Back when I worked at ITSMA, I was constantly amazed doing market research projects for our corporate members at the poor quality of their customer lists. I mean, these were the top tech companies in the world, and some of them were even selling CRM solutions! We'd constantly struggle to get even half-decent lists of customers to interview or survey. There were always reasons, of course, often having to do with the inevitable divide between marketing and sales. But the problem reflected a critical shortcoming in basic marketing hygiene.
I was reminded of this yesterday reading "The Contact Washing Machine" on a new blog just launched by Steven Woods, co-founder and CTO of Eloqua. Steven's point is a simple but critical one: the best thing people working on demand generation can do is set up a simple system to standardize and normalize contact data as it comes in from the multitude of "unwashed" sources we're all swimming in: email, Web forms, meetings, events, internal lists, etc. He doesn't mention the new tide of data from blogs, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networks, but they only add to the challenge.
It doesn't have to be an elaborate system, but it should focus on the major data fields we all use for lead tracking and management, such as titles, physical address, sales territory, and so on. As Steven notes, "Putting this in place, and having all incoming data flow through it, is a great way to avoid the cycle of data continually degrading over time until a major undertaking (at great cost) is done to cleanse it, whereupon it immediately begins degrading again."
It's a pain to set up and maintain, and we can always think of things we'd rather be doing, but having clean contact data is one of those basic marketing (and business) essentials that makes everything else go more smoothly.
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