I’ve been renovating my kitchen. Painstakingly, I painted my cabinets with a color I thought would give them a brilliant new character…only it didn’t work. So I had to come to the hard decision to change course (and hues).
Concurrently, I was also working on a trade show marketing plan.
One exec in our company came up with what he considered a perfect marketing plan for capturing leads from the trade show we were attending. Turns out his plan kinda matched the original bad paint job I gave my cabinets. But unlike me, he refused to change directions.
So, what about you? Sabotaging your perfectly good database with ideas that seemed good but don’t workout in real life? Your customer data capture is essential to your business. But if the data you are collecting is corrupted, you are not targeting the way you think you are.
So let me tell you a bit about my week. Misery does love a bit of company. Pull up a chair, I could use the help.
My exec came up with an eight-page instruction guide on how to enter into CRM system the two-page lead card he assumed the staff on the trade show floor would take the time to fill out. This took days to create, and more days to print. He then took additional days to come up with a contest to give the staff an incentive to turn in the largest numbers of leads. So, do I really need to tell you what kind of leads came in?
My idea was to go to the scanner company—y ‘know the "scan the badge get the lead, add it to your database" folks—and get the daily batch download. We could send a “thanks for coming by” e-mail and then separate the leads appropriately through our five divisions.
But no. This exec had his sights set on manually entering each lead into our slow CRM system as it came in via a series of scanners set up in the various trade show booths we had in our 9,500sq ft. booth (yes, really) to send an immediate e-mail to each lead. Great idea—if you have NO traffic.
Hundreds of leads came in the first day. Great news , huh? Not so much. We got dupes. We got the staff scanning each other’s badges. We got, as my grandfather used to say, “a bunch a junk.” An incentivized data capture system doesn’t work at a trade show. People will scan in ANYTHING.
I sat at home watching these hundreds of leads come in on my computer—and within the first 15 minutes realized the goal of an immediate e-mail follow-up was not going to occur. I also realized the goal of updating, building, and marketing to these new leads was also going to be a challenge.
Essentially, what this “bad paint job” marketing plan did was corrupt an already shaky database.
So what did the exec who came up with the idea do upon his return to the office? He retreated to his office, hid behind his computer, and in complete denial started pulling call lists. The problem was about 80% of the leads were yet to be entered because now with all the “bad paint job” leads coming in, it was taking double the time to go through each record to check it, enter it, and update it. Denial is a bad place to be when you come up with an idea that just isn’t flying.
As you set out to grow your list and come up with ideas. Make sure that you are getting beautiful data that makes you stand back and go “oooh” and “ahhh.” If not, you better start looking for a ladder and a paint brush cause it’s time to face facts and understand that sometimes even the best “paper” ideas just don’t work when it comes to clean, marketable data.
Carol Lustig is marketing director for Sonny's Enterprises, a direct marketer of automotive aftermarket products.
