Contact-Level Marketing: 4 Keys To Reaching The Right Buyers

Published: September 4, 2012


By Jon Russo, Founder of B2B Fusion Group

Jonathan Becker (@jbecker), the CMO of SAP, presented at this year’s Sirius Decisions conference on how important it is in a B2B buying cycle to “market to people, and not market to buildings.” Let’s take Becker’s theme one step further and translate that approach to the CRM and marketing automation world. 

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By Jon Russo, Founder of B2B Fusion Group

Jonathan Becker (@jbecker), the CMO of SAP, presented at this year’s Sirius Decisions conference on how important it is in a B2B buying cycle to “market to people, and not market to buildings.” Let’s take Becker’s theme one step further and translate that approach to the CRM and marketing automation world.

Marketing to the right contacts via these systems is a critical activity. Here are four key areas to focus on when marketing at a contact level:

Move from data cleansing to data hygiene. Data cleansing usually refers to a one-time data cleaning event using third-party tools. Data hygiene, on the other hand, embodies the ongoing process of minimizing duplicate lead, contact, opportunity and account data.  A key part of a data-hygiene regimen involves inspecting users that have mass-upload capabilities within sales and marketing, along with a close inspection of the types of tools they use to upload within the CRM and marketing automation functions.

As an example, the native bulk-upload toolset that Salesforce.com offers does not do an effective job at minimizing data duplications. Data.com, despite its promise in its latest version, only cleans some of this data depending on how the data is sourced. It’s important to address these issues, since data hygiene and integrity is foundational for successfully reaching the right contacts.

Segment based on your organization’s strategic objectives. The ability to segment a market along key attributes of your perfect prospect profile is very relevant to companies with revenue above $500M, although it’s applicable to companies of any size. These attributes can be found by enlisting third-party help to poll current customers; companies can further segment across firmographic data (augmented by D&B or other means) to include SIC code, employee size, vertical market and revenue size. There are usually sub-segments of technical buyers and business decision makers, for whom the messaging is different in each category.

Implement marketing automation effectively. A consistent opportunity for B2B companies to consider is the pursuit of “warm leads” or the “not now, maybe later” buyers – most of whom are more likely to close than “cold” outbound contacts.  Creating the right lead nurturing tracks, and the right sales processes to put the data into these tracks, is critical for the “not now, maybe later” buyer.

Train for consistency, and know how all elements of the sales process are measured. With CRM contact information, some organizations have competing objectives within the sales and marketing teams.  In the financial services segment, I’ve seen $2B companies leveraging Salesforce.com solutions that enable sales to cancel out marketing sourced opportunities – and then post the same opportunity as a new sales-sourced opportunity. This creates at least two issues. First, none of the marketing campaign information (primary or influencing) carries over to the “new” opportunity, so one does not know how often a contact is getting marketed to.  Second, this disconnect means that marketing-sourced revenue is potentially under-reported. Marketers should know how sales and marketing get compensated, and they should also know how sales is trained on opportunity creation within the CRM system.

What have you found effective in reaching your buyers in your buying cycle?

Jon Russo (@b2bcmo) is a three-time B2B Chief Marketing Officer whose assignments have ranged from a former division of General Electric to successful Silicon Valley startups. His global assignments have included Luxembourg, New York City and Silicon Valley. He currently runs B2B Fusion Group, a vendor-neutral business focused on connecting marketing investment to new revenue. You can reach him at jon.russo@b2bfusiongroup.com.

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