Jeff Fischer, VP of Marketing

Mergers, Acquisitions, Consolidations, Bankruptcies:  All big words making headlines in today’s industries.  For the marketer trying to sell goods and services into this vertical, knowing who’s who today, and keeping up with the changes, can be like keeping up with where that damn second sock ended up in your clothes’ basket or dryer.

Executives, SVP’s, VP’s, Directors, Managers, come and go at an ever-increasing rate.  Keeping up with contact’s functional area of responsibility becomes increasingly more difficult for your marketing and sales teams.  Who is the correct executive to target? What is their new role within the entity?  How do you even begin to develop a good target list for pursuit?  Marketers can not afford to have their sales teams wasting effort on the wrong contact.

Certainly, a quick search of the internet will yield many firms, willing to sell data to you, on the cheap.  “Executive Contact Lists”, “Free Business Lists Available”, “Finance Leads” – are but a small sampling of many of the hooks used.  Unfortunately, if a marketer, who is often working on developing leads to input into their CRM, relies on the voracity (or lack thereof) of this data, they are headed for white water.

Managing data deterioration is focusing on the following factors:

• How recently was the data updated?
• What is the functional area of responsibility of the contact?
• How complete and accurate is the information?
• Was the information verified – and if so, how?

Happy Hunting to you all – remember the old adage (albeit a bit changed):  if it was really cheap, it will end up costing you in other ways – such as wasted time and effort.