for every business Ive ever worked with, except for one, between 65% - - PDF document

My name is Iain Lovatt, and I am the Chairman at BlueVenn. For those of you that don’t know, BlueVenn is one of the top 4 Customer Data Platform technologies in the world today, with 400 customers worldwide, both for B2B and B2C marketing. I’m going to be talking about Customer Data Platforms in a B2B context, and how you can utilize a CDP alongside your existing marketing technologies and strategies to help ensure you align marketing with sales and revenue to focus your sales and marketing efforts on acquiring customers that will spend big, and stay long, whilst also you stop wasting budget and resource on ‘time-wasters’, tyre kickers or window shoppers. I’m going to start by identifying some of the issues that we create as marketers. Then show you some interesting perspectives on how BlueVenn view data across the whole business, and how it can impact the important decisions you make in marketing (and at the Board level). The data has shown me over the past 20 years that ultimately, and this rings true

for every business I’ve ever worked with, except for one, between 65% to 85% of a business’ revenue always comes from between 15% and 25% of their customers. By focussing on these customers, and sacking, fire, dismiss, get rid of the rest, you can truly transform your profitability and make your world bigger and much, much

• easier. That may sound counter intuitive but bear with me for the duration of the

presentation.

So I want to start with the concept of Wisdom.

Wisdom comes from a combination of our Knowledge and Experience and allows us to have Good Judgement for all our decisions. 3

Of course our Knowledge is built up by Facts, Information and our learned Skills. Our Experience comes from Learning and our Practical Contact with Facts and Events that occur throughout life. And Good Judgement therefore comes from all these Facts, Information, Skills, Learning and Events to ensure that we’re Informed and Considered.

So what happens when we have ‘Bad Facts’?! When what we are being told is wrong or inaccurate.

Bad Facts are rife across all organisations due to poor data quality or an inability to access good, holistic data. Bad Facts lead to Inaccurate Information and Knowledge Gaps and Inaccuracies.

Which means we make Misguided Judgements and we’re Mis-Informed. Let's look at an example that occurs often for us marketers; If the board are told that 10% of our qualified leads turn into sales, and the business needs to achieve 50 sales then you will be targeted to generate 500 qualified leads and be set a budget accordingly. But what if it’s 5%? You will need 1,000 qualified leads and you’re going to be short, and the business’ target will be missed.

So to ensure that we make decisions based on Wisdom, the Facts (or rather the data) need to be Good Facts, based on Good Data.

And this means that we can be Informed and make the right decisions.

I’ve consulted with many, many businesses that are unable to forecast effectively, and business revenue targets are set without a proper understanding of their market, because they’re all based on Bad Facts, or worse still Facts that only tell a partial truth. A common example is analysing Revenue from your CRM compared with your Finance System – they never tally and both tell you a different story. Just use the CRM to make decisions and you’re likely to come un-stuck. But how many marketers have access to the Finance or Accounting system?! Maybe some, but not many. Now, what we’re about to look at is something that I’ve helped hundreds of B2B, and B2C, organisations to accomplish over the last 20-25 years, and is proven to deliver 30% more profit across the business, and ensure your sales team are not wasting time with low spending, time-wasting customers. How? By ensuring you have Good Facts to make Informed Decisions based on Wisdom.

Ok, so it’s not easy otherwise everyone would be doing it. Data is complicated, disparate and comes in many shapes and sizes, and as we add more tools and technology accelerates forward, we make the problem worse. It is only going to get more complex in the future and that is a Fact Let’s take a look…

As marketers we have an abundance of tools, all collecting fragments of data about what our prospects and customers are doing, what they’re looking at, what they’re buying, clicking, opening, viewing, what they already use. We use a CRM…and we have Marketing Automation…and an Email marketing platform…and a Website. Then we want to connect the CRM system with the Marketing Automation Engine, and of course the email engine, and the website and we are only just getting going! Then we have finance systems that need data from the CRM, Customer Support and Live Chat systems that connect to the CRM and the Website, we’ve got advertising and exciting Account Based Marketing platforms… Then we have 3rd part data enhancing our data which could go into the CRM, the Marketing Automation, the Email, the website, or wherever. It’s difficult to know sometimes where to put it! And then market data…and maybe economic data…and maybe Technographics, Intent Data, Data from Events like IMF!

And then social platforms, bespoke applications, old databases, Docusign agreements, forecasting platforms, mobile apps, etc We then rely on out-of-the-box integrations that might not meet our needs as not all data is transferred across the various platforms. A big issue but we do constantly undertake manual exports and imports, to pass data between systems,

• r analyse them in spreadsheets and BI tools to gather answers that we can then

re-load into the ESP to generate better personalisation fields or create new fields for specific campaigns. This problem means that marketers are now spending 30, 40, 50 or 60% of their time crunching, transforming and cleaning data for a specific purpose BUT none of these provides a holistic view of the customer. They each hold fragments. Some more fragments than others, and certainly our CRM is commonly where we try to hold as much as we can, so that the sales and BD teams have best sight of what they need to be effective, but we’re effectively just pushing data from one place to the other constantly, with no single source of truth about our customers. So where do we go to get our Good Facts?! How do we get to Wisdom?! Up steps the Customer Data Platform!

So what is a Customer Data Platform? Well, the CDP Institute was created by a technology and data expert in the US called David Raab. His definition of a Customer Data Platform is that it is “packaged software that creates a persistent, unified customer database that is accessible to all other systems.” Better still, it combines all the data, from all the systems to give you all the data you need to provide Good Facts, Good Judgements and enables you to make the Right Business Decisions based on Wisdom.

So the 5 point definition for a Customer Data Platform is:

• 1. Ingest data from any source
• 2. Capture full detail of ingested data
• 3. Store ingested data indefinitely
• 4. Create unified profiles of identified individuals
• 5. Share data with any system that needs it

So this is a more simplistic way to look at the issues of the spaghetti mess of data in multiple systems to highlight the Data Layer, the Decisions Layer and of course, for marketing, an Execution Layer, because for marketing we are looking to not just make decisions but then also execute on those decisions through campaigns…or through a sales team! We start here with a common Silo approach which is what we saw several slides

• ago. The email platform holds data, we make decisions about the data in the email

platform, creating selections or lists, deciding how to automate the emails and we execute. Then we have the CRM, where marketing and sales make decisions and maybe execute an email or a phone call or other task. And the Invoice system which hold financial data and we execute invoices, and the marketing automation which again holds data, we make decisions and execute – But these are all silo decisions based on partial facts. So none of the data can be relied upon to give the whole picture. The second column here then is an approach whereby we utilise some out of the box integrations that push data from one place to another, or could be an ETL tool,

• r a person manually exporting and importing data between systems.

The third column here is what a Customer Data Platform does. It takes all the data from everywhere; it makes the data persistent and then shares it with all the platforms that need it. Importantly, it unifies ALL the data from all the systems into a single source of Good Facts to base all your decisions from! And this 4th column is just to show how this ensures that you future proof those Facts too. So as we layer on new data sources or systems, we just add them and the CDP continues to ensure you make the best, informed decisions. It allows you to analyse, model and activate that data in the confidence that it’s using all the data in a clean and trustworthy, unified view. So a CDP is for life. It will grow with

• you. It will accommodate all the data you have today and expand to accept your

data sets of tomorrow so you will always have one true version of the truth.

Let’s now look at what that means. Here are 4 inbound leads. These are genuine inbound enquiries asking to speak with you about your products or services. Now whether you’re generating a couple

• f new leads per week or hundreds, the goal is the same for the marketing team.
• How can you provide the best leads to your sales team to maximise resource?
• How do you know from these prospects who will spend big and turn into

profitable repeat customers, and how do you ensure that you cut out time wasters? And most importantly, how do we ensure that we make these decisions using Good Facts so that Sales say thanks for the great leads?! So which of these opportunities should get the most attention and why?

Client 1 comes at a high Cost Per Lead from Google Adwords. It is Head of Finance, and we had a successful deal with a hospital last year, hence why we’re targeting them through our advertising. Cast forward 10 months and having put a lot of resource into the customer, many meetings, bid writing and negotiation they decide not to buy from us. Depressing! Client 2 comes organically through the website via a google search. It’s a quick win, we often sell our products to small hotel businesses and there is a quick turnaround on the deal. We meet Client 3 at a trade show. A school that represents a new market for our

• product. The event is expensive (especially the WiFi order ), however we’re

happy to make the sale. It’s going to bend us out of shape a little but the order is big enough. And then Client 4. Also via our search marketing efforts, but does not buy after 3 months of discussions, and we’re not entirely sure why after it falls into the cavern

• f the Sales team.

So how could we have done better at prioritizing these leads and maybe getting better results with less wasted effort?

If we look at our trading results for the past 2 years then we can start to look at how different perceptions of data shape our thinking. Or how Bad Facts can lead to Misinformation and Bad Judgement. Firstly at board level, or more accurately the Finance Directors view on the world… We will all have low spending customers and big spending customers. In this linear view here we’re looking at customers and how much revenue they generate for us. Simple. And the board look at our top 20% of customers, create a profile and tell marketing and sales to focus on winning more Hospitals and Retail and Leisure businesses because they will get us to our target quickest! Taking your top 20% of customers and focussing on them?! Sounds like the right idea doesn’t it?!

To make a more informed decision and we layer on some Industry data to look through a 2nd dimensions… So, now we can start to see a commonality in these yellow customers, Hotels, – but they’re low value deals so perhaps not as attractive, or are they?

So then we group or segment the data by number of customers and the picture changes again… The view from a 3rd dimension is that Hotels are actually our top performer for contributing revenue, and can you see how this simple view of the data can start to ensure that we don’t bend the entire marketing and sales function out of shape chasing down a hospital for 10 months, only to lose the deal. We can also see that Retail and Leisure actually come out of the top 20%, but hospitals are still there because they represent a single big ticket deal and of course money talks..

Ok, now let’s add a fourth dimension. For fun maybe we can add some Economic Forecasting data.. In the UK we have access to a dataset of Oxford Economic Forecasting which tells us if specific industry sectors and sizes are in growth or decline and by how much. This is fantastic and no-one is doing it so that’s my top tip today if it exists in France?! So if we add some economic forecasting we can start to see if these key segments

• f customers are in growth or decline, which helps to understand our forecasting

and potential business targets much better again, and ensure we’re basing our simple decision of who to target, based on the best Wisdom we can get to. Retailers and Schools are starting to look less attractive now too as they are likely to be in decline in the future.

And then to complete this picture we should look at our market penetration by analysing our market share against the Total Addressable Market (TAM), we can get to a point of defining very clearly where we should be focussing our spend on High Value and High Success segments… Remember with a CDP you can ingest any data, and our customers will often add entire 3rd party data files to understand the entire market versus their existing customer numbers and therefore their market share versus the Total Addressable Market. This creates a very visual indication of where your customers sit on an Effort v Reward grid. And we can then turn these into segments. Here I’m calling them:

• Treasures – These industry segments provide lots of revenue for us, we have

high success here and they are easy to win.

• Avoids – I’m going to stop acquiring these customers that are low value and

sucking up my budgets.

• Developments - Our Hospitals are now down here in the Developments

• segment. Yes we have one customer who is high value but we have unproven

success here and although we won’t ignore them, they need a different

• approach. We’re certainly not focussing on them above our Treasures which

would be doomed for failure.

• Promotions – You will tend to find that a lot of your customers will appear here

when you run this model. We acquire lots of these but by analysing where they come from and how you’re acquiring them you can start to shift your budget into the Treasure zone.

Here is an example of an organisation called Rapid Racking, owned by a French company called Manutan, that deployed this methodology with us. They sell shelving and racking solutions to businesses, construction companies, IT companies etc. Their customer base is diverse, with many types and sizes of businesses needing shelving solutions to solve storage issues. From Schools, to Educational organisations, Governments, Hospitals, IT companies, trying to understand their customers was particularly difficult. By unifying and consolidating their data, applying layers of data to change the view

• f the customers they needed to target and applying this methodology, they were

able to move their budget and targeting to the Treasure segment, and in 12 months saw an 11% increase in Sales and a 30% growth in Profit! No change to message, channels or anything – just a shift to the ideal customer that brought marketing, sales, revenue together using Good Facts and Wisdom.

So don’t worry if all your prospects look the same. But also be sure to always think if you’re making decisions on potentially Bad Facts! Better still, invest in a CDP and let your data provide Wisdom, Intelligence, Better Decisions, more Focussed Marketing and Increase your Revenues.