Data-Driven Marketing Without Fuss
Accelerating change
Planned use of direct marketing techniques continues to evolve apace, evidenced by the trends in prospect data usage within business to business (b2b) over the last 5 years.
Whilst top line direct marketing industry figures show a continuing trend of positive investment, scratch the surface, and a more mixed picture presents itself.
In house database-driven data usage has crept up from 30% towards and beyond 40% of all business to business direct marketing, and is likely to account for half of all activity by 2003/4.
Expenditure on list acquisition for postal mailings has been fairly flat since 2000, whilst prospect data bought for in-house use has steadily increased at an annual rate of 20%, reflecting a hardening interest in multi-channel campaigning, telesales and segmented data usage.
The Intention Gap
You may have noted the turn of phrase 'planned use' at the very start of this article. Why? Because the intention to undertake systematic direct marketing activity would appear to be very different from common practice.
Prospect data is too often acquired for extended use, only to be under-utilised. It is common for businesses that have invested in prospect lists not to even know they exist.
The reasons why vary, but they all boil down to a lack of effective internal communication, and poor database application software. These dual weaknesses limit the potential of any business to realise the true value from their available market, because of a common disjoint between marketing and sales, and an accompanying lack of scalability in business processes.
Market Developer – A Way Forward
It is these issues that have led to the launch of Market Developer, an entirely web-based database application service that solves these issues with an extremely short implementation cycle. Now medium sized customers can benefit from the same sales and marketing functionality that established CRM software vendors deliver, but at a fraction of their cost.
So how can Market Developer solve these fundamental business challenges that even well known expensive software brands so often fail to adequately address?
The Answer – Part 1
Firstly, an implementation methodology that is firmly rooted in direct marketing principles, and secondly, a focus on simplifying the direct marketing and sales process chain, with accompanying benefits in terms of getting internal company departments to work better together.
Beyond the essential cleaning of source files and acquisition of the best prospect groups, here are the three core concepts that underpin a methodology for success:
Create a single view of your potential market.
Bringing your customers, responders, lapsed business, enquirers, and prospects together within a single database structure need not be an expensive and time consuming operation.
Obvious though it may seem, this is the starting point for being able to ramp up the number of campaigns from established current levels, by turning what otherwise would be 3 or 4 operational steps into a single seamless process. In turn, this supports faster-paced, better targeted and differentiated, direct marketing and lead generation .
Create a unique database design that reflects your market map.
An intrinsic part of this process is implementing an effective classification schema. Analysing business and product definitions within the sources that are to be brought together, standardising these where applicable, and setting detailed rules for mapping fields and translating values from sources into the new classification, is rarely done well.
To be truly effective, you need to reflect your market definitions, as well as your routes (channels) to market, within the database design, otherwise it will be incapable of easily planning and managing all your sales activity, and related demand push and demand pull initiatives.
This is especially important in business to business environments, where a business can often sell different product lines through more than one distributor, and resellers, within the same territory or overlapping ones.
Reflect your established or desired business processes.
The number one business issue in the area of technology enabled sales and marketing is adoption. The value of the previous steps is only realised when sales and marketing people, but especially sales teams, adopt the framework implemented for more effective lead generation and selling.
Adoption only takes place when the framework that the new technology offers is consistent with the way individuals within the team, and the team collectively, are expected to work. If it does not mirror working practises, sales standards and work flow sufficiently closely to be used easily and quickly, it will not be used effectively. No matter how much mandating of the application management thereafter attempt, individuals within sales teams will find ways to work around it.
Market Developer addresses this issue through an architecture that is made up of three layers, rather like a filled sandwich.
The first layer is the database, comprising the unique design, preloaded with prospects and customers. The second layer is the application, which is always identical, so that implementations benefit in full from enhancements and upgrades. The third layer is visualisation, so that the unique database design can be reflected and navigated in whichever way the working practises, sales standards and work flows dictate.
This means that customers with very different priorities, and operating in different market sectors, will use visually different versions of Market Developer that reflect these priorities, that nonetheless are based upon the same core technologies as each other.
The Answer – Part 2
Part 1 represents a methodology that provides the foundations for success.
Part 2 is about simplifying the direct marketing and sales process chain enables sales and marketing activity to be ramped up dramatically, delivering a very rapid return on investment within a single financial year, out of existing resources.
The steps behind planned direct marketing and lead generation activity, that needs to effectively interlink with sales, are harder to manage than is necessarily apparent at face value. This is partly because a number of different suppliers are usually involved in the different steps, reflecting the value of specialist know-how and experience. As a result, the critical path of campaigns are extended, and project management takes up a disproportionate period of time. The diagram below shows these steps, and illustrates how Market Developer joins up the processes. In doing so, communication within a business, and between their suppliers, is dramatically improved.
The Importance of Database Management
Underpinning this approach is a powerful data processing engine that is a central part of the Market Developer offering. Moving data easily in and out of the database is a critical, high frequency, activity in order to link direct marketing steps and suppliers.
Matching and merging records, and processing out duplicates is also essential to support the feeding back of additional information from this network of suppliers, in house activity, and additional data loads.
A successful technology-enabled sales and marketing system flushes prospect lists out from sales people's over a period of time. Once the value has been established as a result of initial use, lists and customer information emerge that were not offered up for the initial database build.
Constant incremental additions and updating of records with additional or changed information requires easy to use de-duplication routines, and loading has to be quick.
Too often this has to be undertaken by exporting the entire database, running the processing externally, then re-importing the combined dataset back in. Not only does this overcomplicate matters, but it absorbs valuable time that ought to be spent productively generating revenues.
Frankly, it beggars belief that so many leading 'CRM systems' offer prehistoric utilities in this most critical aspect of database management. One market leader just recently described to me how his application was really easy to load data in, but 'a real pig to get data out'! The same system only offers the most basic of exact match duplicate identification, on a choice of 3 fields. This is hopelessly inadequate for keeping a database clean – especially in business to business environments. And people wonder why they don't get a return on investment?
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