Maintaining Accurate Marketing Data
It’s no news flash that economic hardships have raged in the United States over the last few years. Although signs of stabilization appear on the horizon, they remain distant and fuzzy in the face of the immediacy of 2011. How many offices nationwide have shut down, or – at the very least- trimmed overhead by means of forcing early retirement or offering buyouts? Even those companies that were not forced to cut jobs frequently found themselves having to reshuffle personnel positions in order to “trim the fat,” searching desperately for new levels of efficiency simply to maintain the status quo. What does all this mean? Many things, I suppose, but most importantly this:
THE SALES LISTS YOUR COMPANY GENERATED ARE MOST LIKELY OBSOLETE AS MARKETING DATA IS DETERIORATING FAST.
Regardless of whether the list was purchased from a 3rd party or developed via countless hours of manning the phones and making tough phone calls, accurate contacts are becoming the exception to the rule. One thing that drives sales forces and marketing teams crazy are the e-mails that are returned via Mailer Daemon, with a snide message like “no such user exists… I give up sending this… I just wasted time I could have been spending generating functional leads and future revenue for my company, too bad my sales contact list has deteriorated into a Swiss-cheese-like lead generator.” Okay, perhaps I exaggerated the last part, but you get the point. Bad contacts are a waste of time and money.
Solutions do exist to this quandary. A company could purchase an “updated” contact list from a 3rd party, guaranteeing that significant funds will be spent for information that has a shelf life similar to fresh fruit. Purchasing contact lists like these is akin to buying produce that is just starting to mold and gather fruit flies. Don’t buy lists frozen in a slightly stale stasis.
Or, Why not set your sales and marketing teams to sending out feeler e-mails, picking up the phone and making calls to corporate offices, and convincing employees from other companies to stop what they are doing to provide you with a personnel roster? The question should be “why would you?” or better yet, “is this the best use of your sales staff’s time?”
Or perhaps the best answer…
Let OnTarget Partners do the work for you. OnTarget is not just another 3rdparty lead generating company; not in the slightest. You see, while sales teams change, the higher-ups often remain in positions of power and influence. OnTarget doesn’t merely skim the surface of company personnel rosters with hasty searches using three key words. OnTarget digs deep, analyzing connections between companies, and – more importantly- between people. Using personal contact and specialized search techniques designed for our company in addition to modern “digital age” social media connections, allows OnTarget to maintain accurate and thorough leads. What good is the name and number of someone in purchasing for a company, if that person doesn’t have the authority to make decisions about purchases? A company that seeks to survive or, even better, to survive and thrive, needs to maintain accurate marketing data – with specific names, numbers, titles, relationships and more. Our lead generation is truly OnTarget. Keep those contact lists intact and updated, and let OnTarget do the dirty work for you!
To learn more about our data cleansing and custom research please visit: http://www.ontargetpartners.com/customresearch.html
-Marc Bedinghaus is a Social Media Coordinator for OnTarget Partners.
Tags: Account mapping services, cleanse legacy data, contact discovery, contact research, data cleansing, managing data deterioration
