A “perfect record” in a customer relationship management – or in any database, really – is a unicorn. Companies often talk about a “golden record” as an aspirational goal. This is an end state where you would be able to know everything about a customer. For long-term customers, you can probably get there over time, as you continue to have interactions with that team.
But what about the first time you encounter a prospect? To reach the kind of selling motion where you will eventually build a great relationship with a customer, you need to consider a few things:
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Where does the information for a new lead come from? (For example: does the information come from the lead themselves, or is it supplied by third-party enrichment platforms using an email as a key for a lookup?)
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When you receive information about a lead, where does it go in your system? I don’t mean exactly where you store it, and am referring more to the customer journey that you are building and the experience for the customer. How does it feel to deal with your company?
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How long should all of this take? When someone contacts you, how long should it be before they hear from you? And in which channel should that happen?
The process of gathering and processing information from leads gets tricky when you realize that you are combining information from multiple systems.
For example, take this Greg Meyer guy (yes, this is supposed to be me). People who know me will know this record at Zoominfo is the result of many people named “Greg Meyer” who have been combined inadvertently. The result is a “lowest common denominator” version of a contact that has incorrect information for a number of Greg Meyer contacts.
What’s the lesson to take from Zoominfo’s record of me? It’s that you shouldn’t rely solely on 3rd party systems for contact enrichment. (And in my case, even telling Zoominfo directly that the information was wrong was not sufficient.)
You need to establish a heuristic for building a “Minimum Viable Record” to apply to records in your systems before they go anywhere. Without reaching this minimum standard, you may as well write “Hello {{first.name}}” instead of trying to get the finer details correct about a prospect.
What is a “Minimum Viable Record”?
A Minimum Viable Record contains all of the basic attributes necessary for engagement in your system. For a Lead record, this might mean:
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First name
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Last name
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Email
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Title
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Company
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Phone number
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Country
And at another company, the information might be as slim as “email”. The point is to define the minimum set of fields necessary to progress the prospect in your customer journey. When a lead doesn’t meet the minimum viable criteria, it must be fixed.
Fixing this entails enriching the information through services, doing research, or placing this record in a “holding area” of sorts until it can be better qualified. Examples of this include adding an email to a marketing nurture sequence instead of doing direct sales outreach.
Minimum viable records also have other qualities in addition to the minimum number of fields. They are accurate: the information in the record is validated to be correct by 1 or more outside sources (the best being the prospect). Minimum viable records are also consistent: they have the same sort of data in expected fields, in the format those fields expect.
These records are also subject to data integrity: they are consistent across fields and across objects. My best example of this is the comparison of a city/state combination with a city/state/zip combination in the United States. “Bellingham, MA” and “Bellingham, WA” are both valid combinations of cities and states. However, “Bellingham, MA 98225” is invalid, as the 98225 zip code refers to the city in Washington state.
Prerequisites for engagement
Why am I telling you this? Building records in any database – and especially for leads in the sales engagement process – requires that you set a minimum standard for the records you want sellers to use. Reaching out with sub-par data is not going to be a great experience for the rep or for the prospect. I can tell you that as a pattern matcher, once I get a poor match that repeats itself it’s a good signal that a company reaching out to me has subscribed to the same bad data set.
(Hint: I’m not the Greg Meyer who manages the data center effort for Salesforce, even though my name is Greg Meyer and I used to work for Salesforce.)
What’s the takeaway? Building a better sales engagement process starts with creating a Minimum Viable Record for any sort of records you want sellers to use. You and your prospects will appreciate the response you get.
