Business Growth Blog

The essential thing sellers and marketers need to know to get results from the campaigns they run every day is what contacts in the sales and marketing database are qualified potential customers.

Your contact database is your most precious asset because it contains (or should contain!) the people you’re currently doing business with or with whom you would like to do business with. Unfortunately, it often gets neglected and holds companies back from effective selling and marketing. Here are three common database problems and how they can negatively impact your business.

What is Clearbit?

Clearbit, the first AI Native Data Provider, enriches CRM data and simplifies the process of identifying top target accounts, understanding who is ready to buy, and instantly finding their contact information. There is a robust integration with HubSpot to build B2B lists with company and contact data and automatically sync those into HubSpot.

Every company must invest some time and money into marketing to get customers. You can’t do business without it. The investment is usually about 7-8% of the projected gross revenue for a small business. How a company uses the money is critical to its success. The ONLY way to know if the investment is getting a return is to collect and track specific sales and marketing data.

Marketers and salespeople need to communicate with the same customers at various stages of the buyer’s journey. HubSpot is a centralized database for all business growth related contact data. Here’s an overview of how each role typically uses HubSpot to quickly access the lists, views, and contacts they need to do their job.

The days of email blasts to lists of contacts are coming to an end. The EU and California instituted more stringent privacy laws in 2018. More states and regions are soon to follow. If you use HubSpot, and email to contacts in the EU or California, here are some tips on using their GDPR functionality.

The number one benefit of HubSpot, in my view, is that the CRM is central to the entire tech stack. If set up correctly, it stores multitudes of valuable data about the one thing sales, marketers, and business leaders care about the most: target buyers. These are the people that will, hopefully, become their future customers. Taking time to set up contact, company, and deal record views in HubSpot is essential to use the tool effectively. Watch the video or download the slides to see how to do it.

One of the age old questions companies ask people is "how did you hear about us?"

That is one of the most important pieces of information you can gather. Unfortunately, many companies I talk to don't have a clear process for how to collect or leverage that data to drive important business decisions.

By effectively tracking lead source, you can fully evaluate where you get your best customers and how that impacts your business growth. Here's an example of how it can work:

We're ultra busy, and taking extra time to input contact data is...annoying to say the least. Most of us just put the minimum amount of information into our contact database as fast as we can and go on our merry way.

That's all fine and dandy – until we want to send a message to a specific group of people, and we have no way to segment out contacts based on certain criteria. Or, we think we have a list of 3000 people, only to find out that only 200 of them have email addresses. Bummer!

The most important part of sales and marketing is to understand who is on our contact list (and who we want to be on the list). My team has spent a lot of time working with our clients to clean up their contacts and implement processes to collect and report on the data.

When we validate contact data, the 4 most important things we look for are:

The people "in your world" are the backbone of all your marketing and sales efforts. When developing any kind of business growth strategy, the first thing you want to hammer out is: who do you want to be your customer?

The ultimate goal of sales and marketing is to find these target prospects and get them into your contact database so you can continue communicating with them.

Unfortunately, most of us don't spend enough time "taking care" of our contacts. We throw them into our database willy-nilly with no strategic thought into who they really are, what we need to know about them, or how to organize them. They become just another meaningless contact in our database.

One of the first questions I ask my prospects is, "How many contacts do you have?" Interestingly, most of them don't really know. And if they can throw a number at me, they can't tell me much about the people on the list.

Don't let this happen to you! Below are the 2 most important types of contact reports you should be able to run. If your contacts aren't organized in a fashion that lets you run these reports, it's better to fix it now than to wait until you have an even bigger mess!