InsightaaS: Leading CRM analyst Denis Pombriant, in the excellent Enterprise Irregulars blog site, makes a compelling case to treating “customer IP” as a class of knowledge that uses evolving tools to combine internal and web-resident sources to create unique competitive advantage. This activity, Pombriant believes, “takes some of the randomness out of selling,” which in turn causes “many forward thinking businesses [to] see sales and marketing intelligence tools as vital to their continued success.”
Sales people have been demanding better leads for a long time and today marketing is in a position to provide them. At the same time, marketers have discovered that the kind of data they collect is as important as its volume.
Marketers need to provide rich prospect profiles that answer many of sales people’s most important questions including: Is there a need? A budget? An executive sponsor? This is information that doesn’t come from simply buying a target list and getting this information requires more than collecting a small set of demographic data.
A few years ago sales people were happy with basic demographics – a name, a title, a phone number – and with that they’d schedule a meeting to capture what was really important such as need, budget, the identities of the decision makers, and more. But with today’s high quotas sales people don’t have time to invest in this basic data gathering and managers want more meetings that advance sales processes rather than performing simple qualification. So all this has caused marketing to re-think its processes to meet sales’ demands…
Read the entire post: http://www.enterpriseirregulars.com/73036/developing-customer-ip/
[…] a more complete view of a potential customer are clear; analysts like Denis Pombraint are already talking about the need to add development of ‘Customer IP’ to an organization’s information architecture, […]