But Your Data Is Fine, Trust Me ...

No matter what you want to call it though, it just boils down to simple information. Information all you marketers crave. Information about your customer, your prospects, your products, your competitors and the trends that will steer you to hitting those numbers in the next and future fiscal quarters.

There is just so much of it, you say? No one here knows what to do with it, I hear? Every department controls a piece of it and refuses to share, is the excuse?

Maybe true. But, with a little time, effort and—of course—some of those ever-scarce budget dollars, you can create an environment where the grain can be separated from the chaff to build a healthy and robust universal silo of data which will benefit and streamline the efforts of every area of your organization efficiently and profitably.

There is no cookie-cutter data model for the business needs of every organization, despite the host of plug-and-play database tools and marketing automation processes available today. The information that makes your business research and marketing program successful is likely to be much different from what works for even your closest competitor.

At the core, your primary contact data for customers and prospects needs to be acquired and maintained as strictly as possible. My good friend, Bernice Grossman, along with fellow direct marketing legend Ruth Stevens, have a whitepaper I always refer to when providing guidance to anyone striving to establish or reorganize the variety of information that quickly begins to accumulate from different sources, in multiple disparate formats. Written as a guide for B-to-B organizations, the reasons and methodologies hold true for B-to-C. Even with the changes in data availability and the explosive growth of social data availability in the industry during the last few years, the white paper addresses the core data requirements for contact and communication.

Outside of the core basics of data needed to contact, track and segment your data pool, determining exactly what it is that gives you the edge is Priority One in deciding what else you must have available to make decisions. In every conversation or discovery session around data and database design within a CRM, the persistent desire that comes up is wanting a “full 360-degree view of my customers.” While that is possible with simply the basic contact information you have as the core of your data, along with whatever historical transactions available to provide RFM, most users expect a much deeper dive. At the more extreme illustration of designing your data around the optimal user experience, you have this infographic from Visual.ly that has been making the social media rounds. While extensive, the many comments on the sites where it has been posted point to even more data sources being needed to be all-encompassing.

If you, and your business goals, are like most, your time and budget is more likely going to place your need somewhere between the most basic and the most extravagant of these two extremes.

Discovering your own sweet spot is where the best value proposition is to create and maintain profitability for your business. That is where I hope to focus in the posts that will follow on a regular basis. I will be sharing points of interest, ideas, solutions and strategies for identifying the most accurate and efficient steps to take in planning the housing and process flow of all the data you need for success … with a dose of irreverence sprinkled in liberally along the way.