Segmenting and keeping a clean database is relevant to any business and knowing where to dig to find your clients is a very important part of marketing.
In this episode, our host Kym Heffernan was joined by Andy Kyiet from Demand Flow Intelligence a company that helps you find the nuggets in your market. Demand Flow Intelligence provides services to B2B vendors define their market strategy, execute their market strategy and support their findings with relevant marketing data.
This episode contains a discussion on:
- How to build and maintain your database
- The importance of personalising your database
- How to identify your ideal prospect
- Tips on building your database with ease
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If you want more information from the podcast check out the transcript below.
Transcript
Welcome to Marketing Show. The 20 to 30 minutes of marketing magic that will help you connect the dots with all the digital, social, and old school marketing and sales options available today. Our aim is to give you practical, effective tips and ideas so your business or professional practice can get more prospects and nurture those prospects to be coming long term customers.
This show is sponsored by the Marketing Strategy Company who help B2B organisations develop winning marketing strategies and sales and marketing automation systems to turn their sales and marketing efforts into new customers and dollars through their marketing.
Check out the Marketing Strategy Company’s planning and marketing services at themarketingstrategy.co.
Kym: Hi, and welcome to today’s Marketing Strategy Show. I’m Kym Heffernan and I am your host. This is a Marketing Strategy Show and it’s all about getting the right marketing to your business. In our Marketing Strategy episodes, we pull back the curtain for an expert in a specialised subject or someone who has grown and has experience in that topic.
Kym: Now marketing today relies heavily on having critical information. Information about your markets, your prospects and of course your customers. And all that relies on a four letter word, it’s not what you think, it’s D-A-T-A. So today we invite Andy Kyiet from Demand Flow Intelligence to take you through seven reasons to invest in your marketing data but more importantly what you need to do to make sure your marketing data delivers.
Andy are you there?
Andy: I am Kym and thank you very much for that introduction.
Kym: And welcome.
Andy: Thank you.
Kym: So why don’t we start with the Andy story.
Andy: Absolutely, thank you, yeah. Well I guess I very much position myself as an IT geek doing marketing. In fact the whole business, Demand Flow Intelligence, we are IT geeks doing marketing. I have a very I guess rich background being a technology provider. Demand Flow Intelligence is actually my seventh venture. The other six were actually in technology and being a technology provider. And I came over to Australia in 95′ and as you’ve probably all spotted I’m going to talk to you about data which I can assure you is exactly the same thing as data, so you’re going to get the English version of this. As much as I’ve tried and been here 23 years I still can’t say data, I’m still data I’m afraid.
Andy: Yeah, I came here 95′ and was involved as a technical director of another technology venture and one of our markets was the supply chain market and we were providing a warehouse management system. So like any good CEO I wanted to know what the size of my market was and so I started to do some research about that. And discovered very quickly that there wasn’t really very much intelligence available about that. I just had a simple question. I wanted to know how many distribution centres there were of a given size in Australia or in ANZ. And I found that that didn’t actually exist. So my only option at that time was to go to research companies, the likes of Gartner who provided a great research service, but discovered that to find out that answer it was going to cost me a considerable amount of money. So, I started asking around probably thinking the guys who provide forklift trucks would know the answer to this and their answer when I asked how many warehouses are there in Australia was, “oh there’s heaps.”
Kym: There’s more than we have forklift trucks.
Andy: Yeah, there’s heaps. And actually they weren’t wrong because here’s a bit of trivia. Australia has more distribution centres per capita than anybody in the world.
Kym: Really?
Andy: Yes, because of our tyranny of distance.
Kym: Of course. It’s a big country.
Andy: They weren’t wrong. There are heaps. But I needed to have something a little more exact than heaps to work on. So I realised there was a bit of a gap in the market. We actually had the tech downturn in about 2001 and at that time the company we were representing, they were a US company, went back to the US. So I had a little bit of a choice of what I was going to do and I decided to basically reinvent myself as a marketing person, go back to my marketing routes. I started my career in marketing to focus initially on the marketing intelligence side of things. And that got us into the market in 2001.
Kym: Wow.
Andy: Yeah. So our initial activity was helping bring people into the market and giving them market intelligence and through that activity we were asked to help with things like lead generation and pipeline building and we got into that and then being IT geeks doing marketing as I mentioned before, we then got into helping with marketing automation. And through that experience we discovered something really interesting about businesses. Basically everyone’s marketing data was really poor. I’ve used a very polite word there.
Kym: Maybe that four letter word we spoke about might be the right one.
Andy: Yeah, yeah. I’d like to use that but I won’t. But it was really really consistently poor and it was affecting the return on investment that people were putting into their lead generation, that they were investing in their CRM platforms. And as I mentioned, we have an IT background, we have the same DNA as a lot of our clients. A lot of our client base are as technology providers. We actually have the knowledge and know-how to solve that problem. And so to solve that problem we developed a data robot we called DAVE. DAVE does data. And DAVE is an acronym for Data Accuracy Verification Engine and that provides us with a lot of the capability, cleaning up people’s data.
Andy: But as you can imagine we had access to an awful a lot of data and seen a lot of the issues that exist with the data and the effects that that has.
Kym: Yeah, seeing so much data come through from. I think if you went across IT professional services, industrial and medical equipment and transport logistics there’s quite a lot of data over the years on where the issues lie and where the solutions lie too right.
Andy: Absolutely, yeah. A lot of different industries and a lot of different data. All B to B data, but similar problems exist in B to C type data.
Kym: So let’s jump into the seven reasons. The first one you’ve got which I think is a really lovely one. Stop killing your audience due to audience fatigue.
Andy: Absolutely. When you look at the effects of what this poor data is doing, we have a big problem in marketing today and that is massive audience fatigue. And one of the things that cause this is that people have invested in their CRMs, their marketing automation platforms, sales automation and they’ve absolutely Howitzer-ed their audience with this really poor data. I think some people referred to them at a conference I went to as spam cannons, you know? So they load up their cannon with all this dirty data and just pummeled the audience. And the fact that it’s inaccurate really is a big turnoff for the audience. They’re getting a lot of irrelevant stuff because the data is not segmented. So they’re just spraying and spraying and we just see a lot of segmentation that just doesn’t exist, it’s missing, it’s either inconsistent or it’s just completely wrong. And a lot of people just get stuff that’s not relevant to them. They unfortunately then switch off to your whole brand. It becomes a brand level, I guess fatigue, and they just actually start just ignoring messages from you some of which in the future may be relevant to them.
Kym: So how do you suggest people in the blog which we’ll send the show notes to, talk about segmentation, even just segmentation like industry and type or role for example.
Andy: Yeah I think it’s well worth having your data expertly and consistently segmented but the other thing to bear in mind is that it’s got to be done on a regular basis. Unfortunately it’s not a set and forget exercise because if you’re doing a good job marketing you should be polluting your data all the time. What I mean by that is that we’re now in the age of friction less marketing. And what that means is that we’re actually reducing the friction we have with the audience and are asking less and less of them in return for say, downloading that white paper. And maybe even got down to the level of saying just give me your email address and I’ll send you the content.
Andy: Whereas previously you used to ask them their whole life story and profile of the whole company, now people won’t do that. They’re pretty savvy now, they know exactly what you’re doing so in order to get them to reply you’ve just got to de-condition it. Consequently, from a marketing perspective, there are huge gaps in the data. So you know a somebody, perhaps you know their name, you might know who they work with. They’ve downloaded your white paper but you know not much about them. You perhaps don’t know what role they’re in, what job they’re in, what seniority they are, what industry their business is. You need to know all of this to get your segmentation right and get the right messages go to the right audience.
Kym: Yeah, ’cause otherwise as you’ve said, if you get a generic message has no relevance to you, you just eventually unsubscribe or don’t bother subscribing, ignore it, put it into a read later folder for uses which I don’t actually read later.
Andy: No that’s right. Later never comes does it.
Kym: That’s an interesting point you made about that balance of form of people prepared to do it. I often say to B2B clients, it’s great to capture the details but unless they’re prepared to give you some basic information like at least their company name is it worthwhile doing. That’s a balance people have got to. You ask for first name, last name, email, you get “x” responses, you add phone number of company name you’ll get less. This is better quality lead, people have to got to test this stuff and be prepared to make a phone call or send an email or whatever later on to capture that basic information. So often it’s not just a form it could be your salespeople filling it out, it could be your inbound telephone people filling it out and they don’t have time to capture it all or they don’t want to capture it.
Andy: Absolutely, a classic one that we see is around industry and its left to the sales guys to decide what the industry classification is. It’s a really common mistake. I often hold up my mobile phone and say how would you classify the manufacturers of this phone? A lot of people would say, “oh they’re in telecoms” which is actually the wrong answer. They’re actually a consumer electronics manufacturer. That is the industry they’re in. Their industry of interest is telecoms, but the problem is if you classify them as telecoms and you say I’m going to run a campaign for complex manufacturers, lets say, oh we better include telecoms because people may have classified a phone manufacturer as telecoms, the next thing you know you’re including Telstra who are not a manufacturer and they’re outside of your target. So, that’s the kind of stuff that happens.
Kym: So standardizing those things according to industry standards, there’s ANZ.
Andy: Yeah we do use that a lot. In itself it’s not a perfect science and quite often when you are targeting by industry or how you want to see an audience, it’s really got to be done cognizance of how the business sees the market. So one size doesn’t necessarily fit all.
Kym: So coming up with a definition and making sure all the staff know the definition.
Andy: Yeah, absolutely. The thing is that quite often we have an industry, they set it up with a pick list, a drop down list for somebody to pick up. And certainly the value that gets put in there is a valid value but it’s not a sensible value. So a lot of what we do is to try and sensibile-ize data. So kind of what I say, we sensibilize it to death. We normalise, standardise, regularise but a new thing that we do is sensible-ize because you look at stuff and you wonder who was smoking what at the time. It’s usually just, they’re in a hurry and say well I’ll just put them in, pick these values off the pick list, I’ll fix it up later. And as you said, Kym, later never comes, does it.
Kym: So your tip to solve that is to get the data expertly and consistently segmented. So not as a one-off exercise but as a continued exercise.
Andy: Yeah, clean it and then put it under maintenance, keep it clean because it’s going to be getting dirty all the time.
Kym: The next step in your plug I found really interesting was number two, a grain field has the quickest yield, that’s what we always think but not necessarily, right?
Andy: No, true. But I guess putting this into context. The context here is that people have got lists which they have been heavily over farming and, as I mentioned before, generated audience fatigue and so a lot of sales guys when we get into campaigns say, “can you find me some fresh prospects, I think I’ve worn the old ones out and I need something fresh.” So the thing that you need to do is not only be cleaning up your data and making it segmented, you also want to be extending your data and getting fresh data and data that’s within your target market so that you’re farming what people often say white space as well as actually nurturing the existing leads that you’ve got. So that’s really where getting some new fresh fields can actually yield some good returns.
Kym: So where do people source this data from, I guess it’s something you have to compile yourself. You wouldn’t recommend as I mentioned buying a rented list for example. Where do you get that data from?
Andy: We get it from a variety of sources. We ourselves are not a list broken although we do have an awful lot of data, we’ve got about 1.6 million business contacts we have access to. But that’s a resource that we use for the cleaning but we do work ourselves with a lot of quality list providers. You have to be very circumspect. There’s an awful lot of lists being offered for sale and lists that look very very affordable, you might get an offer of a list that comes out of the US and it seems exceedingly cheap and you’re literally being offered half a million contacts for about $1000, which compared to what it costs you locally is exceedingly cheap. We check some of those sources and so have our clients and I can tell you they are extremely unreliable.
Kym: It’s like buying a five year old phone book basically.
Andy: Oh absolutely. Absolutely. There is some accurate data in there, I’m not sure how they actually farm it but I think they do a lot of email scraping and so forth. Get information out of people’s email footers and build these lists. But certainly when I’ve looked at these and checked out say ourselves, Demand Flow Intelligence, yeah the names are accurate but there were people who haven’t worked with us for sort of 5-10 years. So it’s a case of when you get on there, you’re on there for life. So those lists are never clean. They are very very counterproductive. So you’ve really got to be sure that you’re going to a quality source and I actually don’t know many, if any, decent overseas quality sources. I would always be very circumspect about an overseas source offering you Australian or ANZ data. It’s never good, they might have good reach in the US and the rest of the world but certainly what they have on the ANZ is poor. So the local data is the best data.
Kym: Doesn’t matter which country you’re in, local data is always better.
Andy: A local provider, absolutely, is always the best provider we’ve found. But you also need to be somewhat of an expert buyer as well. And again one of the things that got me involved with becoming expert list acquisition experts was somebody right in the early days that said he wanted to target field service managers. And he had a particular product for mobility and he had gone to a list provider and given this list, and he said can you pull out service managers please and gave us this list to work on and we found that over half of them were service managers in car dealers. The guys who are managing the car service operation. Totally irrelevant. So that was a really early example of the downside of not being an expert list buyer. So we often encourage our clients to allow us to buy the lists for them, doesn’t cost them anything extra but makes sure they get what they need.
Kym: And very often you’ve got a supplement list anyways. It might just be companies in industry or have all those contact details right?
Andy: Absolutely.
Kym: So it’s quite good quality source of data. So should people get a sample of it first of all or is that really irrelevant because they’re only going to give you a good sample anyway.
Andy: Yeah, you can. They will usually give you a small sample, 10, 20 records. So you can see what you’re getting. They’re reasonably accommodating.
Kym: So number three you have is about personalised marketing.
Andy: Yes, we’re now in the age of personalised marketing or we’re moving towards it very quickly. It’s very hard to get traction in the market and one way to do that is to really personalise your marketing communications. And I mean more than just saying, Dear Andy Kyiet or Dear Andy or hello Andy. Going a bit deeper than that, having all the information that you have about them as clean and correct. I guess a classic error, my Co-Director, his middle name is V, V for Victor and he got an email which was addressed Dear Laurence V. And straight away you know that was machine generated. I mean the whole idea of personalised marketing is to make people feel as though another person has personally taken the trouble to generate this email for them. And in fact you probably almost need to do that. But because people need organisations want to scale up this activity, there is some very good software that can create very good personalised emails, however, you really need good clean data to drive that because the effect of bad data is probably worse than actually not doing any marketing. As soon as you see something badly addressed and inaccurate straight away you switch off and you say, that’s just a machine talking to me. A person would never send me an email like that. So it’s completely counterproductive.
Kym: Yeah, I don’t know how, but with a name like Kym that you can probably guess can be the male or female, quite often you get correspondence to Ms or Miss Kym.
Andy: Absolutely, yeah. How do you feel about that.
Kym: You can’t even get my gender right, hello.
Andy: Exactly. Exactly.
Kym: I think there’s a golden rule. If you can’t get it right, don’t personalise it. If you don’t have the first name right don’t say dear first.
Andy: No. Or if you’ve just got the initial, Dear L.
Andy: It was always better to have a dot than nothing. No you’re absolutely right Kym. You either don’t personalise it at all or get it right.
Kym: And as you say you’ve got to get it ready for the first glance, so you’ve got to invest time in getting the data correct.
Andy: Absolutely.
Kym: It’s quite a mental task, but you really can’t rely on, you can run some things through an engine like DAVE I presume to get it right. But sometimes you’ll have to have a look at what DAVE can’t have and look through it yourself and it’s so obvious when it’s your data. You can see tacks where they shouldn’t be, you can see names that are half-spelt. It’s just obvious when you look at it. You really need to take time out do that every quarter or whatever time period there might be to do that.
Andy: Absolutely. DAVE, the engine, runs through and checks stuff but also flags an awful lot of exceptions or things that need checking. And that’s all checked by real people. Living breathing people. Actually look at that and see if it’s sensible. We sensible-ize stuff because it’s pretty dangerous if you don’t.
Kym: Number four, I love this one, is stop chasing chimps when you need orangutans.
Andy: Yeah.
Kym: Talk to me about that one.
Andy: Yeah, people often say to me, what do you do Andy? I’m the orangutan whisperer. If you look at my LinkedIn profile I position myself as the orangutan whisperer and it’s a great purple cow name, thank you Seth Godin for a great book. Because people look at that and go, “whoa what’s that?” And it’s analogous of what we do. I often say to people we hunt for orangutans for our clients because it’s something that’s hard to find, can only be found in certain places and certainly one of the first things is that you ask yourself where do I find orangutans. Generally speaking in jungles but then the next question is are there orangutans in every jungle and absolutely not they only live in certain jungles. So, you want to make sure you’re in the right jungle because if you’re not you’re under this big illusion and you’re in this jungle and you’re looking and you can blow the whole marketing budget just by being in the wrong jungle.
Andy: Let’s say you are looking for orangutans and they’re pretty hard to find so you’ve got to get in the right jungle, you’re in the right jungle, there’s loads of trees. You don’t have time to climb every single tree to check if there’s an orangutan in it so you need to be a little bit savvy about which trees you’re going to climb and know a little bit about what types of trees orangutans might live in. But you really want to be sure that you are, it’s a tree with an orangutan because having gone to all that effort to climb the tree and got up there and you’ve discovered there’s an ape up there but it’s actually a chimp and I actually want orangutans you just wasted a whole lot of time.
Kym: Can you give me a practical example of that, Andy. Of maybe a client that you’ve worked with.
Andy: Yeah. I guess the reality is people are harder to get hold of and they’re getting harder to get a hold of. So a big part of the marketing execution is actually finding, getting to talk to those people. You can have the best message in the whole world, the best pitch in play but if you can’t actually deliver it and find the right person then you’re not getting anywhere. So there’s a lot of effort involved and imagine the scenario you’ve gone weeks ringing and ringing trying to get hold of this particular target and you finally get hold of them, you ask them a few qualifying questions and you very quickly discover they’re not actually an orangutan, they’re just a chimp. They’re an ape, they’re both apes but this ones a chimp. And you’ve completely wasted a lot of time. You’ve wasted both your time and there’s.
Andy: So one way to avoid that is to ensure that, and it comes back down to the segmentation of your data, to make sure as an example if you’re looking for an orangutan within an organisation then you need to make sure you know what their role is, what their level of seniority is. So if you’re targeting the CFO, you get the CFO and you don’t get the book keep.
Kym: Right, or they actually buy your product or service even before that.
Andy: Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. Improving your data is all about reducing the amount of marketing waste that’s going on. You’ve really got to really target that budget the best way that you can to get the best you can and so you’re trying to avoid wasting time what turned out to be a chimp when as I say you want an orangutan.
Kym: Yeah so make sure they buy the product but also make sure your data includes segmentation and the seniority of the contact not just his name.
Andy: Yeah that’s right. You’re ringing up and you finally get the person and you go okay, well I’m looking for somebody who makes decisions on recommendations on whatever accounting system or ERP you might use. They turn around and say, “sorry I’m just the book keeper” or “I’m a fairly junior accountant I can’t help you with that.” Yeah you’ve just blown a whole lot of time which is avoidable.
Kym: Yeah, I can see as well is that number five you’ve got is that make sure at least 80% of your addressable market is identified. Can you explain what you mean with that.
Andy: Yeah. We do auditing of data to help the clients understand how much data is really relevant, how much have they got. And we do health checks on the data and that includes how much of their addressable market they have identified. We give a balance score card on the data and no one scores more than 60% on that and certainly nobody or very few people have more than 60% reach into their market. And sometimes it’s as low as even 30%.
Kym: So it’s a bit like, we were talking before Andy, about the distribution warehouses, how many are there. They just don’t know what the number is.
Andy: Yeah. So you know we’re in a pretty finite market here in ANZ I can tell you there are less than 3000 businesses than have a revenue of more than 100 million US dollars or 140 Australian. So in a market this size, and given that nobody, very few people are addressing the whole market, the whole business market it’s not unrealistic to set yourself a goal, it’s an achievable goal to say we want to have at least 80% of our market identified so that we’re marketing to at least 80% of our market. And I’ve said to people, it’s quite simple in one way. All you need to know is the size of your market and how much of it you’ve already got in your database. The reality is that most businesses don’t know the answer to either of those questions. Many have only got say a macro view of the whole market, that’s not hard to get. You know the Australian Bureau of Statistics provides pretty good market analysis split down by ANZSIC codes but as I say most people are not addressing that whole macro market.
Kym: It’s a section of that industry, it’s not the whole.
Andy: Exactly. Yeah. Just generally speaking, they’ll want companies of a certain minimum size or possibly even a maximum size whose a good fit for their offering. So quite often after we’ve cleaned up people’s data and said to people well the bad news is you’ve only got 30% of your market identified. The great news is you’ve got 70% potential new market you can start reaching to.
Kym: That’s massive.
Andy: Yeah it’s good news bad news.
Kym: That’s a very good tip because I think it’s a challenge, I see a lot of organisations start with, oh I need more leads or I need more new business. Is the markets don’t properly, they try to market and sell to people they’ve identified already. They’ve only identified 20%, coming back to what you were saying, people marketing over and over and over the same 20% when there’s another 80% out there that you haven’t actually identified.
Andy: Absolutely. I’ll give you another example. A client gave us a target account list of about 4200 companies and said can you clean that up. And by the time we’d finished with it and de-duped it and look to see if businesses had been acquired or not and rationalised it, -ized it to death as I say, we handed back 2800, And that was a bit of a sobering moment for the client because a, he realised his target market was a lot smaller than he thought and b, he realised he had too many account managers. So as I say, a bit of a sobering moment for him.
Andy: Yes, unfortunately because of this are labouring under an illusion that they have got more reach than they have. Whereas a lot of what they got is just not relevant or it’s out of date or it’s duplicates or it’s junk.
Kym: And how do you go about de-duping it, do you employ someone yourself? Do you employ someone externally? Is it possible to employ someone to do it, that’s an interesting question for you.
Andy: Oh yeah. We do. A lot of it we’ve developed our data cleaning robot DAVE to do an awful lot of the grunt work. So DAVE does a lot of that. We’ve almost built into that machine learning where the more data DAVE cleans, the more DAVE learns. We obviously teach DAVE and give it business rules, get him to understand when he spits out exceptions and we obviously put more rules in there to help him understand it. Yeah, so he can do a lot of that. But it does need, it certainly does need some human intervention to look at that and yes we can train people.
Andy: I think one of the mistakes people make though is they often see this data cleaning exercise as giving it to the least cost resource because they see it as, I won’t need anybody particularly savvy on it. Well the absolute opposite’s true. You probably want to put your most savvy person on it to make smart decisions. So one of the good reasons why you don’t want to offshore, a lot of people send their data cleaning off shore, and then the stuff that I see come back is again just, a lot of it’s just not sensible. People offshore don’t understand the local geography. They put suburbs in the wrong state or vice-versa because they just simply don’t know. So you need someone who’s local and savvy and knows the market and then the whole issue of industry coding, you need somebody who’s really savvy.
Andy: As we discovered if they’re researching stuff and looking at people’s websites which aren’t always that helpful. You know, I’ve read so many about statements which don’t actually really tell you what the company does in a succinct manner which allows an inexperienced person to go, “oh yes, that’s the right industry code.” It’s actually a highly skilled job to do that and get that right.
Andy: And I’ll tell you one very funny story as well was that I had a whole team of people doing this and I had men and women and I rang the client, I had a query and I had the client and said, “how do you want us to code these industries?”, I said an example how would you like us to code a ball-bearing manufacturer. And this was the marketing manager of a big company and she said to me, “what’s a ball bearing?” Very funny to ask but I thought, well yeah okay. I guess you can’t assume that people know that. And I said, well you know they’re used a lot in cars to makes things go round. And she said, “oh okay, put them in automotive.” I said, “No, you can’t do that. They’re heavy metal manufacturing, you need to classify them accordingly.
Andy: But that taught me a big lesson to make sure that the people you’re using have the right industry knowledge to make sensible decisions. So we have the ball bearing test which we ask of both men and women, we’re not sexist at all. And there are woman who do have very good mechanical bent, mechanical minds and absolutely understand what a ball bearing is and can classify it correctly and there are some men that don’t. So it just illustrates the knowledge that you need.
Kym: It illustrates I guess the problem doesn’t always lie with the marketing person or the IT person, it’s probably broad knowledge across the company isn’t it. Take people through the marketing people, through the sales people, and even telephone people taking calls. Rather than one people making decisions and then no one understands it, getting an hour maximum on getting people to agree on a classification.
Andy: Yeah, it can be very subject. And actually one of things we learnt was that the more people you have on these projects, the more variation you get. So you actually want to minimise the people you have on it. And I’ve had a lot of time having very interesting debates about how something should be classified and probably we were both right but as I’m the boss my decision was final. I had to pull rank. That’s not saying the other person was wrong. But it is subjective. But the worst thing you can do is to be inconsistent and that really makes a mess. We can cope with being consistently wrong. If something is consistently coded the wrong way it’s very very easy to change it, you just say flip A to B, we’ve now got it right. But if you’ve got stuff coded as As and Bs you’ve got a mess, you’ve got a problem. So, inconsistency is the worst crime but being consistently wrong is kind of nowhere near as bad.
Kym: Andy, I think that’s been a fantastic list of five tips there. There are two more in terms of making pay you back, which is getting data clean while you’re doing your project. And I guess the last one I just wanted to touch on for a couple of minutes. A lot of people think data, just getting it right isn’t important but that can add significant value to your business valuation.
Andy: Absolutely. I’ve seen a big mind shift from looking at systems and not getting the right answer and saying stupid system to saying stupid data which is great. And that is viewed in its operational impact. However, one thing that people don’t really consider is that it’s a really important asset of your business. And if you think about your business as needing to get the best value and the best multiple for your business, it almost needs to be viewed as a franchisable operation. And in effect, you’re effectively franchising it to the new buyer. And most people would say, here you go, here’s the procedures manual, here’s my customer list, here’s all my collateral, my products, my manufacturing facilities and so forth. But very few people pay enough attention to the data. And if you go, here you go, here’s this wonderful machine they’ll go, great has it got any petrol in it. It’s like, uhhh no the petrol’s pretty dirty you better go buy some fresh stuff. And that’s what data is, it’s the fuel for your business.
Andy: If you were to say to somebody, here’s my data, I’ve got at least 85% of my market identified, I know how big my market is, my data is very very clean, you just crank this handle, put this data into the system, here’s the results you’re going to get. People are going to look on that very very favourably and it’s going to very positively affect the multiple that you’re going to get for your business. Just not something that people think about.
Kym: Absolutely, yeah. I think that’s a really important factor. Andy, is there anything else you’d like to add as a closing, parting suggestion for people.
Andy: Yes, I think hopefully, just looking. These are just seven reasons but there are many other reasons why you want to keep your data clean and why it’s worth investing in it and there are so many things happening. You just need to really think about the waste that poor data is generating in your business, how much more efficient you could be, the time that you would save. It’s also, I guess one of the biggest effect that you see with bad data is getting lack of buy in, particularly sales people, they look at that data and they say, well that’s rubbish, I’ve got my own little silo of data and off they go, they’ve built their own spreadsheet and used that. And when they leave the business, guess what that walks out the business with them. So for that alone, that fact alone, it’s worth investing some time and money making sure your data is the best that it can be.
Kym: Andy, if people want to find out more about you or Demand Flow what’s the best way to connect with you.
Andy: Yeah well our website is www.demandflow.com.au so you can reach us through that or you can contact us, we’re happy to take calls. I’m happy to give my email address as well, Kym.
Kym: What was it so I connect with you via LinkedIn I guess as well.
Andy: Oh fantastic, I love LinkedIn.
Kym: Andy Kyiet, K-Y-I-E-T. Is that right?
Andy: That’s it, yeah. Absolutely.
Kym: Because, you know, just connect with Andy. I think the other thing I’ll say it that part of your marketing budget, have a budget for data maintenance. Don’t spent it all on the plans, strategies, the tactics. Make sure that in your budget you’ve got money for data maintenance.
Andy: Yeah, absolutely, getting in maintained on a regular basis.
Kym: Fantastic. Well, Andy thank you so much for your time today and putting together those seven reasons again, we’ll put a link to that blog in the show notes and thank you so much for your time, we really appreciate it.
Andy: Thank you, Kym. It’s been fun.
Kym: You take care.
Andy: Thank you.
Thanks for joining us on this episode of Marketing Show. We hope you got some practical effective tips and ideas so your organisation gets more prospects and nurtures those prospects to becoming long term customers. Just a reminder, the show is sponsored by the Marketing Strategy Company who help B to B organisations develop winning marketing strategies and sales and marketing automation systems to turn their sales and marketing efforts into new customers and dollars through their marketing. Check out the show notes for this episode and the Marketing Strategy Company’s marketing services at themarketingstrategy.co.
Until next time, happy marketing.
