With the resurgence of Account Based Marketing (ABM), marketers are dedicating budget towards strategies, tactics and the new and shiny platforms. But before you ride the ABM wave, it’s important to look at your data. You might be ready for ABM, but is the data in your database?
Why Data Quality is Important for Account Based Marketing?
Dirty data is every marketer’s secret shame. While you don’t have full control over everything that is captured or entered in your CRM or marketing automation platforms, it’s important to keep your data as clean as possible – especially before you implement ABM.
Implementing account based strategies usually starts with some sort of historical number crunching – Who bought from us in the past? Who did we target at each account? What did they marketing campaigns did they participate in? The more accurate your data the easier it will be to find your existing top strategic accounts and create your ABM account lists and tiers.
Once you have ABM implemented, keeping an eye on data quality will also help to ensure that you aren’t reporting false positives or missing out on critical opportunities. It is harder notice important firmographic or behavioural trends that can influence account scoring when you have duplicates or incomplete data.
How Can I Better Prepare My Data for ABM?
Your data won’t always be perfect but here are few things that can help improve the overall quality of your data:
- Field Management:
- Identify important firmographic and behavioural data and the fields they live in.
- Know who (users) and what (platforms) should have access to these fields and when they should/should not get updated.
- Collect This Data Early On:
- Ask for it on form submissions or as part of your intake process with your sales representatives
- Leverage data enrichment partners if it’s not possible to get all this information right away
- Data Governance is a shared responsibility:
- Create a committee that takes responsibility for Data Quality and Governance for your systems.
- This committee should include members from Marketing, Sales and IT.
- Develop a Data Governance Manual detailing where and when data is updated, and who is responsible.
- As you learn more from your ABM initiatives you may find new trends; ensure sure that you review and update your governance regularly so that you can accurately report on these key metrics as they surface.
