One of the most common jobs performed by our data team is address standardisation.  We see many different lists of company and contact data from a plethora of sources and almost always address data needs reviewing and correcting.  It can be simple stuff like postcodes in the wrong columns or multiple address lines in one column or missing or misspelt data – we have seen it all!

Not only can incorrect addresses lead to mail returns but they can also make de-duping data more difficult.  Incorrect or malformed addresses are also obvious to users of the data and can lead to a mistrust within the business, of its accuracy.  One of the key sources for incorrect data are self-service web forms including campaign landing pads, contact us pages, registration pages etc.

We have always been able to bulk verify addresses against the appropriate countries postal files (PAF in the UK) but many customers have asked us about technology that can verify and standardise address when they are captured on the web.

We are pleased to announce that we have partnered with PostCodeAnywhere.  This is a web service that allows automatic address entry and verification to be performed on your own capture forms, landing pads and registration pages on your web site.  Building the functionality into your forms is simplicity itself and the service is charged on a pay-per-click basis. See the link on our website for further information, to see demos or to sign up for the service. We can also help you to integrate the functionality on your own web pages.

As well as automatic UK or international address entry and verification we can provide geographic coding, bank detail verification, route planning and consumer profiling, all in real-time at point of entry. Please call us to discuss any requirements you may have.

We have been following the success of Salesforce.com over the last few years and have championed their efforts to provide a flexible development platform to allow highly customised solutions that can rival the biggest and most complex CRM systems.  We have worked on Salesforce.com projects with a number of clients and have now cemented the relationship by becoming a consulting and AppXChange partner.

This will allow us to build customer solutions on a flexible, reliable and on-demand platform giving our customers a low-risk and low cost alternative to bespoke systems. See the full press release here.  In the meantime, if you are an existing or prospective Saleforce.com user we would love to hear from you.

A common challenge seems to be emerging for marketing and sales operations personnel in 2008.  That is the ongoing requirement for a “Single Customer View”.  Most business recognise the potential for cross-selling and up-selling their offerings to their customer base but do not have the data at their fingertips to execute such initiatives.

The CRM promise of a 360 degree view of your customer never really materialised and businesses continue to have at least two or three sources of customer data.  Their CRM system provides customer contact, interest and sales lead information, their ERP system contains the line items of every customer purchase and their support system contains information of warranty, support contracts and installed base. All useful elements of customer data if you want to target your customer for up-sell and cross-sell campaigns.
Just like the hype that surrounded Customer Relationship Management at the beginning of the decade we are starting to see similar claims for emerging enterprise scale software that promises to link all these systems together transparently, to provide a single customer view.  Of course this all comes at a price!

Our answer to this is to apply a pragmatic data-centric approach.  Rather than trying to tie these systems together using technology our approach is to take feeds from each source and combine into a single Master Reference database.  Whilst this approach is not real-time it can be performed monthly or even weekly which is usually sufficient for the marketer who is executing campaigns to a timetable anyway. With the clever use of mapping algorithms the refresh process can be made quick, efficient and cost effective and can even encompass third party data sources to clean and enhance the data further.

This Master database can then be used by the marketing department to segment and target their customer base in ways that were just not possible whilst the data remained separated in the source systems.

We have recent cases whereby the insight gained by the business by combining and analysing their customer data completely changed their tactical approach to customer communication.  Just think what it could do to your business?
 

Many of the popular CRM software vendors make great claims of a single system for sales, marketing and support.  Indeed many companies have invested huge amounts to enable them to achieve this dream.   However, when it comes to satisfying the needs of the marketing department most, if not all CRM systems fail to deliver.
Over the years we have worked with many CRM systems, that, out of the box, share the same design principles for sales and marketing processes. Common to all is the notion that a “Lead” is a prospective piece of business that requires qualification before it is passed to Sales and becomes an “Opportunity”. 

The Lead itself is kept in isolation from existing account and contact information, supposedly so it does not clutter up your customer data.  Furthermore, there is no concept of nurturing leads – they are either qualified out or passed to sales, their historic significance being lost in the process.  This is compounded by the fact that the core functionality of the CRM system focuses on the processes revolving around managing the Opportunity not the Lead. Great if you are in the sales department but not so great for the marketer.

So what do we mean by Lead Management? Well let’s first forget the notion of Leads – it is not a Lead that buys from you but a person.  In a B2B environment that person works for a business that hopefully has a requirement for your products or services. So in CRM parlance we are still talking about tracking Contacts and Accounts. A “Lead” should purely be a way of recording the fact that at a particular point in time this person/business showed a certain level of interest in a particular product/service offering by responding in a certain way to a particular marketing or sales effort. Simple eh? Well not quite.

In the real-world companies have all sorts of types of Leads ranging in temperature from “Cold Suspects” that may have been purchased from a third party list provider to Hot Leads from existing customers. Also these days most businesses can not afford to pass all these different types of Leads to Sales to qualify and therefore qualification remains the remit of marketing. We would also argue that Marketing has a pipeline, just like Sales.  The Marketing pipeline should be designed to nurture leads (through “joined-up” campaigns) to a point where they are sales ready and therefore truly become Opportunities. Automating this pipeline (for campaign execution and lead tracking/scoring) coupled with a liberal sprinkling of list management (to cope with the various sources and quality of data) and preference management (to handle opt-ins/outs and communication preferences) is the art of Lead Management.

The good news is that driven largely by the “On-demand” market we are starting to see Lead Management add-ons to the popular CRM systems.  These are tightly integrated to the CRM system so that for all intents and purposes they are seamless - something that the CRM vendors themselves must be keeping an eye on.

We are still waiting for an industry standard CRM system that caters for the need for Lead Management but given the recent momentum, maybe it is not too far away?

Welcome to the first edition of “The Lead”, a newsletter designed for our customers and anyone involved with Marketing and Sales Operations within their businesses.  We hope to regularly bring you the latest news, views and comment on the operational challenges and successes within Marketing and Sales .

At the same time we are launching a companion BLOG to allow everyone to have their say and we hope to generate constructive discussions that will be a valuable resource for anyone in marketing or sales.  Why our own BLOG?  Quite simply we could not find an existing forum or BLOG that was focused on the ever increasing number of technical challenges that marketers face to achieve their goals  - so we created our own.  We have placed a number of entries on it already that we hope you will find interesting.  We would welcome your comment or views and please do post your own experiences.