You are living in the digital era and so you would be encountering and handling abundant data even though you are running a small business. The reality is B2B marketers are having unprecedented access to data relating to the decision-makers or even better tools for managing that data.
Yet, several small businesses are struggling due to obsolete, incomplete, and inaccurate databases. Here are a few solid recommendations for ensuring that your small business database is helping your business to forge ahead and not letting it stagnate.
Table of Contents
Audit consistently customer data
You must focus on building a total picture of your precise customer base; what are the characteristics and features that they share? Do you think that the contacts are updated? What sort of information are you lacking in? What does your perfect prospect look like?
Take a decision about the precise information you intend to collect
Your intention is to create a consistent and clear picture of prospects and customers. You must focus primarily on collecting relevant data that would be of great use in the promotion, marketing, and sales process.
Structure the collected data
Placing organizations into specific marketing segments would be of great help to marketing campaigns, as well as, reporting. It is of great importance to track exactly which phase of the overall sales cycle your business prospect seems to be in. A majority of the CRM systems would be having a default method to track sales.
Businesses must focus on creating rules for entering data consistently, using drop-down menus wherever possible. Simple rules would serve to avoid undesirable oversights. You may seek professional assistance from professional services like RemoteDBA.com for perfect DBA solutions.
Concentrate on expanding the database
The database could be effectively supplemented with:
- Bought in data
- The campaign generated data, for instance, new subscriptions to your mailing lists.
- Data collected from sales interactions along with other relevant information collected by your sales team.
- Social data that could be imported from social media platforms such as Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.
Fill in the blanks
Specialist data agencies actually offer a service wherein they would be enriching your small business database by supplying missing data such as contacts, telephone numbers, employee numbers, emails, and SIC codes. They may consider adding flags for identifying businesses that have subscribed to the TPS and the MPS.
However, you must keep in mind that even the most proficient data providers would not be having all the data required by you so you need to put in some endeavors for accumulating the additional data.
Chalk out a regular maintenance routine
Business data is known to degenerate at 25 percent or even more per annum. If you have not examined your data for about 18 months or so, there is every chance that 40 percent of your existing data would be outdated by now.
According to experts, companies would be sabotaging their marketing efforts through inefficiently managed data. You must keep updating your data every six months or so. This could be done by emails or telephone calls. Moreover, there are numerous applications that send out regular requests to customers for verifying their contact data. You must ensure that you know of an effective method to identify and merge duplicates.
Conclusion
You must consider the important steps discussed above while building a database. However, remember that it is vital for sales and marketing people to coordinate and work together toward the common goal that entails looking for, gaining, and keeping intact all profitable customers.
