Telemarketing Software Featured Article

Quick: What’s your most important sales asset? Is it your sales team? Their experience? Your terrific product or service? Your supporting sales materials?

If you’re a highly successful sales organization, it’s likely none of these things. While they are all valuable, in a modern lead-generation sense, nothing is more important than your marketing database. This is the collection of resources that your sales people need to sell, and sell well. Unfortunately, many companies neglect this critical asset, and their sales team wastes a lot of time re-creating the information it should contain, often erroneously.  According to Maribeth Ross, writing for Business2Community, studies show that fewer than half of companies spend much time at all managing this precious resource.

“Managing a marketing database includes good segmentation, a well-implemented unsubscribe and spam process, regular data cleansing, appending, and a few other processes,” writes Ross. “A strong data management strategy can help you guide your sales and marketing organizations to success – but you have to put the time and effort into implementing one.”

This process should involve a number of departments and all manner of in-depth knowledge about the company, its products and services, its clients, its previous sales, its sales prospects and a detailed record of all past sales efforts.  But it’s also a living, breathing thing that needs regular attention and updates. This is key to moving forward with a thriving lead-generation process.

“A well-managed database grows at a faster rate than one that is not managed,” writes Ross. “In fact, data from Aberdeen’s (News - Alert) 2014 Lead Management Study shows that companies with data management strategies see year-over-year growth of data contacts of 25 percent versus 11 percent growth without database management practices.”

A more up-to-date marketing database will produce more up-to-date leads, eliminate duplication and wasted effort, and increase the likelihood of turning a lead into a sale. This is the best possible way your company’s marketing efforts can be focused to grow the organization. Companies with marketing and sales departments that work in sync – rather than competitively, which is often the case – will generate symbiosis that can result in magic when it comes to sales and lead management.

“A better database will lead to higher conversions and more revenue directly generated from your department,” writes Ross. “And, with demonstrated marketing success comes perks. It only makes sense that marketing departments demonstrating higher ROI can make a better case for an increase in marketing budget.”