Demographic vs. Firmagraphic Appends

Note: This is a continuation of the B2B vs. B2C series. I will also be presenting some related material at the MIT Information Quality Symposium next week (MITIQS 7/15-7/17 2009). If you are attending, please introduce yourself.

Data Acquisition is an important part of any data driven Sales and Marketing program. I associate the append process with Marketing since that’s where these programs are generally funded, but the clear beneficiary of the work is the Sales organization. And of course, it takes a partnership between Technology, Sales and Marketing to make data acquisition programs successful. A data file on a shared drive or standalone table in a database has little or no value. The data has to be integrated with customer and prospect lists and loaded into the CRM and SFA systems and / or presented through your BI/DW tools to show ROI. Sorry… I got on a roll with the acronyms. They’re defined at the bottom. I’m in a Data Governance role now. Acronyms and definitions are my life (in a scary, scary way).

This raises the topics of Data Cleansing, Address Standardization, Merging & Matching, Deduplication, Archiving, etc. I’ll save those topics for future posts, but would encourage questions in the comments section. It’s fair to say that without a Data Quality focus you won’t achieve the optimal results for either Demographic or Firmagraphic Data Acquisition program.

Demographic Appends

Demographic data is generally used by Marketers and Analysts to determine the best way to target a consumer base. Starting with a universe of customers or prospects, a company can buy information on:

• Credit History
• Purchasing Patterns
• Housing Location and Situation, e.g. owner, renter
• Salary
• Lifestyle / Family

You can also buy data that segments customers based on the provider’s best information. Some is based on geographic of financial information. Others are based in buying patterns. Sometimes they even have cool segment titles like “Boomer Barons,” “True Blues,” and “Jumbo Families.” (All of those are from the Acxiom Personicx family of pre-defined segments). The goal of a demographic append is really bulk segmentation. How do I get enough information about my consumers to segment them for marketing and analysis. In most cases, the purchaser doesn’t care about any single individual or household, other than to get them into the correct program. The marketers are looking at sets of consumers, and then targeting from there.

In very high end consumer sales, e.g., luxury items, high net worth banking etc, you may find cases where sales people will use the appended data at the individual level. But generally it’s used for grouping customers into buckets, finding buying patterns and trends across like customers, and performing analyses such as next best product, lifetime value, and similar. Consumer sales is so transactional, that there isn’t time to research before any one conversation.

Firmagraphic Appends

B2B data, which I prefer to call “Firmagraphic” but have also seen called Firmographic or Firma-graphic, can provide value for not only segmentation, but also for pre-call research. B2B Sales is moving toward a more consultative approach where the sales rep becomes more of a partner with the purchaser. The best sales reps do this across all businesses. Rather than try to sell one product or service (transactional), the sales rep tries to understand the company’s need and deliver a suite of prodcuts & services and sometimes even the workers to use them (in an outsourcing arrangement). I’m sure if you’re reading this you’ve seen the varying styles of transactional and consultative sales reps.

To arm those consultative sales reps with the appropriate information, companies often purchase firmagraphic data and load it into their CRM systems. This data may be grouped into:

• Parent Child Relationships
• Locations of Related Companies
• Contact Information for Executives
• Industry Codes
• Number of Employees
• Revenue

This allows the rep to quickly look at the companie’s situation, and taylor their initial pitch accordingly. “I see you’re in a fast moving industry, with over 100 employees, and that you’re company has decentralized offices across the country. Have you heard of Product A that might meet your needs?” That conversation can only happen to a perspective customer if a firmagraphic append has happened previously. Which reminds me that another form of firmagraphic purchase is the ubiquitous, “Get 200 leads in your target industry,” but that’s not what I’m talking about here.

Segmentation of B2B customers is also sometimes based on Firmagraphic appends,  but as mentioned in the original B2B vs. B2C post, householding in B2B is focused on creating parent child relationships among your customers and prospects. You should also use all of your existing customer information including location, purchasing and servicing history, and past communication response to segment your customers. Once you have those relationships built, you can begin to analyze your coverage of headquarters and branches based on firmagraphic data.

Analytics then focuses on similar models for next best product, lifetime value, likelihood to purchase, likelihood to respond to certain campaigns and others. The tools to d

Acronym Glossary

CRM: Customer Relationship Management. Generally refers to the systems used by Sales and Marketing teams to store and organize customer contact information, purchasing, and servicing history. CRM systems also pump out lots of data used for operational reporting and as inputs to customer analysis and segmentation.

SFA: Sales Force Automation. Tools used by Sales Reps to manage their actitivities. This would include follow ups/reminders, appointments, leads, renewals, etc.  SFA systemsalso includes the operational reporting of those activities in some cases.

BI: Business Intelligence. The analytics and reporting tools built on top of the Data Warehouse. Business Intelligence can also be used to describe the practice of analyzing data to determine important insights and drive strategy. These tools look across CRM, SFA, manufacturing and financial systems.

B2B: Business to Business. Marketing and Sales activities along with associated products and services targeted at business customers.

B2C: Business to Consumer. Marketing and Sales activities along with associated products and services targeted at individuals or households of consumers.

ROI: Return on Investment. A simple calcualtion that takes the difference between the cost of a program and the returned value from it, and divides it by the cost of the program. So if I spend $100 and make $150, my ROI would be the $50 of benefit over the $100 of cost: .5 ROI. People often forget to subtract the cost from the numerator and inflate their ROIs.

Mixed Metaphors

I decided to go for a light post today. No Data Governance or Analytics allowed on the Friday of a long weekend! Enjoy, and add in others if you have them. Not all of these are original, but many are.

Hack of all trades (credit to my wife Lauren)
Green behind the ears (credit to Barack)
This isn’t rocket surgery
There’s no place like Rome
When in Rome, do as the Romanians do
I’m just talking out loud (also Lauren)
Walking on thin air
Skating on thin air
Treading on thin ice
Hit the wall running
Birds of a feather gather no moss
Burn that bridge when we come to it
Just water over the bridge
Death by a thousand paper clips
Up a tree without a paddle
Up a river without a leg to stand on
Wake up and smell the roses
Two’s a crowd and three’s company
Stop and smell the coffee
Don’t punch a gift horse in the mouth
Can’t lead a dead horse to water
It’s first and ten and we’re swinging for the fences
He took a shot in the dark and hit a grand slam
Give him enough rope to hang by a thread
They’re selling like hot potatoes
I don’t give a flying rat’s ass
A punter’s chance in hell

From therussler.tripod.com/
Pair up in threes, then line up in a circle, alphabetically by height.

From http://www.jimcarlton.com/
We could stand here and talk until the cows turn blue.
We have to get all our ducks on the same page.

Lightweight Data Governance: A Starting Point

This expands on the previous article, Lightweight Data Governance. I’ll continue to add to the theory in upcoming posts. If there are any areas you would like me to focus on, please add a comment, or email me directly.

A few weeks back I met with Steve Sarsfield to discuss the upcoming MIT Information Quality Symposium (MITIQS). It will be my first time presenting to a Data Quality focused group, so I was excited when Steve offered to provide some background. My main concern was, “How can someone in the commercial space keep the interest of a combined business, government and research focused community?” We discussed my approach, and I think I’m on the right track. I’m going to describe how we initiated Data Governance at my company, kept it simple, and found early success.

So where did we start? Data Governance grew from an expressed need by the executive team for better data quality. Sounds simple right? Fix the data. It’s like the Kenan Thompson SNL character talking about the economy: Fix It. The company decided that Data Governance was needed, and that they would let me define the path to getting there. I set the scope to include any project where I have an opportunity to build credibility in data or reporting. I’ve formalized processes where necessary, but kept it “lightweight” in most areas. With the current state of the economy, I see no other way to get there.

I previously led the Marketing Analytics department, and we had responsibility for B2B and B2C Analytics. Most of our efforts were focused on the B2B side, since that’s where the most perceived opportunity existed. When I moved into the Director of Global Data Governance role, I built from my strength and worked on B2B issues first. I attacked the low-effort, high-value projects. I looked to expand on the local efforts that were working well. If teams or projects came up with creative solutions, I looked to expand their work globally. My thought was that it’s really hard to come up with the underlying process definition, but that an existing process was easy to expand. It doesn’t work for every existing process, but some are natural fits that resolve longstanding internal issues.

That became the basis for Lightweight Data Governance. Find the projects or efforts that are successful on a small scale, and expand them globally. That way you start with a base of knowledge, documentation, and executive support that’s very hard to build from scratch.

Grow Data Governance efforts organically

Start with existing processes. Find out which can be expanded, centralized or automated.

Focus on project level ROI

Don’t try to sell your management on a huge program to start. Build the business case at the project level. It’s easier for management to support small positive ROI projects.

Partner to be unobtrusive to ongoing work

Find projects that are already in flight. Would Data Governance add to their impact? If so, partner with their leadership to help craft the deliverables to create mutual benefit.

Build momentum from early successes

Get testimonials! If the project went well and the community benefited, you should be able to get the project sponsor to say so.

Measure initiatives on DQ impact

This step is further along the Data Governance continuum. Begin to show the impact on the organization when projects focus on data quality. This cultural shift will underscore the importance of future Data Governance work.

Follow with Formal Data Governance

Does it make sense for the enterprise? Does executive support exist? If not how do you build it? This is where the more traditional theory in most Data Governance efforts becomes relevant.

Upcoming Blog Posts

June has been a light month for blog posts. I’ve settled on upcoming topics, and even drafted my next couple of posts out. Why the slow month? I took a detour into Lean BI research that proved uninteresting to write about. I’ll scrap that. Gone also is my brief foray into Cloud Computing for BI. I’m just not an expert there. Good to learn about, but nothing I want to associate my name with yet. I also had to knock out a conference presentation for this Summer.

I’ve settled on the following upcoming topics. Bear with me while I get them out there. Enjoy the previous posts in the Data Governance folder. Also, please comment if there are any areas you’d like me to explore.

1) Lightweight Data Governance: A Starting Point

A continuation of the previous post. I’ve finished my MIT Information Quality Symposium presentation for this Summer, and think it would be helpful to write some background on the theory I’m developing. In a recent conversation with a Data Governance colleague, they referred to the work as “different from what everyone else is doing.” I hope that’s a good thing. Either way, it confirmed that the presentation will be provocative for that group. So I’ve got that going for me.

2) Data Quality and Data Governance Blogs I’d Recommend

I’ve been keeping a list of those bloggers I think are really good. I look for people who put their opinions out there, and keep the topic light. I’m also a fan of those who are tool agnostic. Too many in our field are married to their vendors. It’s a bad position to take.

3) Demographic and Firmagraphic Appends

A continuation of my B2C vs. B2B series. In this post I’ll explore where the value is, how to incorporate and whether you should even bother. Have you maximized your own data first? Are there other ways to get access to this data for free? Some podcaster’s I follow think so. More to come in the blog post.

Are You Spamming Your Customers?

Marketing Compliance is a critical area that most companies don’t do well. If you haven’t read the summary of the CAN SPAM act, you should. As a consumer, you should know. As an email marketer, you need to know. From the always hilarious FTC Consumer Protection page:

“The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act) establishes requirements for those who send commercial email, spells out penalties for spammers and companies whose products are advertised in spam if they violate the law, and gives consumers the right to ask emailers to stop spamming them.”

Can I start by pointing out that the government thinks of Marketers and Pornographers in the same category? I love that. Think of the ramifications! These guys should go into comedy. What’s next? Auditors and Strippers grouped together for Wall Street regulations by the SEC?

But seriously… Every time I receive a commercial email, I look for the common traces of a well produced email marketing campaign. Often I find critical elements missing. CAN SPAM points out that all campaigns must 1) Not contain false or misleading header information; 2) Contain an opt-out mechanism that leads to an opt-out request processed within 10 days, and 3) Include a valid postal address. Pretty basic, right? Most don’t. Email addresses are spoofed all the time. Subject lines contain misleading information from real companies. Opt-outs are non-functional or not even included. And there are many companies that fail to include an appropriate footer including a postal address.

In one recent example, I opted out of a campaign at the Corporate Executive Board. They are an established organization and should be very good at Marketing Compliance. I don’t usually include real examples, but you’ll see that the CEB earned this review. I wasn’t interested in purchasing their services, so I sent a note to the sales rep who had been contacting me to let him know that I’d like to opt-out of any future communication. I included the subject line “Unsubscribe,” which will be important later. At that point a series of steps should happen.

1) The rep should flag me in whatever CRM system (Siebel, Salesforce.com, etc.) he uses to track his communication with customers. If he’s doing it manually, he should delete my email address from his Outlook, but I assume the Corporate Executive Board is more sophisticated than that. Maybe not.

2) He should alert the Marketing department that I no longer have interest in receiving their campaigns. This could happen systematically by integrating a Marketing Campaign Management system with the CRM system, or it could be an email to a marketing administrator. The latter is more likely.

3) My email address should be flagged as opted out, and all future marketing campaigns should suppress that email address.

I know that something broke down in that normal process flow. How? I received another email in a campaign during the next month. Now at this point there’s been no violation of CAN SPAM. I didn’t use the systematic opt-out in the email. I worked through a sales rep, so all that has occurred is a poor customer interaction. This time, I clicked on the opt out (to ensure the process would work) and sent a friendly note to the rep letting him know that something broke down. I forwarded my previous confirmed request and included a new subject line - “Unsubscribe - 2nd Request.”

Two months later I received another email. This time I clicked on the opt-out link, and reviewed the company’s privacy policy. They suggested on their own site that any questions should be directed to their Legal Department, and even included an email address for convenience. After seeing that I again forwarded the previous thread, CCed the Legal team, and let them know that I had a background in Marketing Compliance, and that they were not living up to their CAN SPAM responsibilities to opt me out. Subject line - “Unsubscribe - 3rd Request.”

I received an apologetic email from the Sales rep letting me know that they had converted their email marketing system to a new vendor and that they were still working out the kinks. That prompted me to do a little research, and I quickly discovered that they were using Eloqua (look for the default server name of en25 in the email address). Eloqua is a SaaS marketing campaign tool that has received high marks from the community. I know a little about Eloqua, and was elated. The tool is unique by email address, so there is no chance for ambiguity. All they needed to do was flag me using the built in functionality, and no more emails to Mr. Mark Goloboy.

The next month I received another email. At this point I was dissappointed more than mad. I now knew how easy it was for the Corporate Executive Board to get it right. As a marketing compliance expert, I felt that they were letting the whole community down. I sent another email, but this time let them know that they had now twice violated CAN SPAM. I again included the Legal Department and detailed the history including who had sent recent emails. You guessed it. Subject line, “Unsubscribe - 4th Request.”

The next day was the clincher. A new sales rep reached out with an unsolicited email (read: SPAM) to an opted-out prospect who had already put the Corporate Executive Board’s Legal Team on notice and documented process failures. At this point I asked for the email to be forwarded to the CEO, CMO and Head of Sales so they could see the team’s failure to accomplish basic communication tasks. The subject line, “Unsubscribe - 5th Request.”

That was the last I heard from the Corporate Executive Board, but I’ll be sure to update this blog post if they send any more.

Have you had a similar experience? Please comment.