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ProTip: Grooming Your Contacts Database Before a Research Project

By crooky | February 6, 2008

Quite often when myself and my colleauges send out a market intelligence survey to a base of potential users or customers, we start from a list of contacts of individuals that we want to take our survey. For consumer products, that doesn’t matter - we can do a random survey and get what we need. For business-to-business (B2B) products like enterprise software - you need the best intelligence on your target audience that you can get. In some cases, your client will provide a contact database. In many cases - this data is worse than useless because it hasn’t been maintained and can waste a lot of your time trying to clean it up.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a client give me a list that they swear on a stack of bibles is “totally current” and I’ll call one of the people on the list up and his widow says “Jack died in 1993. What is wrong with you?” Okay. That’s a dramatic example and it only happened once. Often, you’ll call a contact on a list and they’re no longer with the company or the company is out of business. That happens a lot. My rule of thumb is that if the entries on that list are more than a year old, there’s a good chance the list is garbage.

What does a good list look like?

1. Context

A good contact list (or output from a CRM database) should have a bit of context about why they’re on the list in the first place. Is this a list that you culled from Google research? Is this a list that you purchased? Is this a list of people that responded to your last survey? Is this a list of existing customers? If so, what did they buy from you? As a researcher, this kind of information helps me know where to press and when to back off when I’m talking to these people that I don’t know on your behalf.

2. Tracked Updates

Every contact in a database should have a field that says when that information was last confirmed. Without that, I end up unnecessarily calling wrong numbers and talking to grieving widows.

3. Titles

Just names and phone numbers isn’t all that useful. Like the context point - if you put “Bob” from BC Hydro and it ends up being Bob Elton, the CEO. I don’t want to call up and say “Hiya! Is Bob there?” I might say something like that if it was Bob Jones from Stores. Bob Jones doesn’t want to hear someone who sounds like they have a stick up their ass calling him. Bob Elton probably expects that. Again, I need to know what I’m getting into when I call. Put their job title in the database.

4. Company Size

The size of a company can make a big difference on how I talk to someone on the phone. If I know it’s a five person shop, I know how many people I need to sweet talk to get a real live decision-maker on the phone. If it’s a 5,000 person company, I’m going to need an inside man. This is information I need to know.

5. Area Codes

For the love of god - if you’re someone who has a company outside of a major urban centre, you have to realize that us city-slickers have to dial ten digits to get someone on the phone, not seven. If you don’t leave an area code and I have to guess, it’s going to waste your and what’s infinitely worse, my time.

In the end, having a good contact list for a market intelligence campaign isn’t about making me, the consultant happy. It’s about saving you, the client, a lot of money because you’re still paying me my consultant’s rate to do clerical work cleaning up your data. It’s much cheaper to have an admin person at your office clean up the data before it gets to me. In the end, that’s what it’s all about - giving value to the customer.

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Aaron “Crooky” Cruikshank is the Principal and Founder of Friuch Consulting. He has written professionally about science and technology for ten years.

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Topics: Research Methodologies |

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