When I go to Starbucks, I rarely give them my real name to scribble on the cup. I prefer to test out spelling and general attention paying with names like Niamh or Zoltan. Sometimes I am Queen Magrethe of Denmark. The challenge, of course, is remembering what name I gave them while I’m standing around waiting for my drink at the other end of the counter.
On just such a morning recently, while a confused barista was paging Miss Piggy and I was lost in Twitter, I spotted a friend from many years prior sitting in the corner with his computer and neat piles of business cards all around him.
Rob is one of the best sales people I know: he’s great at building trust, genuinely interested in his customers, never forgets a name, a spouse’s name, a key fact. Rob is also smart, well organized and, unsurprisingly, very successful.
Today, however, he was looking a little stabby and here’s why: he had more than 100 contacts to enter into his sales database by the end of the day.
Yes, he knew that he should have just put them in as he went along. Yes, there is a mobile app he could have used to add them quickly to the list. No, he didn’t think it was a good idea to have such valuable information stuffed into pockets and drawers. The trouble was, he was doing this other thing all quarter that he liked to call selling. The reward for which was a day hiding at Starbucks typing in data.
Rob will tell you he sucks at typing and only barely understands the sales force tool his company uses, but he will also tell you that he trusts even less the collection of students and coordinators to whom he could unload this thankless task. Rob understands the importance of great data.
So too do the marketers and customer service people who are downstream of the tedious input chore. These contacts become our marketing database and, if we manage to pry some money out of them, our customer database.
We know our databases are chock full of duplicate entries, mangled names, things in the wrong fields, incorrect salutations, missing postal codes, out-of-date titles, inaccurate mailing addresses and empty email address fields.
We also know that when we try to enforce data hygiene with a few rules, like no empty fields, they are populated with dummy information so the poor schlub who got stuck with it can go to lunch.
Which brings me to my point, which is this: if data is the lifeblood of our organizations why do we treat it with so little respect? Why do we find the cheapest, least trained and least interested person in the room and make them update the database? Conversely, why do we ask our high-priced sales people to step back from earning revenue so they can type stuff into the application?
I propose we create a new department in our companies. Let’s call them Data Sanitation Engineers or Accuracy Assurance or Database Avengers.
Let’s send them off to our vendors for in-depth training on how to use the contact management tool of our choice, and by use, I mean master. They will come back knowing every nook and cranny of that application. They will know how to coax reports and dashboards out of the darkness; they will understand taxonomy and rules and data cleanliness.
They will be hired not because they are fast at typing but because they are curious and will take the time to do things like validating a post code, calling up a company to verify their address, pulling up a D&B record to properly code the industry, asking a sales rep for clarification on a note, relentlessly searching for duplicate records, typos, missing fields and diligently chasing the information until they are satisfied that it is exactly right.
This is the group that will update the billing contact when the customer requests it. This is the team that will go out and teach the Sales Squirrels how to tag their activities properly, and will audit them to make sure it’s happening.
This is the group that will train CSRs how to validate information properly while the customer is on the phone.
This is the place happy marketers will go to learn all of the secrets of their customer base: demographics, firmographics, propensity-to-whatever.
This new nerve centre of the organization will be staffed not with Skippy the Summer Student but with well-paid, well-trained data entry people who can read mushed up business cards, terrible hand-writing, scanned post-it notes and badly exported .csv files.
There will be data visualization people, and data analysts and people who are really, really good at training the rest of us to use and care for our precious data.
This team will be on top of the latest technologies and will lead us to the promised land of scanning that actually works, and mobile apps that Rob can use. They will push our vendors to build better and better systems.
By the time I left Rob in his corner, he had given up and was taking photos of the business cards to email to the receptionist for her to input between calls. He’s pretty sure if he buys her some flowers and a skinny vanilla soy misto that it will all work out.
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BizMarketer is written by Elizabeth Williams
I help companies have better conversations
Drop me a line at ewilliams@candlerchase.com
Or follow me @bizmkter
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