As the MECLABS Research Partnership analyst team, my colleagues and I speak with professionals who attend our events (like next month’s MarketingSherpa Email Summit in Las Vegas), purchase our publications and want more information about how MECLABS can help grow their business. So, every day, we hear about the challenges they’re facing.
Optimizing your database
One issue that surfaces all too often is optimizing databases: When you have a database of thousands upon thousands of names, how do you help your team quickly and effectively prioritize who to contact? Nearly every company I talk to does some lead scoring, but rarely do those lead scores align with their database in a way that allows their sales teams to determine – at a glance – which prospects are the right fit at the right time.
This hit way too close to home. Here at MECLABS, my team was struggling with the same issue. We add hundreds of interested potential partner inquiries to our database every few weeks, sometimes even thousands, through events, publications, and general inquiries.
Our ace IT team has set up platforms to identify who fits our Ideal Partner Profile quickly. We’d contact them when they express interest in our Research Partnership program. We are very well aware of the importance of timeliness for marketers struggling to optimize their sales and marketing funnels. We’d follow up based on the next action associated with their file.
Focus on your ideal customer profile.
Focus on your ideal customer profile.But it took Brooke Bower, our data-analysis whiz, to help our team look at our database from a new perspective. Focusing on the most promising potential partners instead of merely the most urgent would help us get the highest return on our time.
What we realized was missing was a comprehensive at-a-glance snapshot that shows us the key factors that define a successful research-partnership engagement:
- If the individual inquiring is a decision-maker or an influencer
- How many events the individual and his team have attended and publications they’ve purchased compiled in an easily sortable list
- Their organization’s firmographic details – such as revenue, marketing budget, sales cycle, and size
Grading opportunities
We enlisted the IT department to add fields to our existing platform to combine these details into a single “opportunity grade” applied to each potential partner’s account. (Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Managing Director and CEO of MECLABS recommended the concept of an “opportunity grade.”) The higher the grade, the better the fit for a long-term, strategic research partnership.
What’s your opportunity grade?
Within just a few days, through IT, marketing, and sales teamwork, we sorted our database to reveal to us the “opportunity grade” for each partner. It wasn’t rocket science, just taking the time to ask the hard questions (thanks Brooke), and look at what we do from a fresh perspective to give IT the parameters they needed to bring it all together. This is a project that will never be completed, of course. We will continually work with Brooke to analyze what qualities make up our most qualified research partners and ensure our database can easily and accurately help us identify them.
Great results happen when people and departments with different skill sets take time to put their minds together. In this case, it was Brooke’s data-savvy combined with my hands-on experience talking to potential Research Partners about their challenges.
I’d really like to hear about your experiences building a database that helps you engage more efficiently and effectively. Please share them in the comments.
You may also like:
Lead Capture: How undermining value impacts conversion
Growing B2B Sales with Trust and Empathy
No hype. No noise. Clarity your team can actually use.