Now what? Taming the Data Beast
How can you keep your database under control? Some tips from the experts:
- Be choosy about the information you track. Resist going overboard. Says Lon Orenstein, president of Computer Support Network, in Dallas, "When I ask people what they want to track about customers, I get answers like fraternity membership and what color boxer shorts someone likes. It's minutiae that doesn't pay off, and the maintenance is a bear."
- Develop a simple rating system. As you enter more information, you and your employees must be able to tell at a glance how important each customer is to your company's growth. Marketing 1:1's Bob Dorf suggests assigning each customer a score of one to three on several variables, such as sales, future sales, and referrals. You can set up a similar system for ranking leads.
- Keep your list clean. Give thought up front to how names should be entered, so that a customer like IBM isn't also entered as International Business Machines. Make use of contact managers' drop-down menus or pop-up boxes that prompt users to fill in fields correctly. "A temp entering trade-show leads can corrupt a whole database," warns Janet Parks, whose company, Marketing Frontiers Inc., in Woburn, Mass., cleans up databases.
- Identify the best leads--and then turn them over as quickly as possible. The idea isn't to have a bigger database than all your competitors; it's to have a more profitable one. Database specialist Linda Keating once had a client who insisted on maintaining a record on a deceased customer. ("Talk about a dead lead!" she jokes.) Put questionable prospects into a "holding" database and dead leads into a purge file, she advises. To sort out older leads, author Jeffrey Mayer suggests conducting a search by the date that the information was last edited.
- Be realistic. If you can't get people to enter information in your database regularly, the database won't be of much use. Dorf recalls one company that devised this solution: computer-shy executives relay information about customers they've visited to a dedicated voice-mail box; an assistant transcribes the messages and enters them in the marketing database for all to see.
Susan Greco is an articles editor at Inc.
Resources
If you're an Act! fan or a frustrated beginner, there's someone you should definitely get to know: Jeffrey Mayer is a walking encyclopedia of Act! trivia and of timesaving features buried deep in the program. Of course, Mayer has a vested interest in being helpful. He's the author of two Act! for Dummies books published by IDG Books Worldwide. Last year Mayer launched a monthly newsletter, Act! in Action, with advice on pressing mobile-maneuvering issues like how to get Act! to dial all your calls from a hotel room. You can sample the newsletter at Mayer's Web site.
The brisk sales of contact-management programs have given way to a cottage industry of consultants and gadgets. (Did you know there's a machine for scanning business cards right into a database?) The Web sites of the top vendors should be full of case studies and tips, but instead they're mostly useless public-relations drivel. At the Symantec site, at least you can hook into all sorts of Act! add-on products. Maximizer includes a link to a listing service that's offering one free sample search. Most of the top vendors also maintain a list of consultants who have customized their contact managers for a host of industries, but you won't necessarily find those lists at the vendors' Web sites, at least not yet.
The number of add-on products for Act! speaks to both the program's popularity and its limitations. ForecastManager!, a utility from Lon Orenstein of Computer Support Network, will beef up the capabilities of Act!, for example. (But GoldMine users have a forecasting feature included in their software.) Linda Keating of JL Technical Group responded to her customers' needs by creating Database Scrubber and Trouble Spotter for Act! utilities.
GoldMine has prepared a detailed three-page chart comparing the features of its program with Act!, Maximizer, Microsoft Outlook, and Janna Contact. To obtain a copy, call GoldMine Software Corp. at 310-454-6800 or visit its Web site.
OK, you've played around with several contact managers, and they just don't cut it for your business. You've reviewed your customers' needs and concluded you're ready to make the investment in some heavy-duty custom solutions. But what next? See Sarah Schafer's story " Supercharged Sell" (Inc. Technology #2, 1997), which presents three sophisticated, compelling case studies in sales-force automation.
Whatever kind of marketing database you build, it's going to need lots of loving care. Janet Parks, president of Marketing Frontiers, penned The Care and Feeding of Your Marketing Database, a small but clever manual about getting more mileage from this central corporate asset. "A marketing database is like an automobile," she writes. "It doesn't run by itself except downhill." Call her at 617-933-5100 to get a free copy of the booklet.
BABY FAIRE, Kim Whittaker, 10 Converse Pl., Mill Pond Bldg., Winchester, MA 01890; 617-729-4500 94
EARNINGS PERFORMANCE GROUP, Charles Forbes, 830 Morris Turnpike, Third Floor, Short Hills, NJ 07078-2675; 201-379-7772 94
SEKO WORLDWIDE, Cathy Moran, 790 Busse Rd., Elk Grove Village, IL 60007; 847-806-4800 94
