The data in most of the company’s CRM and marketing automation system unvaryingly degenerates with time as their leads change their post, designations and jobs or often profession too.
The bottle neck for lead generation professionals lies there – keeping fingers on the pulse. How can you increase lead generation, when the proportion of quality data you’re working with is actively decreasing as time goes by?
Given that your data is not static, you need to ensure that you keep up with the data. Most of the marketers don’t bother, eroding their database and ending up in buying more data from data vendors (which again meets the same fate over time). As an alternate they ramp up their inbound efforts (which means further inaccuracy, incomplete and made-up leads forced into your database in conjunction with good ones).
Ultimately though, it merely ends up with sales and marketing being nudged to the edge making it harder and harder to produce better results – left with less useful data. Efficiency stagnates or reduces, so the pressure heightens, so you buy more data, and so on.
This vicious cycle can be broken provided your company identifies a critical fact: your database is not consistent with data, rather it has people or more accurately – data of people.
The crux of the entire discussion is those leads are mainly human beings. They keep changing their position and move out of a company frequently. They gain more experience, develop additional skills, and become familiar with newer and better sophisticated technologies.
Often in the hysteria to drive increased lead generation, this core part is easily forgotten. But that human data needs to be reflected in your databases. If not, your marketing campaigns are bound to fail or fetch minimal outcome than expected.
How to add human touch to your database
This is an in-depth and time-consuming task, partakes detailed requirements. However, it is worth doing.
CRMs and marketing automation systems typically include just a few basic fields of information about your leads and contacts. You will fail to engage with your prospects effectively, in other words meaningfully increase lead generation – when you hardly know anything about your prospects.
Even if you succeed in enriching your database with the most minute insights into your leads, yet in the long term that will not be the only helpful factor to suffice. On the contrary, it will eventually mean more outdated – and potentially misleading data to disrupt future campaigns.
To humanize your data, it must evolve along with the people it embodies. After all, B2B sales and marketing professionals have their plates full to be contended without having to chase shadows.
This is one of the major problems with most data vendors and data enrichment platforms out there. Many of them fail to secure a comprehensive and correct insights to be useful in the first place – while those who can do so too often lack real-time or on-demand refreshing and enrichment capabilities.
Increased Lead generation with humanized database
The significance of human data transcends any marketing solution or strategy, irrespective of how advanced it is. The quality of your fundamental data will always be your organization’s key asset – else the chief liability.
A great example is about account-based marketing (ABM). Yes, ABM offers a highly-targeted, very effective and efficient approach to lead generation. Studies show that it is fetching – 60% of companies who adopted ABM reported increased revenue in the first 12 months, while 92% of companies surveyed by Sirius Decisions said they understood the value of ABM.
ABM is definitely good in theory. However, it will not actually increase lead generation without accurate and granular information on two levels: firstly, your target accounts (companies), including their development, at times their detailed infrastructures of local branches and subsidiaries; and secondly the key influencers (leads) within each account – the decision-makers.
Targeting named accounts, performing lead-to-account matching and site-level matching – all crucial ingredients of ABM – are impossible without quality, accurate and up-to-date human data.
Artificial Intelligence without human data, not Intelligent!
It also applies to AI – the latest technology that has swept away the B2B world by the feet.
AI needs to be so much more organic and valid in many levels to be potentially massive for B2B marketing firms. It is maturing the way B2B marketers do and spurred some truly revolutionary innovations for demand generation.
And like any technical solution, the powerhouse to AI is again data. With bad data, even the most advanced AI platform will be disillusioning. If your database does not reflect the human beings it represents, none of the AI platforms can be expected to relate to them as such.
Conclusion
Most data providers are stuck in the quagmire of humanizing the database that brings us to a full circle.
The world of big data has progressed swiftly over the years. On the other side, there is information in abundance out there more than ever – including third party data and social signals dispersed in the open web and on social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Yet in many respects, the B2B marketing firms have not matured with time, good enough to collect, sort and verify all that information at scale.
Third party data miners risk falling apart or go redundant if they fail to keep up. On-demand data enrichment – particularly if coupled with AI solutions like predictive analytics add an additional layer of advanced intelligence – offers B2B companies an opportunity that marketers cannot afford to miss out on.
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