Amongst the smoke and mirrors of business information, what is real and what is...something else? Where is the value?
Believe me, these are questions that keep me awake at night. Read some of the web sites and listen to a few data sales professionals, and you would think you were buying the crown jewels, but that is rarely so.
In most cases, we are buying a recipe of information combined, overlaid, assumed and estimated to give us the targetability we think our clients want. Being able to select from a data set is clearly a must. Most general databases are automatically segmented by SIC code, or a similar directory code, but there is no guaruntee these are correct.
Was the SIC code originally registered at Companies House correctly? Did the directory put them in the right slot? Then you move onto company size. Only 1000,000 ‘large’ businesses file full turnover figures. The rest are estimated, or asked. How does the estimate work? Who got asked the question within the organisation, and did they give an accurate answer? Is that answer more reliable than an estimated value?
I could go on, but I am losing the will to live. In short, nearly every field we rely on to segment and select data is open to debate. Hence, each dataset is inbuilt with a variety of inaccuracies and errors. So, I like to start with the basics in looking at any dataset. How is it created?
The strength of the creation process gives a strong indication of the basic value of the database. That is why the most valuable datasets in this country are all directories. Regardless of the different models, a form is filled out giving some cold hard facts, and these must be accurate because the whole point of registering with a directory is to attract customers - so the company name, address and phone number are going to be checked and are likely to be right.
Evolution then comes into play. To build a fully selectable dataset, other data sources are matched. Empty fields are estimated, tele-verification takes place on certain elements, and you get the playing field we all run around on. It is much more Kiln Brow (Redhill FC) than Emirates Stadium, believe me.
The added value is evolution, but the core quality is in creation. As a data owner, I trust that core, because without that solid, living spine the data has no value. And yet as an industry we put far more effort, and talk far more, about the more brittle bones connected to that spine.
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Last Thursday, we went to a meeting with the business in our pocket. A complete business universe on one CD, and it frightened the hell out of me. No wonder there are a zillion people out there selling data, this is easier than being a window cleaner. No ladder, no van, not even a bucket, just a CD, a laptop and a Broadband account, and you too can be a broker, a list ‘owner’ or whatever.
Databases get stolen. Data gets stolen, captured, misused, repackaged and regurgitated so often you often cannot tell what the source of it really is, or was. Out of date, out of order, out of the CD drive and into the car. Spend a happy hour surfing for data suppliers and you will lose count of the market leading databases you can find, or the companies that claim access to them.
And, somewhat surprisingly given the apparent ease with which it can be done, some of all this data on the market has not been stolen at all.
Some of it is legitimately licenced, matched, merged and buggered about with, until it is unique, or whatever clever USP can be plucked from the Thesaurus.
One example of this brought to my attention this week was use of the 2001 electoral register. Boy, I bet the client got a great price on that! Was that a CD that walked from somewhere?
Another example, which I personally discovered, concerned the name of a supplier I had never heard of before, mentioned in a competetive sense by a client. I Googled the name, and found out that this small outfit no one has ever heard of had the logo’s of four household name data suppliers displayed prominently on their website. I will not name and shame today, because I have not proved beyond any doubt that this is incorrect, but I am pretty sure it is – since the logo’s have now magically disappeared.
Only a year or so ago, a new supplier started placing adverts in the trade press offering high quality business data for £15 per thousand on a lifetime basis. Again that proved to be of dubious parentage. Then this morning I came up against a quote of £500 for 40,000 records. Yes, a mighty £12.50 per thousand from a company that trumpets on it’s website about being a Premium data supplier!
This sounds like a long whinge. And of course it is, but it is also an illustration of what we within the industry...and more importantly our clients...face day in and day out.
I have no solutions. As the desk sargeant in Hill Street Blues used to say, ‘Be careful out there.’
If you have any stories along these lines, I would love to hear them...
In defending DM against waste in this blog in the last week or so, or at least trying to, a number of comments reinforced the general feeling of loathing that is aimed at any form of cold approach, from direct mail to cold telephone calls. We all buy things, we all have needs and wants, so why do we get so hot under the collar when someone tries to sell us something?
Of course, the answer is the intrusion. I am as cheesed off as the next person when the bedtime story is interrupted by a cold call. After all, I am a Horrid Henry fan, I want to know what happens next without breaking off to discuss my soffit boards.
And the recycling bin is a bit daunting by the end of the week. Businesses do need to be more sensitive when dealing with consumers. But this is blog called B2B101, so I will stick to the subject.
Do we react the same at work? Is the intrusion as irritating and do we go all green at the site of the wastebin? After all, when I am caught by a cold call, I am sitting 10 feet from my own sales team, doing the same thing to other people. We all need to sell to pay our wages, so why are we still so irritated by the intrusion into our daily routine?
Personally, I think it is in our pysche. We hate the direct approach. Better to talk about the weather, or last nights television, or the football, than enagage in a sales discussion. It is almost unclean, but at the end of the day every single one of us is concerned with revenue generation, so we should be more sympathetic to the cause.
Most Americans I have met have no such inhibitions, although that is clearly a generalisation. The pitch is made with the handshake, and the relationship develops or dies without rancour or particular embarrassment. That ‘can I make a buck here’ attitude is not only socially acceptable, but ingrained, and no offence seems to be taken, whatever the result.
It is a bit like tipping in restaurants. We add 5% or 10%, almost regardless of the service we receive, because we think it is expected (and moan when the restaurant adds 12.5% automatically, whilst still paying it, of course) and our cousins across the Atlantic work their butts off to earn a large tip, and get quite shirty if you don’t give them one. They aren’t tipping, they are paying for service.
We are naturally reticent, a little shy and (generally) polite. Any sort of hard sell seems to offend something deep within us. Rather than concentrating on doing a deal, we feel that our personal space is being violated.
This is not true. People are just trying to do business. Is there anything so wrong with the direct approach? Not in my opinion, as long as it is professional. If the time is inconvenient, a better time can be arranged to have the conversation. But if someone picks up the phone, aren’t they admitting that they are available?
Marketing B2B is not rocket science, but sometimes we make it sound as if it is.
Deep inside the IDM website the other day, using its excellent resources to check up on something, I came across the jargon buster. OMG what a list! It just served as a timely reminder that we can all fall into the habit of overcomplicating and confusing everyone from clients to ourselves, if we try hard enough.
Even the CIM, in an effort to define marketing recently, came up with a short essay masquerading as a mission statement!
Creating our own marketing language is either a sure sign of self-importance, or a defence mechanism against the cuts of the accounts department, or the slings and arrows of salesforce discontent.
The trouble is it is self-defeating. Marketing is simple. It is about understanding and communicating with customers. It is about creating products and services that prospects want to buy. If we really need to publish a jargon buster, we are all in serious trouble.
Some B2B related facts. Most businesses are small. Resources and budgets are generally tight. In terms of investing in direct marketing they need help, advice and a lot of customer service. Most come to the subject of data like lambs to the slaughter, ready to be bemused, befuddled and taken for a ride. What they need is clarity, objectivity and guidance, rather than the smoke and mirrors they sometimes get.
What are we afraid of? By keeping it simple, clients will better understand the limitations of DM. They will understand what they are getting for their money. They will feel more comfortable with what is going on, and know what to expect. They will come back for more.
By offering clarity rather than confusion we can set reasonable expectations, rather than letting clients believe that we have some sort of magic wand.
Going green(er) might mean less D2D, and frankly about time too! Newspaper inserts and the like will be next, because conspicuously untargeted drops and inserts drive us all insane. But where does the buck really stop?
Last week, the industry admitted the threat to D2D on the grounds of waste. Our glorious industry will be forced, presumably kicking and screaming, to stop door dropping and start targeting to reduce our collective carbon footprint.
Next on the list will be inserts, and I wonder if anyone ever thought about all those CD’s and DVD’s that come with the weekend papers? We have the Mail and the Times delivered at the weekends. Apart from the amount of sections we never quite get to read, the pile of inserts that comes out of those nifty celophane wrappers is quite stunning. I am not saying we don’t look at any of it, because we do. That is the point, there is a return on investment.
The same must apply to D2D, or they would not do it, would they? Apart from the debilitating back injuries done to our loyal paper boys and girls, and our much maligned post people, carrying this stuff around, it is not very green. Obviously, I am in the business of supplying data, so I would say that, I suppose. I admit my vested interest in that regard.
However, it sounded to me like we were offering D2D up as a willing sacrifice. We all have to wake up to the fact that the world is changing. Green issues are no longer peripheral, and can no longer be ignored. Annoying people with junk, cold calls or whatever is one thing...and we have suffered from that backlash...but the fact is that as long as we pay our taxes and create jobs the regulators are unlikely to crush us.
But if we let ourselves get pushed to the front of the queue in terms of crimes against the environment, we are in big trouble. D2D may turn out to be the thin end of the wedge. Consumers are being assaulted with green guidance, and they (we) are paying for the recycling process one way or another. We have to get our own house in order, before someone imposes restrictions from on high.
Marketing is the corperate version of the flashy Premiership winger, who turns on the skill in flashes of brilliance but doesn’t track back to help the defence, has a Ferrari in the car park and a season ticket to the best night clubs. He doesn’t seem to appear on the scoresheet often enough, he prompts mixed reviews in the boardroom and in the stands, whilst the media praises him one week, and castigates him the next. Is this fair?
As an ex-Marcoms manager, no, it’s bloody well not!
In corporate life, marketing is the most misunderstood function, because so much of its work is ethereal. Brand building, advertising, sponsorship – it is usually so hard to measure the results.
Direct marketing, of course, is supposed to be the antidote to that, and in its purest form it is. In the right sort of business, even in B2B, you send out your catalogue with the right offer and the orders flood back in. Measuring return on investment is much easier – it cost this, we got back that, and bingo, success or failure.
The trouble is, in B2B, most of us don’t sell a can of beans. Higher value products and services do not sell ‘off the page’.
Direct marketing is a part of the marketing communications mix, invested in to start a direct dialogue with new prospects or re-invigorate existing contacts. We generate leads, or opportunities, to engage in a sales process. This is still measurable, but is the marketing department responsible for the performance of the entire sales process? Usually not. You can only put in the cross from the touchline and hope that the striker heads it home. So you get into complicated debates about the cost of generating a lead, the quality of leads, lead conversion rates and so forth. Sales always think the leads generated by marketing are pants, and marketing always believe that the sales team (the strikers in my football analogy) could not hit a barn door from the edge of the six yard box.
Normally of course, this debate takes place in a rather nice restaurant paid for by the creative agency, who offer the traditional shoulder to cry on!
The truth is that much of the marketing process is horribly difficult to measure. That is why when the cuts come around, marketing is the easiest target. Slashing that advertising budget probably won’t damage the bottom line in the short term, halving the sales force probably will. Most people develop marketing KPI’s to try and offer some sort of defence, but in the boardroom the only KPI’s that really matter are the ones measured in pounds, shillings and pence.
In such black and white terms, direct marketing is more defendable. You can see a basic return on investment for any activity, as long as the objectives are clear and realistic. Unfortunately, most of the time they are not. Why do people advertise on television and in magazines? More often than not there is no clear objective. Muttering about supporting the brand, or ‘being seen to be there’ will not protect the investment when the chips are down. But commonsense tells all of us that visibility within our own marketplace helps us sell. DM works better if the brand is known to the recipient before it hits their desk. It is called a marketing toolbox because you need to use all the tools, or at least consider all the tools. If you only needed a screwdriver, you would only invest in a screwdriver.
We can change this ourselves. Instead of reading in the press about the new £Xm campaign for thingummygig, I’d rather hear about the objectives, and the way the investment should be measured. I hate hearing the word spend...it is not a cost, it is an investment. The standard stereotypical image of the marketing professional is unfair. The trouble is we do spend a lot of time worrying about creative and strategy, which other functions within the business equate as disappearing up our own behinds and taking long lunches in Soho. The reality at the coalface, in smaller businesses, is often rather different, but we can help ourselves by having, measuring and achieving clear objectives.
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Lazy, irresponsible and downright stupid direct marketing damages us all. So when are people going to learn that irritating the hell out of people does no one any good?
On Friday night, in The Venture Inn, Reigate, I had a drink or three and a rather good Thai dinner with two of my best friends (It used to be called The Desert Rat, but the brand changed with the refit, go and try the food, it’s really good. Watch out Michael Winner, I am after yout job!). We did the man thing – football, rugby, golf, a bit of family gossip and progress, work...and finally the latest dig at DM.
Not unfounded, as it happens, and it highlights the problems we all face. Colin bought a new car a year or so ago, and the dealership picked up his mobile number during the process. Not for marketing purposes, however. So, imagine his surprise when he got two texts offering him a rather spiffing deal on another new car.
Imagine his reaction when they arrived at 1am!
Stupid, of course. He rang the dealership to complain, and the general manager had no idea about the ‘campaign’. It got blamed on the marketing function taking promotion into their own hands, without reference to the front line.
The resulting discussion was quite interesting. My friends found the idea of text marketing more intrusive than anything other than cold calls at home. Both work in international businesses and their Raspberries are in use at all hours. A text was intrusive because it has to be read – it could be anything, couldn’t it? A family emergency, a crisis in the Timbucktoo office...and being woken up to find out that you can get the new model Trabant for 25% off did not amuse.
Regardless of the merits of mobile marketing, why send a text in the middle of the night? I leave my mobile on all the time, going silent for meetings, and I use it as an alarm clock in hotels midweek. My friends do the same. So, our little focus group decided that middle of the night texts were almost certain to irritate.
And irritation does not prompt positive responses for any campaign.
Have we lost our compass here a little? I know this is only one small example, but it is the kind of thing that gives everyone a bad name. As cold calling and postal DM get more difficult, email and mobile channels are going to become more important. If we let this sort of thing continue, there is a lot more trouble ahead.
Databases, fairies at the bottom of the garden and the man in the moon.
Most people involved in B2B marketing can agree on one thing. (No, not that it is time for a drink. Okay, two things!) Maintaining some sort of database is vital for any marketing plan involving new business and customer retention to succeed.
In my formative sales days, my database was a passenger seat of index cards loosely attached to plastic binders. My area manager would formally examine them when he came out on some calls with me, as if he knew what should have been updated by some sort of telepathic process. It worked all right, in those pre-computerised days, but it made a mailshot from that particular source a time-intensive task. Still, it had the basics, contact names, postal address, telephone numbers and call history. Cross-referenced with my contract book, you could even work out how much they had spent.
Nowadays, collating this sort of information is an electronic piece of cake. You choose your software, and off you jolly well go.
The trouble is that the basic principle is still the same – you only get out what you put in. Given deep pockets, you can buy some fantastic databases, complete with bells, whistles, online access, endless reporting functions, inputs, outputs, links to accounting systems, sales systems – you name it, you can get it.
Unfortunately, the same basic principle still applies. The database does not solve your problems, what you do with it does.
Let us leave CRM for another day, and concentrate on prospects. No matter what the functionality of your kit, you need to start off with the right data. In my experience, clients either want to start off with too much, or too little, but whatever – the first step is to define your prospect and locate the best data to fit it.
The next step is to sweat that data. Rather than minimising costs and buying data on a single use basis, it works out much better value to license for twelve months and give yourself the best chance to build your own relationship with your prospects. The most common mistake smaller businesses make is not using their data, thus effectively letting it die. You can have as much online access and monthly reporting as you like, but if you don’t do something proactive the data decays and you have to start again.
Call me a luddite if you like (I am called much worse at home!), but no amount of investment in software and hardware can replace the simple, undeniable need for a sound marketing strategy, properly costed and consistently employed. The myth is that the database can do the work for you, at the press of a button, but it is just the framework to hang actions off, not the action itself. And to allow the database to work, you have to build it into your processes. It has to close the virtuous circle between marketing, sales and accounts, so that marketing is seen as an investment, and you can prove the link between prospecting and an eventual order.
Now, half of you are complaining about being told how to suck eggs. But half of you are thinking how much easier life would be if it all fitted together. And you think it would be easy but I once failed to get a prospecting database and an accounts package linked, even though they were from the same supplier and it said you could do it on the tin! And don’t even start me on changing from one market leading sales package to another and trying to import and export data! I agree that a database is vital, but it does not come first. One lesson I have learned (eventually), and put to good use in my business life, is not to tinker. Rather than spending time trying to work out how to make what you have work, get a blank sheet of paper and work out what you need. Then get it.
A database will be in there somewhere, but strategy, process, linkage and cross-functional support is far more important. Because the database does not create information, it merely sorts it. You need to feed it with cold data, and then capture information through the efforts of sales and marketing.
If the kid in the Astra 1.4 makes the sales call, but forgets to enter it in his bit of the database on the seat beside him, you will be forever in the dark.
Direct Marketing is not the most fashionable place to be. Bad press and bad vibes seem to have haunted us since the Milennium, and everyone from the Daily Mail to the BBC has queued up to have a go, driving up MPS/TPS/CTPS as a result. Postal strikes damage confidence, government regulations interfere and then there is the damage to the environment. When are we going to fight back, and who is going to do the fighting?
Everyone is entitled to their opinion. Nuisance calls and junk mail annoy me just as much as the man in the street – perhaps even more so, because I supposedly know what is going on. In the pub, when accused of all these ills by a mate, I usually check he has bought his round then try to fight back (easy, they are accountants and consultants, and one is even a Newcastle supporter!).
There are positives about this industry of ours. Besides all the revenue we generate, and pay taxes on, we support the postal service and we bring businesses and consumers together with some success, see www.mydm.co.uk for more. I am sure many of you do the same when challenged. It is not all bad news. Someone needs to shout it from the rooftops.
No one is effectively answering all these attacks on our industry, and we need to sell ourselves a bit better. I would like the DMA to do this a bit more, but I am not necessarily blaming them.
I know, like and admire Rosemary Smith and running a trade association is not easy. The officials and officers are always on the defensive, because they only get airtime when the latest disaster hits the front pages.
I am also an admirer, and member, of the IDM, and the work they are doing in training, certifying and attracting people to the industry is excellent, but it is not enough.
We need a superhero to rally around and hit back, and we need to find one fast. We need to explain what we are trying to do, and how it works, and make the consumer understand that we are providing a convenient service. Someone needs to dig the rotten apples out of the bag. Yes, we need to get our own house in order in places, but we also have to reach out and win some hearts and minds.
We need a name, a face, to stand up and be counted even if John Humphreys is going for the jugular. But who? What do you think? Post suggestions, please!
Once again, we are getting castigated over waste, because everything we mail is junk, isn’t it? No one likes direct marketing and it is an absolute disgrace. Irresponsible suits in corporate castles enjoy spending cascades of cash just to fill up the local tip with rubbish. Good grief, we might as well cut out the middle man and send it straight there, at least then the ‘man in the street’ would not have to recycle it. Shoot them, string them up by their toenails blah blah blah...
Nice to feel wanted, isn’t it?
Yet again, the DMA are on the defensive, and everyone is nodding and agreeing that we have to do more about waste.
Why? No one else is. One trip to the local supermarket produces more useless packaging than comes through my letter box in a week. Each local free paper that flops through my letter box unsolicited gets no more than a cursory glance on the way to the re-cycling box. Plastic shopping bags, 4x4 the size of my old school bus, the sections in the Sunday papers that no one ever reads, the fact that you can only recycle certain bits of plastic...I could go on.
So why turn all the ire on us? The reason businesses use direct marketing terchniques is that they work. People buy from the comfort of their homes or offices every day. Does anyone really think they open an unsolicited envelope, curse the damage to our blessed planet, rail against the vile satans of marketing and then fill out that application form for a new credit card?
Yes, we should all target better. We all want to target better, actually. No one wants waste. Suppression is a ‘good thing’, like eating your 5 portions of fruit and vegetables per day, or flossing your teeth. No one wants to mail dead people. No one wants to mail people who definitely are not going to buy their products.
But for goodness sake, let’s keep things in proportion. It is the balance of cost against reward. ROI is king and that makes everyone reluctant to add cost by using multiple suppressions. Maybe that attitude needs to change. By all means, lets get tough with people who cut costs too far and cause real waste, but just because Mrs Smith doesn’t want that particular offer at that particular time does not make it junk mail.
If it does, then that unread free newspaper is junk news, blah blah blah. Waste may cost the taxpayer £30m per year, according to DEFRA, but how much tax does the DM industry pay? How many stamps do we buy?
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The marketing industry, apart from the IPA, is joining forces to prevent an opt-in being imposed for mailings. No surprise there then, but there are wider issues, too. Like do we want a postal service?
Our poor beleagered post people will hopefully return to work this week, and get Adam Crozier off the airwaves and back to counting his bonus. And around half of their time will be spent getting marketing materials of one sort or another to doorsteps from John O’Groats to Lands End. Add in a few birthday cards, bills, bank statements, theatre tickets and reminders from the dentist, as well as the annual deluge of Christmas cards, and that is what all the fuss is about. So, what would happen if the direct market industry had to secure an opt-in before sending out any mailings?
Well, we would all panic, and the mailable universe would shrink considerably, obviously. No doubt, given time and a lot of blood-letting, we would survive. But would the postal service?
Not as we know it.
The idea of popping something in the post today and getting it more or less anywhere within the country within 24 hours for the cost of a first class stamp is part of our heritage. But the fact is that the idea of writing to someone no longer involves licking an envelope. We all email. My mother-in-law once swore that a computer was no use to her. She was persuaded otherwise, and 7 years later emails and e-cards buzz downline like confetti. From silver-surfers down to the boys in year 3 at Reigate Priory School we all communicate electronically, and post is relegated to the formal or the unsolicited.
Even Christmas cards are on the wain. The annual writing of hundreds of cards per family, all with the little progress report scrawled inside, is a lot of hard work when you can type and send an email to all your friends and contacts at the touch of a button, or even keep everyone up to date via MySpace or Facebook.
Without DM we will not have a post service. Not a national one, anyway. Maybe this is inevitable, as communication habits change, but do we really want to hasten the process? I know there are environmental pressures, and I know junk mail is annoying – and in this age of recycling a cost might be levied against the receiver, making it even more irritating – but if we want a post service, DM is paying for it.
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Strikes and delivery issues make relying on the postal service difficult, and therefore it is time the industry started to take email seriously.
Regardless of the rights and wrongs of the postal dispute, the direct marketing industry is suffering more than most as a result. Whatever the result, can we rely on deliveries? Can we time campaigns to hit the doormat or the desktop effectively? And beyond that, can our clients deliver their products, invoices or whatever, in a timely, reliable fashion?
More importantly, is there an alternative?
Email could be, but so far we have allowed the channel to be abused to the point where people are a lot more unwilling to give out their personal or business email address than we would like. Like most people, I often use a hotmail address to register for things online. I do this to hide from all the spammers, who seem to believe I need copious quantities of Viagra.
I am not a consumer data expert, so I will not focus on that, although in fact I believe the issues are the same.
It is about trust.
The threat of spamming causing clogged inbox’s and carrying all sorts of bugs and virus’s has made people reluctant to give out their details. But on the other hand, the spectacular rise of Broadband has made it possible for us all, businesses big and small as well as consumers, to be online more, and to settle on a fairly static address that will not regularly change.
So, all interested parties need to build trust with email users.
Not just the DM industry, but ISP’s and broadband suppliers, Microsoft, Apple, governments and everyone else concerned. I would like to see an email address become as fixed and trustworthy as a postal address. It must be as secure as possible, and that means the relevant parties dealing with the spammers, hackers and virus creators. It must not be abused, so we need double opt-in and EPS (Email preference service), preferably an international one. We need an electronic email signature, with the same levels of security as Internet banking (or better!) so that orders can be irrefutably confirmed online, and we need to give users the confidence that the system works for them.
In terms of direct marketing, we must stop taking advantage of the medium. Because people expect spam, junk email (oversold, poorly targetted) is regarded as spam. This should not be the case from reputable suppliers – there ought to be a double opt-in in place, and there often is. But there is not much email data on the market, and what there is gets used too much, for the wrong things. However, if we build trust, we will change the perception of marketing email in the minds of the receiver. Here are just a few thoughts:
The pursuit of ROI against all the odds, commonsense and experience.
Regular readers of this blog will already realise that I am not into volume for volume’s sake. Despite being in the business of selling data, I would rather sell less for more than more for less. Because, in the long run, following the former path I can count on more repeat business.
However, there is a school of thought that still says mail as many as you can and the return on investment will be a good measure of success. Never mind the collateral damage to the brand, the budget or the environment. As long as you sell enough cans of beans, it works – period. Except that ROI is falling.
Especially amongst consumer DM, but I believe the same is true for B2B. Targeting is not a precise science, but if the sniper route is difficult, that is no excuse to resort to the nuclear bomb of volume. That is why the not-at-all-new idea of prospect pools is starting to gain some ground.
Most B2B businesses can define their prospect pool. Few can really sell to any business and within product portfolio’s there can be different target pools. We used to call this market and product segmentation back in the day. Once that is done, license the prospect pool from a good supplier that best fits your requirements and budget, giving you updates and amendments on a regular basis, and sweat the asset. Cut out the waste, refine the model and stop chasing the dragon.
Why?
Because this model works for everyone. Good data suppliers, focussed on quality, supply proactive clients with what they need, and the client can in turn focus on their prospect base, refining, investing and working in a systematic way.
Searching for more and more cold data is just going round and round in circles. There is no more cold data. It is the same data wrapped up in another way, sourced from a different angle.
Building a presence online is not as simple as building a website. Online directories, search engine optimisation and banner ads work on one level, but they do not guarantee that businesses will make a connection with clients. Is there a lesson to be learned from social networking sites, and will the same model work for B2B?
Networking is essential, or so they say. I must admit to being a late convert, but I am starting to understand the power of the model. Linkedin, Myspace and the Brand Republic community have added to my connections, and I have got business through them, one way or another, not to mention re-connecting with some old colleagues and friends.
Individuals are clearly using the internet, and the various communities online, for more than just chatting, exchanging photographs and blogging about their lives and hobbies. Within this, there is some business activity. Obviously, Linkedin, for one, is aimed at individuals doing business – but is there a space for business networking? Of course there is, if someone creates it. Check out a site called www.upspring.com – our cousins across the water are leading the way. This is quite new ground.
Individuals on sites like Linkedin are usually quite open about who they work for, but it is an individual networking exercise. A company centric community changes the footprint – a big company could have dozens, or hundreds, of members of staff using it, and will all of them be on-message? I can see PR departments having regular fits about that, and there must be dangers of disgruntled employees rubbishing the business for everyone to see, but is there a positive here? I think so. For me, Linkedin works because you can get someone in your extended network to recommend a solution to a particular problem. You ask a question, and you get answers from people who have come across the same issue before. Introductions to people who might be helpful, or might do business, can be arranged via a mutual connection. You can see how this can work from business to business, rather than from individual to individual. For people of my generation, this is all quite new, but the younger ones will not find this so much of a challenge. Surely they will just see it as a logical extension of Myspace or Facebook?
Social and business networking will necessarily merge (that will make people think twice about those inflammatory blogs, and those juicy photographs!) and online business services will cluster around the community, adding value and capturing traffic.
Watch this space, it is coming.
Opposition parties are apparently asking the information commissioner to investigate Labour party call centre activity during the phoney pre-election-that-never-was war, but if the law-makers cannot get it right, what chance is there for the rest of us?
TPS and CTPS is a bit of a minefield for everyone. Most reputable data suppliers suppress registered telephone numbers, at their own cost, because clients expect it to be done, but we all know that by the time the data gets used they probably ought to do it again – legally data must be screened every 28 days.
Like it or not, it is the client’s responsibility to make sure that they comply with the regulations, because even if the data was compliant at the time of purchase, it will not be two weeks later. But are there lots of prosecutions going on out there?
No, there are not. One or two blatant floutings of the law have been named and shamed, and presumably fined, I believe, but not enough to make people take the regulations seriously. In fact, the only people who are talking about, and paying for, CTPS and TPS are the suppliers, and ultimately the clients who buy the data.
Suppression is a good thing, undeniably. If someone does not want to receive cold calls, they should be able to opt out, and we as an industry should accept that. But the regulations are a tad confusing – especially where businesses are concerned.
For a start, SOHO businesses are sometimes registered with TPS, rather than CTPS, so we have to check both to be sure. When that business owner registered with TPS, did he or she mean to shut off calls that might help the business? No, probably not, but they did.
Secondly, anyone within a business can register a number or numbers on CTPS. So, the switchboard operator at the largest employer in the world can decide to make their life easier by shutting off all cold calls, without the directors of the business being aware.
Thirdly, the 28 days rule is unworkable. Assuming a data owner refreshes, updates and adds to the database on a montly basis, it is easy enough to put TPS/CTPS into the middle of it. But in my experience, these processes take time, often days or weeks. Therefore, on the first of the month, everything might be delivered to the sales team, clean and compliant, but it is quite possible that the actual TPS/CTPS check took place two weeks before. By the middle of the month, even if the client uses the data the moment the email hits the inbox (which we know they do not, they have processes of their own to go through) they could technically be breaking the law.
Fourthly, any number registered on TPS and CTPS can still be called for research purposes. Personally, I think this is where Gordon will escape the clutches of the Information Commissioner, but we will see. But the point is it is possible to start off ‘researching’ the person who answers the call, and gain permission to move into a sales situation – that is perfectly legal as I understand the regulations.
The cynic within me believes that these regulations were put in place to stop people shouting at the government about cold calling. They had to be seen to be doing something but they were not particularly concerned about actually stopping any activity that generates jobs or tax revenues.
You can make up your own minds.
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Hugh Bessant
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