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Disparate sources. Duplicate records. Confusion between older and newer records for the same contact. An inability to communicate effectively in the marketplace. These were all obstacles for CA Technologies, a global provider of IT management software and solutions based in Islandia, N.Y. In the session, “Leveraging Crowd-Sourced BtoB Data to Improve Marketing Efforts,” presented at last week’s Digital Marketing Days Conference & Expo, CA Senior Director of Relationship Marketing Adam Mincham shared with attendees how his company fixed its database quality issues.
According to Mincham, marketing’s effectiveness was hampered by having the wrong contacts; weakened demand generation efforts, because CA had to blanket its market for leads; exposure to spam lists and privacy issues; and diluted messaging in the marketplace.
The process CA took to fix this data challenge included identifying the specific problems; getting executive buy-in to fix them; identifying a data solutions supplier; identifying sources of data; the global collection of data; and implementing global best practices.
Mincham emphasized how critical communication is to such a database fix-up. Some of the lessons CA learned along the way were to not “boil the ocean,” by phasing its data project by region; to agree on standard data definitions; to always consider data quality; and to not recreate the wheel when you can readily find a good source of data on the market.
Crowdsourced data—such as that from Jigsaw, CA’s supplier—was a fit for the B-to-B firm because Mincham found it to be cost-effective, as well as giving CA access to a large universe of clean data. And because crowdsourced models like Jigsaw’s incentivize members to keep their data clean, Mincham found the data accuracy to be unparalleled. It also allows, he said, for advanced integration as opposed to pulling data from a black box.
But perhaps his favorite aspect of crowdsourced data is the ownership. “The negatives are as positive as the positives,” Mincham stated, when it comes to the knowledge gained from testing. Being able to update the database history for who didn’t respond to a contact is just as important as having access to respondents, he said.
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