September 30, 2020
A problem that a lot of sales professionals in the financial services industry face is an exceedingly high turnover rate. People typically remain within the industry, leaving one firm for another while still specializing in the same niche area. It can be extremely time consuming to make sure that your database or CRM is up to date with so many people moving roles and companies on a weekly or monthly basis. However, knowing when those contacts relocate, and keeping their information up to date is incredibly important, because even though a person leaves a firm, the relationship you may have had with them remains.
So, if your emails are getting bounced back, and your data is getting stale, what do you do about it? Are you getting notified, and if so, how are you going about keeping the data fresh when this happens? Sales can’t follow and qualify leads with bad data, and marketers can’t effectively market without knowing who their audience is.
In this post, we’re sharing three of the tools that have worked best for us, so that you can ensure that no outdated information is left behind, taking up unnecessary space in your pipeline.
Neverbounce: This service integrates with platforms like Hubspot seamlessly, and can run through full lists of contacts, delivering reports on all of your email addresses and determining whether they’re valid, invalid, or “catch all,” which means that no emails will be deliverable to that domain, even though you won’t get a bounceback. While Neverbounce helps you find out whether or not a contact is still at a particular firm, it will not tell you if they are still in the same position at said firm. If they’re not at the firm (the invlaid or catchall email addresses) you can send them for further evaluation. Which brings us to our next point:
Rocketreach and Seamless: Two of the tools we use for further analysis of contacts that have already run through Neverbounce are Rocketreach and Seamless. These services will analyze data points like names and phone numbers to give you the person’s most up to date information. These tools also give you the ability to take the information they find and push it back into your Salesforce instance, instantly updating your data so that your sales team is equipped with accurate information when it comes time to reach out.
Both of these services help streamline the data maintenance required by companies big and small, and help enable your sales team to stay focused on selling. However, it is important to note that while these services will begin the data maintenance process, there is a layer of human interference needed to upload that refreshed data into Salesforce, and to review the lists as they move through the process.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator: This tool can be used to find out if someone has changed jobs, and help you identify where they’ve gone. This, too, can be synchronized with your Salesforce instance so that you can instantly update your contact information. By uploading a full list of your accounts and contacts, Sales Navigator will notify you when anyone on that list has changed jobs or roles. Like Rocketreach and Seamless, Sales Navigator gives you the opportunity to review the change, and upload it directly into Salesforce. Knowing which job title someone has is important because if someone was once a hedge fund specialist, and is now a private equity specialist, you know the kind of emails they’ll benefit from receiving. This also allows you to maintain relationships as former clients move between firms, making it easier to close deals as they move around in their careers.
These tools help our team at Dakota stay on top of our data, ensuring that we have the most recent contact information, which is critical to doing our jobs well every day. And, it’s important to keep in mind that good data is not just relevant to salespeople; it’s a company-wide issue. Having bad data and therefore selling and marketing to the wrong people does your company as much good as not reaching out in the first place. At Dakota, our motto is to always “sell the apple to the apple buyer.” After all, if you sell apples and your database is full of orange buyers, you aren’t going to have nearly as much luck closing deals or building relationships as you would if you had a database full of apple buyers.
Tim Mitchell is the Director of IT at Dakota.
