2B

companies. With the industry’s largest (more than 100 million records) company and contact data set,

ReachForce fuels inbound, outbound, and database marketing initiatives for revenue-driven marketers

with powerful tools to assess, clean, append, and acquire the right data and increase their market

reach to the right audience.

About DemandGen ReportDemandGen Report is a targeted e-media publication spotlighting the strategies and solutions that

help companies better align their sales and marketing organizations, and ultimately, drive growth. A

key component of our coverage focuses on the sales and marketing automation tools that enable

companies to better measure and manage their multi-channel demand generation efforts.

411 State RT 17, Suite 410Hasbrouck Heights, NJ 07604

1.888.603.3626www.demandgenreport.com

9020-I Capital of TX Hwy N, Ste. 270 Austin, TX 78759

512.327.9000

www.reachforce.com

About

About TeleverdeTeleverde is the leading B2B provider of sales pipeline development solutions that drive increased revenue for our clients by integrating contact data, marketing automation and world-class teleservices.We identify new customers, accelerate and convert sales opportunities, and discover fresh, actionable market insight. The outcomes we produce are improved performance of your sales pipeline, net new top-line sales revenue growth, measurable return on marketing investment, and sales & marketing alignment. We provide a sensible, integrated and disciplined approach to optimizing sales and marketing program performance.

4636 E. University DrPhoenix, AZ 85034

480.736.8137www.televerde.com