I have a favourite story I often tell to anyone foolish
enough to listen. It is on the theme of a builder never does a good job on his
own house. Let me give you the short version as I am trying to add readers to
this blog not drive them away.
When I worked for a roof tile manufacturer, the office
building’s roof leaked all the time.
When I worked for an information business based on planning
applications, my office was in a wing off of the main building which had been
built without planning permission.
And when I worked for a company, a group even, which sold
data and gave advice on how to build and maintain good databases, our own
database was so full of holes John Lennon could have written another verse to A
Day in the Life all about it, let alone Blackburn Lancashire.
Except that last one is true about every company I have ever
worked for. No exceptions. Big or small, traditional or more radically minded,
the one thing every single business had in common was that their data was
complete pants.
Not all of them realised it. In fact, many were in denial.
They spent thousands on CRM systems and tried to use their data intelligently
but they all ignored the two basic facts – firstly if you allow rubbish to go
in you will only ever get rubbish out, and secondly if you don’t use it, you
lose it.
B2B data decays at some 30 percent a year. Think about that
for a minute. You have ten records on your database. Do nothing and 3 of them
will be gone within twelve months. Businesses close, people leave, change
names, move offices. Database marketing has to produce enough activity to track
that movement or you will soon be wasting your time.
Data in general is taken for granted. Collecting it and
recording it should be everyone’s job because every email, every phone number,
every name and job title, are worth quite a lot. Then it is up to the sales and
marketing teams to use it properly.
Most don’t, at least not often enough, because data has no
perceived value. That is why emails are entered onto systems incorrectly. That
is why reps collect business cards in their jacket pockets but only ever take
them out when they are off to the dry cleaners.
Oh yes, there is a lot of talk about the value of data, and
you soon find what that value is when you rent a mailing list, but outside the
relatively small group of people like me who find data really quite interesting
everyone else acts like a teenage boy faced with some homework (Whatever, CBA,
are you serious?).
And so we come to the nub of the matter for me these days.
If you don’t value the data when you are using it, why should you value it when
you are throwing a laptop away? Everyone loves getting a new laptop (unless is
has Windows 8 on it – seriously, the person who developed that is an evil and
twisted individual) and they hardly give a second thought to their old one.
This is an education problem, right from the get go. People
don’t understand what data is, until they use some and then they have all sorts
of complaints about it. Especially sales people. 'I mean, what do you expect if
our customer records are so inaccurate?' 'We need these people’s email addresses
and phone numbers for goodness sake. I mean it’s not that hard to get, I’ve had
their card in my pocket for ages!'
My point is we value the laptop much more than we value the
contents of the hard disk, and that makes no sense whatsoever. I remember
getting told off as a young salesman for leaving my laptop in my car, because
it cost £700.No mention was made of the data on it and that is by far the most
important thing.
Although if you do steal a database, expect quite a few
bounce backs...
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