Spend time on data, increases enterprise wide sales and marketing efficiency. Common sense, right? Nope.
- 33% of our new clients in the Commercial Finance space cannot easily produce a simple database of targets for email, direct mail, etc.
- 43%: The average invalid contact data percentage of a database we start working with
- 60% of our clients cannot on first engagement produce a company-wide email database of existing customer decision makers.
Yes, existing customers. Again, they couldn’t easily identify the world’s easiest way to contact their existing customers. Shocking. Something is wrong in the world of sales management.
For years I have said great sales and marketing starts with great data. I didn’t think that was a moment of brilliance, I thought it was common sense. Actually, great business starts with great data and far too often people in the commercial finance business dramatically under-invest in the effort to build great databases. A few reasons (just from a marketing and sales perspective) to have great data:
- Never again let the salespeople control all the data. Customer and prospect data is your company’s asset, so stop watching it run through a revolving door every time a salesperson turns over.
- End of term renewal sales and marketing becomes a breeze, where today too many of you are losing renewals and capital expansion opportunities because of losing touch. Stop that.
- When the salesperson’s “great book of business” turns out to be less than promised…which it almost always does…you have ground you can hand them in a database to farm. And no, handing them access to a D&B database is not enough.
- Also in the increasing “gray hair” world of our business, wouldn’t it be nice to bring someone younger up through the ranks. The payoff for your company is usually far stronger if you do this and database can help tremendously.
PWC did a really nice whitepaper chastising, I mean point out the challenges for commercial lending groups and data. An excerpt from the findings:
We agree. If your CRM data is lacking, the first thing you have to do is look in the mirror. The biggest problem in achieving great data is poor sales management, not technological functionality. Many of these CRM tools have far more horsepower than you take the time to use and understand. If you need a great provider, we recommend Leasepath, a great comprehensive solution. If you need a better understanding of how data impacts successful sales and marketing…give us a holler.