Attaining the Elusive Sales and Marketing Golden Record

The year was 2011. I faced a growth challenge – to grow a B2B business in a mature, saturated electric market. The marketing team was earnestly generating leads and the sales team followed through, within a 48-hour deadline. Yet, it did not translate into bottom-line results. When I studied the process and the people dynamics – it was similar to many other places. Marketing said, “We are whipping up the leads” and the sales folks quipped, “Those leads are not as warm as they are made out to be?”

In trust situations like this, I work towards swapping mindsets without switching jobs.

So, I orchestrated something different – leveraging my data skills, I enabled sales folks to pull out accounts that populated the “wish I had more time in a day” segment of their pipeline and sent them to marketing. One thing different about this list – each account had a sales person’s name before the start of a campaign. In other words, behaviorally, the sales people “owned” the list as they provided the accounts. 

In the past, the marketing teams mandate was to give leads – as many as “warm” leads that had a higher probability of closure. There were subjective words everywhere. I refined the marketing campaign goal to something simpler and different - to find the decision maker at the potential client and/or a champion at the client.

A cryptic summary of the campaign for those interested.

Change of goals for marketing and the feeling of ownership by sales brought a great return and more importantly – shared perspectives between marketing team and sales folks at the ground level.

There is one gold nugget in all this whole narrative – an implicit assumption.

That assumption bubbled up when I read about Michael Goldberg’s experience - “More than six months after being here [Dun & Bradstreet, D&B], half a dozen vendors contacted me to schedule meetings. I always let them know that I was no longer with my former company, but the message didn’t seem to resonate. Some sales reps even went so far as to ask me for the contact information of the employee who replaced me. One of the misguided calls I received was actually a pitch for a CRM solution.”

That implicit assumption in the whole campaign narrative - data about prospects – where to start, how to properly target. In effect, who to contact - the golden record. 

You miss that, you may end-up on the other side of Michael’s experience. The world has changed since the 1970’s.

"Can you imagine Instagram in the 1970's? You'd have to go around to people and say, 'I think I'm going to take a bunch of pictures of myself and then mail them around because I'm hoping to gather a lot of opinions on them.” [ Loved this perspective from Professor Adam Grant]

On the flip, can you imagine a world where most of the organizations have very stable and predictable organizational structures where people had careers in one job at one company?

The 3 assumptions inside the statement are no longer true for a majority of the folks – stable organizational structures, career in one job and career in one company.

In other words – our golden record needs to be current, relevant, timely and have a crisp information of prospects.

One way to do that, which is a way I have operated before – look for external sources like Dun & Bradstreet, LinkedIn and triangulate.

There is an alternate – to look inward.

Looking Inside for Data Nuggets

Greg McLaughlin, Getty Images Vice President of Global Sales Operations calls it cleaning your own basement. In his words, “You’ve got this big basement full of old stuff, and you have to start somewhere. Start small – define the core attributes that you need to master; structure and connect those key pieces of information…. understand where your data lives. Where is it across all these disparate sources? And where did it originate, and why?”

The great point in all this – data too has history and understanding history goes a long way in contextualizing the abstract that creates long lasting impact. It is an implicit acknowledgement of people who have experience in that company DNA. That goes a long way in success. In that sense, inward start is a good way to go.

Bringing it All Together

Most strategy narratives around sales and marketing are often around things we can relate. Data – at its core – is abstract. Data about a prospect is more concrete.

Anywhere in the world, it is a great way to start there. House cleaning can be inward looking or an external triangulation.

In all this, when sales and marketing work together – magic happens. And what greases that wheel is mutual success and the data of prospects is a bedrock of that success.

Current, relevant, timely and crisp information of prospects and customers - I call it the golden record of data.

Maybe you have a different name?

Karthik Rajan

P.S. I came to know about Michael and David through my friend, John White who enthusiastically shared about the Sirius Decisions event Greg will be speaking at next week. I could not attend, but I liked the intersection of data, marketing and sales.