Once Daylight Savings Time ends, the first leaves appear on the trees and migratory birds begin their annual trek to the north, it’s clear that spring has arrived.
In your medtech or B2B company, a good way to celebrate this season is with a round of spring cleaning in your sales and marketing database or CRM system.
Working with complete and accurate information on your B2B or medtech customers and prospects ensures you’re reaching the right buyers as efficiently as possible.
Three spring cleaning tips for your sales and marketing database
1. Update customer and prospect contact information
The quality and accuracy of your sales and marketing prospect lists are paramount to success. After all, if your email campaigns bounce back from undeliverable addresses, your target decision-makers have left the organization, or your sales calls ring to the wrong extensions, you’re just wasting time, effort and budget on your lead generation efforts.
Research shows that B2B data decays quickly. Marketing Sherpa estimates 2.1 percent of contact data becomes outdated each month. That’s 22 percent—or one-fifth of your database—every year.
One of the easiest and most cost-effective ways to keep your B2B and medtech prospect lists up-to-date is through outbound calling. A single call from a professional contact center like Volkart May not only can identify correct decision-makers with titles and contact information, it also can build your marketing intelligence by asking qualifying questions specific to your sales process.
For example, we recently worked with a medical device manufacturer interested in reaching biomedical contacts at large healthcare systems. Through outbound calling, we quickly profiled hundreds of hospitals. Our efforts resulted in accurate contact information as well as details on each healthcare system’s current equipment and contract expiration dates. It armed the internal sales team to make focused and productive calls that resulted in new deals.
2. Evaluate past sales leads and opportunities
Another way to maximize the usefulness of your sales and marketing database is by triaging any open sales leads and opportunities. This will increase the accuracy of your sales forecasts and help resolve friction between departments. It can reveal leads and opportunities you might be missing, such as cooler leads that you can nurture through email or outbound calling.
Start by pulling a report of all inbound inquiries, sales leads and possible deals in your pipeline. This includes business cards from your last event, forms completed on your website, attendees from your latest webinar and even leads handed off to the sales team.
Next, group these contacts by stages in your sales cycle and look at how frequently your sales team is engaging with these potential buyers. Odds are, you’ll find sizable groups of B2B or medtech leads who’ve expressed some form of interest, then been largely forgotten. It’s easy for this to happen early in the sales funnel, when buyers are weeks or months away from a buying decision.
A lead nurturing campaign can jumpstart the sales process with these cooler accounts. Outbound calling is another viable option. Simply connecting with your leads every few weeks keeps you top of mind. It helps you deepen your relationship, answer questions and learn important details to fuel your sales efforts.
Depending on how many open leads and opportunities you find, user training may be needed, especially if leads in the “pending” category are actually “lost” or “closed” but no one has taken time to update the records. Try a quick refresher or lunch-and-learn with the sales team to remind everyone of the importance accuracy in your systems.
3. Archive and delete outdated or duplicate records
Unless your company has an active database administrator or strong data governance policies, it’s easy for the marketing and sales database to become a bit of a “Wild West” situation. When too many people can enter or change information without rules to guide their actions, your shared medtech and B2B prospect lists can quickly become a chaotic, disorganized mess.
One place to begin is by running queries that look for duplicate records. Then, merge or remove these accounts. Next, make sure there’s a field where users can flag outdated records so you can archive them to a secondary area. These may be companies no longer in business or verticals where your company no longer sells your product or service. It could even be accounts with no activity for a certain number of months or years.
Not sure whether an account has value? A list enhancement project with a professional lead generation call center like Volkart May can quickly review and update your medtech or B2B prospect lists.
By working with an outsourced firm, you can keep your internal sales team focused on closing deals, while we use high-velocity calling to work through thousands of records in a short amount of time.
Make spring the season of sales growth and opportunity
Spring reminds us of renewal, optimism and growth. Making sure you’ve got a strong foundation in your sales and marketing database will do the same for the important revenue-generating teams at your B2B or medtech company.
Need help getting organized? We’re ready. Schedule a one-on-one conversation to create a custom calling campaign that can keep your prospects lists in perfect order and generate new leads for your sales pipeline.
