The economy recent decline is forcing job cuts in almost every industry across our nation. With these cuts comes reorganization and shifts in job responsibilities for many companies. This is an unfortunate situation for so many but remains a reality that businesses are forced to face. And despite these challenges and tough decisions, businesses still have to meet bottom line goals set by executive management. Closing deals and bringing in new customers has never been so crucial. The increasingly critical pressure for sales to create new business is causing lead generation programs to play a more important role than ever before. Smaller sales forces are forcing companies to depend on their lead generation vendors to deliver when times are tough.
There is something to consider when evaluating your demand generation success during these troubling times. As mentioned, job cuts and responsibility turnover is affecting hundreds of thousands of people. The result of this type of behavior is inaccurate contact level data. Many people are no longer with their previous companies, some are no longer decision makers and others have a new phone number due to reorganizations and office changes. For any sales and marketing organization to be successful, it is critical to maintain decent prospecting data – especially on your top marketing prospects. This means having updated address information, direct and main phone lines as well as the right titles for your decision-makers. While it will be nearly impossible to have 100% accurate data, you should consider taking a portion of your budget for the sole purpose of performing a data verification/contact discovery initiative focused on your top prospect accounts. These prospect accounts are too important to your sales funnel not to spend some time and money on ensuring they’re accurate.
The economy will eventually turn around and jobs will be filled but for this to happen businesses must perform and sell their products. Ensuring your priority prospect data is as clean as possible is critical to the success of your marketing campaigns, and ultimately in allowing your sales team to focus on selling to accurate decision-makers.