By identifying accurate, fresh, complete, and consistent data, marketers can make optimal strategic decisions or tactical investments. This presents a tremendous opportunity for competitive advantage: If your marketing team has superior data relative to your competitors, it will help you outperform your peers tactically and, if used effectively, strategically.
It is clear that marketing professionals at companies of all sizes are under increasing pressure to lower costs, increase leads and lead quality, and provide evidence of business impact. The customer record is emerging as the basis for much of the analysis necessary to improve marketing performance at both strategic and tactical levels
This whitepaper will illustrate the power of Data, implementation strategies and what qualities to look for in your data providers.
W H I T E P AP E R D a t a . c o m : T h e F u e l f o r H i g h - P e r f o r m a n c e B 2 B M a r k e t i n g a n d S a l e s E n g i n e s Sponsored by: salesforce.com Gerald Murray Mary Wardley November 2011
I D C O P I N I O N moc.c Today's high-performance marketing and sales engines run on data, and the better di. your data, the better your performance. Regardless of what technology you use to www drive campaigns and nurture leads, data is increasingly essential to marketing 5 performance. Without accurate, fresh, complete, and consistent data, marketers 104 cannot make optimal strategic decisions or tactical investments. This presents a .53 tremendous opportunity for competitive advantage: If your marketing team has 9.8 superior data relative to your competitors, it will help you outperform your peers 05.F tactically and, if used effectively, strategically. 002 Achieving sustainable data superiority has significant challenges. The data has to be 8.27 continually refreshed, cleaned, and validated. One marketing professional we 8.8 interviewed for this study reported annual data churn rates as high as 30% - a rate 05. that will quickly degrade your ability to generate leads and close business. As a P result, traditional approaches to data sourcing are no longer good enough. Marketers AS require sources that are self-maintaining, provide equally high-quality information on U 10 contacts and accounts, and are flexible and scalable enough to keep up with 710 changing business needs. AM , In fact, the following issues are emerging as key requirements for making data mah acquisition decisions and ensuring that the quality of your customer data set remains gni as high as possible: marF te 1. Crowd curation. The fastest and most efficient way to maintain contact data at ert scale is through the collective action of people continually updating their personal S ne information and that of people they know. epS 5 2. Account hierarchies. Marketers need just as much data about accounts as they :sre do about contacts. But the real marketing power in this data is in understanding trau the relationships between contacts within accounts and the relationships qda between accounts - known as account hierarchies. eH lab 3. Cloud sourcing. Consistent contact and account data must be available to all olG customer-facing functions to align marketing and sales and support meaningful analysis of funnel and pipeline performance.
M E T H O D O L O G Y
IDC completed this white paper to assess the role of customer data in strategic and tactical marketing decisions. It provides recommendations and models for marketing leaders to acquire, manage, and act on customer data more effectively. To support the findings in this document, IDC conducted executive interviews with marketing professionals in four Data.com customer organizations ranging in size from start-up to large enterprise ($1 billion+). IDC applied existing research and data models, as well as the authors' expertise in marketing, marketing operations, and marketing automation, to this primary market research to produce the conclusions and recommendations found in this white paper.
S I T U AT I O N O V E R V I E W
Marketing is undergoing fundamental and painful transformations on several fronts:
? Dynamics in customer acquisition
? Channels and forms of communication
? Tools and infrastructure requirements
? Expanding data sets
? Skills required for success
? Pressure to prove business impact
This multidimensional set of challenges has many marketing leaders struggling to keep up. IDC has strong evidence that all customer-facing activities and systems should be built around the fundamental design principle of the contact record so that organizations can thrive on all this change. The contact record is increasingly the source for strategic insight, tactical planning, and performance metrics. It is the foundation on which the success or failure of your marketing efforts will be determined. As such, it must be defined, implemented, and governed as a standardized enterprise asset.
Establishing a standard ... [download for more]
