Found Money: Why Your Contact Database is a Valuable Asset (and How to Get More Value Out of It)
For a period of time (the exact length of which I shall not confess), I’ve been looking for a new CRM platform. It’s been a byzantine quest, sifting through features and attempting to simulate the real experience through 14-day trials using fake data.
It got me thinking about contact lists–mine and those of the small marketing agencies I work with–and why finding the right software to house them is so important.
Good list hygiene was bred into me early by my first boss, the head of sales at a commercial production company, who assigned me to update his contact records. I can’t remember the name of the software but I do remember it was MS DOS, which I credit for making every other list management software I had to use after that easy to learn and to use.
Plus, I’m a lover of systems and processes so the value of a well-maintained contact list has always been obvious to me. But I'm often surprised at how unobvious it is to some of the agency owners I work with. They all understand the value of the “C” (customer) and the “R” (relationship) in CRM, but undervalue the management part. Keeping information updated and accurate feels like drudgery and they perceive it as just not a good use of time.
If this describes you, allow me to reframe this: your list is a business asset.
The International Financial Reporting Standards defines an asset as “a resource controlled by the enterprise as a result of past events and from which future economic benefits are expected to flow to the enterprise.”
Yup, I’d say that definition applies. Your list is a repository of marketing intelligence you build over time. With each bit of intelligence, whether it's tracking email opens or writing detailed notes following a conversation with a prospect, you’re adding to the accuracy of profiles of people and businesses who are likely to buy from you in the future.
And the more you invest in it, the more valuable it becomes.
This is especially true if you do business with large complex organizations. As an example, one of my clients is an agency that specializes in higher education. Some of the larger universities they work with and sell to are amazingly complex. They encompass multiple schools and departments and have stratified and siloed marketing teams. My client’s ability to collect intelligence not only on the people who have the authority to hire agencies but also on the interrelationships of other players that impact the decision is really valuable.
How? Here are four ways an investment in proper list management yields value:
1. Saving time
When you have a rich history of interactions with people and companies that’s easily accessible, you and your team can make faster, well-informed decisions. You don’t waste a lot of time chasing down intelligence because it’s all there. You can act quickly and decisively.
2. Saving Money
As your agency grows you may take on a full-time business development leader. This will likely be a big financial investment for you and you want to make sure that investment pays off as quickly as possible. An accurate and well maintained contact database gives a salesperson an instant snapshot on the state of accounts, requiring less of your time to pull together and provide background.The faster you can get your biz dev person into the market and selling, the sooner your investment in their salary will pay off.
3. Making money
Saving time and saving money lead to making money–when you can recognize the value of a set of connections, you can monetize it. But there are other ways a well-maintained list makes you money. For one, it’s a hedge against an economic downturn because when you have a ready list of individuals who know you and have a positive impression of you, they're easier to reactivate as prospects themselves or as conduits to other new business opportunities. When you’re ready to cash out and sell your agency, it adds value to your balance sheet.
4. Skirting disaster
Sometimes the value is made obvious when a poorly kept database lets you down. This typically happens when information is compartmentalized, or protected by team members who don’t want to share it, or simply taken for granted. This leads to blunders, like a well-meaning but uninformed new business person making an introductory overture to a prospective client who, it turns out, not only knows the agency but is having active conversations with another senior leader about a project.
Oops.
In some cases a misstep like this can be managed and the damage repaired but it’s just not indicative of an exemplary business development operation. That’s fine if a long-term sustainable approach to new business isn’t of interest to you, but if it is, the damaging effects should concern you. In the worst cases, a misstep like this can erase thousands of dollars from your pipeline in a matter of moments, not to mention the years you invested in relationship-building.
If you’re still with me, I’m going to assume you’re an agency leader that does want a high quality business development operation inclusive of a well-maintained contact database. Here are a few easy ways, then, for you to make big improvements:
Find some software that you like. OK, I'll admit this isn’t always as easy as it sounds as I myself described at the beginning of this article. Choosing the software with a set of features right for your agency can be baffling. I’ll give you the advice I finally gave myself: don't agonize. Make a list of what’s important to you and find the software that approximates that list as best as possible. If you're new to CRM software, err on the side of a well-known product that has wide usage as well as good support. This also means that it will be more likely to integrate seamlessly with your other software tools. Can’t quite stomach the thought of using a CRM tool? Then at the very least, get your data into a spreadsheet so that it’s clean and easy for others to access.
Learn how to use it. I say this partially tongue-in-cheek but seriously, don't purchase the software and then ignore it. The best way to learn it is to use it. The second best way is to get some training (and a well-supported platform with wide usage will have lots of options for training).
Make it part of your daily professional practice. Open your CRM program when you open up your email or Slack at the start of your day. I think everyone at a small agency, from the CEO down, should be using and contributing to this asset even at a basic level.
Keep it clean. This will also make life infinitely easier when you need to move to another platform in the future, which is inevitable because your needs change as you grow and technology improves over time. And while I don’t wish this to be the case, it also helps if you realize you made the wrong decision and need to find a new solution quickly.
Assign ownership. If you agree with my premise that your contact list is an asset of increasing value, then protect it by assigning one person at your agency ownership over its health and maintenance. And, if that person is responsible and capable but not necessarily wired to maintain a contact database, empower them to seek outside help. This might be something as simple and affordable as hiring a freelancer on Upwork who knows the software and is experienced in this kind of work.
Establish some basics. Before you populate your database, take a moment to think about how you want to organize it. Are there audience segments or tags that will be useful? What are the naming protocols everyone should use? What are guidelines around adding, deleting, or merging data? What kinds of reports would be useful? How will you use this to track new business opportunities? As you master the basics, explore how to leverage this valuable asset through more sophisticated content marketing and automated nurturing sequences.
I’ll acknowledge that while I may be a booster of the well-managed list, I’m not an expert. In fact, for all my talk, I’m also guilty of under-leveraging my own list. I’m only human–just like you–but my list is as well-cared for as any of my other valuable business assets.
(If you’re interested, I’ve decided to go with Zoho CRM Plus. It’s far from perfect, but it offers my small consultancy the features I need at a price that works for my budget. Plus, I’m confident in my own CRM skills to lessen the learning curve AND I have a team member with experience using a similar platform who will be managing the data day-to-day. Feel free to reach out to me if you think my experience might be of help in finding the right platform for your agency.)