Clicks 'n Conversions Blog

This article was first published June 10, 2008 on the Tatum Marketing blog

If you’re going to consistently develop prospects into sales-ready leads or customers, you’ll need a good marketing database. Even if you have a relatively small number of prospects, the cost of an online system to manage data and communications is so low (as in “free”) you’d have a hard time convincing me it isn’t worth it.

Why do you need a database? Organization really. A marketing database lets you:

• Segment and customize correspondence. In a complex buying situation – which business technology usually is – your prospects are not all on the same page. You need to know where each one is. With a marketing database, you can track where each prospect is in the buying process.
• Store and easily access records of previous communication. This can keep you from a) looking like an idiot because you can’t remember the last correspondence you had with the prospect or b) annoying the prospect with too much communication. (Newsletters; emails; phone calls. All in the same day. Jeez.)
• Avoid dropping prospects into a black hole. Make it clear who “owns” a lead at any point in time. Is it marketing’s or sales’ responsibility to follow up?
• Reduce administrative costs. Once it’s set up properly, a marketing database is simply a faster and more efficient way to organize your prospects than an admin and an Excel spreadsheet.
• Create visibility into the lead nurturing process. Nothing like the boss looking into the pipeline to keep marketing people focused.

Ideally, your marketing database and your sales database are shared. All of the correspondence notes on a contact are in one place. This contact history helps both marketing and sales people select the next communication tactic.

Unfortunately, most salesforce automation software (CRMs) are very lite on marketing management capabilities – although they are improving. Still, a CRM is a good place to start. I’ll take a look at marketing automation software in a future article.

What information goes in the marketing database?

This requires some thought. You’ll want your database to contain the attributes that are specific to your ideal prospect. The perfect database contains all the data you’ll actually use and nothing more.

Conveniently, much of what you’d put in a marketing database is the same as what you may already have in a sales database. You’ll definitely want to include the following general information:

• Company name
• Contacts & titles
• Address
• Telephone & fax numbers
• Email address
• Phone number
• Website URL
• You’ll also want specific demographic information such as:

o Company revenue

o Number of employees

o Industry

o Type of business

o Any other factors that help determine the prospect’s specific needs relative to what you’re selling.

Other helpful marketing information:

• Status – where is the lead in the marketing/ buying process? Status includes what actions the prospect has taken (accessed a whitepaper, attended a webinar, downloaded a product trial). It might also include lead ranking criteria (also a subject for another article).
• Activity history – what communication and contact has taken place with this prospect
• Lead source – how did this prospect find you?

Making it work

Our clients universally struggle with keeping a clean, up-to-date database. It’s boring and tedious. But business people tend to move around a lot. They change jobs and a new person comes in. They get a promotion. The company gets acquired and everyone’s email address changes.

You can avoid wasting time and money trying to communicate with prospects who have moved on by keeping your database up to date. Depending on how many prospects you have, you might be able to assign database maintenance as a part time responsibility or you may need to hire someone full time for it.

You’ll may also have to require that marketing and sales people use the database. Sales people in particular often resist this. I believe that’s because most CRMs are set up to make “management” easier and necessarily to make “selling” any easier. You can avoid this by including both sales and marketing teams in the development of the database as well as the entire marketing system.

This article got a little longer than usual so let me summarize. The important points of this article are:

1. You need a marketing database.
2. Everyone must use it.
3. Someone must be in charge of updating and maintaining it or the information will soon become junk.

Did you miss the first article in this series about Designing a Lead Nurturing System? If so, you can read it here: Designing a Lead Nurturing System: Part 1.