You know, the database isn't very useful if you don't update the damned thing

The BBQ Pit
1

I realize that I’ve only been in this office 16 months, but I’ve been with the company five years now, and I’m smart enough to know that a sales contact database is utterly useless when it’s full of missing, incomplete, outdated, and otherwise crappy information. Old contacts, no contacts, misspelled contacts, no address, no phone, no ZIP code, and so on and so on and so on.

Out of some 4,000 contacts, there are nearly 500 with no ZIP codes. Well, not now there aren’t–there are about 200, thanks to me. Some of these aren’t prospects, either–some of these are longtime clients. There’s no excuse for messed-up information.

You do realize, don’t you, that without address information, all of the prospects have missed out on any mailings we’ve done, at both the local and corporate levels? Without fax numbers or e-mail addresses, they haven’t been invited to any of our events. Business isn’t hurting because of it, but considering some of our goals, that really isn’t any way to land new accounts.

And don’t tell me that because you’re outside sales, you haven’t had the time. I’ve seen your appointment count. You can take ten minutes a day to go in and correct some of this info.

So now who is doing it? Me. Of course. I like this company, I like my job, and I like the people in this office. I really do. But come on–meet me halfway on this! A week and a half ago, I exported all the contacts with “Prospect” in the “Status” field, because I know some of them have since signed up. I asked you all to correct it and send it back to me. I haven’t gotten a single response.

In a month, I’m going to be out of the country for three weeks. I would really like to have this cleaned up by then, but I can’t do it by myself. I have lots of other things to do. If you don’t want to have accurate information in there, fine by me–as an inside salesperson, I’m not burdened with the quota requirements you are. But I’d really like to see us excel, and get some serious bonus money, and I bet you would too. Capisce? Good.

2

. . . And not that you asked for a witness, but Amen, brother.

At my last job, we had a service that provided updated caselaw on CDs, which were loaded into the central CD-ROM tower. Every three months we’d get a new batch with the latest cases on them.

We were unable to make the person responsible understand why the new CDs had to be loaded into the tower in place of the old ones promptly. Yes, they do look almost identical to the old – becuase they are, they’re just newer. Yes, the old ones are still working; the problem isn’t that they don’t work, it’s that they are no longer current. When the new disks come in, do not stack them on the corner of your desk as a task you might get around to some random Tuesday. Do not use them as coasters. Load them in the machine.

I don’t know why some people don’t grasp that out of date or incomplete information is less valuable than current, complete information.

3

Heh. I handle marketing for our company. Each year, we provide our dealer base with a list of potential customers in their area. We get this list by having Dun & Bradstreet run specific SICs for each geographic area served by our dealers.

Wanna guess how many of our 140 dealers never look at their list? About two-thirds. They pay good money for this list, AND for the catalog that we mail based on this list.

We provide the dealers with a fairly inexpensive yet high-quality way to reach almost every potential customer in their area. Our four-color, 132-page catalog goes out to each business on the list, for a total cost of $1.60 per. This is freakin’ incredible – a marketing tool that our dealers would NEVER be able to afford or produce on their own.

And what do I hear all the time? “My list is no good.” Well, then EDIT it. That’s why we send it to you three months before the catalog mails, so you can delete the businesses you don’t want to mail and add the ones you do want. “Why do we have to mail the catalogs?” Well, there’s this little thing called “business development.” A lot of successful companies do it. Might wanna check into it. “The catalogs don’t work.” Since we track purchases, and our company historically shows a sales spike in the first quarter of the year (right after the catalog mails) when everyone else in the industry is down, I think it’s pretty evident that the catalogs DO work.

It’s frustrating trying to spoon-feed people something very good when all they want to do is complain about the size of the spoon.

4

Having just spent the entire day cleaning up zip codes, and looking up 9-digit codes and adding the zebra bars, I’m with you. That work is going to pay off twenty times what they paid me to do it.