Have you ever looked at the industry coding of a company in your CRM and wondered who was smoking what when they made that choice? DAVE sees it all the time.
How does this happen? How can anyone of have made such a silly choice?
There are usually multiple reasons behind this phenomenon and rarely is one of them the influence of illegal substances.
The most frequent cause is that people simply don’t know what the best choice is. Picking the right industry is not the simple task that it seems and can be quite subjective. The result is that users either make the best guess they can or choose the first value in a mandatory pick-list or leave it blank and resolve to fix it up later. The problem is that “later” never comes…
The end result is that organisations are either not classified at all or are wrongly or inconsistently classified (at a contact level).
All of this has a pretty bad knock-on effect when Marketing starts to target campaigns by industry.
Organisations get completely missed or specific contacts get missed out. Or, an organisation receives a marketing piece that is completely inappropriate.
The key effects are that your market and persona reach have been significantly reduced and, for those organisations receiving irrelevant content, an acceleration of brand fatigue leading to an increase in the unsubscribe rate and donations to the bit bucket. One day you may have some relevant content for those people and it’s really hard and costly to win them back.
DAVE makes a highly deceptive problem simple. DAVE looks for the company in his master database and makes sure all of the industry coding is consistent on all of the contacts.
Simple. If DAVE doesn’t know, he will make sure it’s flagged for further verification research.
DAVE is very thorough like that.
Next week: Irregular data and acronyms
