File Qualification
Your customer file loses an average of 24% to 36% of its value each year
Why Customer File Qualification Matters?
Your customer files are dynamic. They evolve and degrade over time, losing up to 36% of their accuracy on average. These files are the foundation of all marketing campaigns, enabling effective and targeted outreach. Using outdated customer data comes at a significant cost, impacting both processing time and marketing performance.
Before launching a marketing campaign, such as email marketing, direct mail, or B2B/B2C telemarketing, ensuring complete and reliable data is crucial. This allows you to target customers effectively and avoid wasted calls, letters, and emails. Regular customer and prospect file qualification is essential.
Common Database Errors:
- Obsolete Data: This includes outdated names of managers, phone numbers, emails, etc.
- Typos and Human Errors: Accidental mistakes during data entry can lead to inaccuracies.
- Duplicates: Multiple entries for the same contact can inflate your database size and skew results.
If you've been relying on the same customer prospect files for the past two years, you could be wasting up to two-thirds of your communication campaigns!
The Bottom Line:
Qualified customer files are the cornerstone of successful marketing campaigns. Their effectiveness and relevance hinge on data accuracy. Regular file qualification ensures you're targeting the right audience and maximizing your marketing ROI.
The Power of Customer File Qualification
Flawed customer data undermines your marketing efforts. Unqualified prospect databases hinder the success of acquisition, loyalty, and other marketing campaigns. A clean and up-to-date database is the bedrock of effective marketing strategies.
Benefits of Customer File Qualification:
Optimized Sales Prospecting & Increased ROI:
A qualified customer file empowers you to execute targeted marketing activities – like telemarketing, direct mail campaigns, customer reactivation efforts, and cross-selling initiatives, up-selling– without wasted resources.
Unqualified files lead to irrelevant marketing investments, ultimately weakening conversion rates.
Leads Provider's customer file qualification services free up your staff to focus on high-value tasks like face-to-face meetings and phone appointments.
Quality over Quantity: Relevant Information:
A high-quality database isn't measured by the sheer volume of data, but by the accuracy and relevance of the information it contains. Before launching a qualification campaign, Leads Provider works with you to define your specific needs and identify the information crucial to achieving your campaign goals. A database filled with unused data lacks value. We advise our clients to prioritize actionable information that directly benefits their business.
Reduced Costs Through Outsourcing:
In-house customer file qualification can be costly, time-consuming, and resource-intensive. It requires significant manpower, specialized knowledge, staff training, and additional organizational overhead. Some companies resort to temporary staff, which adds recruitment and training costs while offering no guarantee of qualified personnel. Outsourcing customer file qualification to Leads Provider offers several advantages:
- Effective Prospecting with Accurate Data: Our qualified databases connect you with the right contacts and contain relevant information.
- Experienced Telemarketers: Our team boasts an average of 5 years of telemarketing experience, wielding the necessary sales techniques to motivate contacts to provide accurate information.
- High-Performance Technology: Leads Provider utilizes an advanced information system that streamlines calls and facilitates high-volume qualification efforts, ensuring speed and efficiency.
- Real-Time Reporting & Transparency: Detailed reporting provides you with real-time insights into your campaign's progress. Additionally, an interface grants access to historical reports for comprehensive data analysis.
Leads Provider's Customer File Qualification Process
At Leads Provider, we take a streamlined approach to customer file qualification. Here's how we ensure your data is up-to-date and effective:
- Collaborative Needs Assessment: We begin with a meeting to discuss your specific needs, campaign objectives, and the information you require from your qualified database.
- Data Integration: You'll then send us your existing customer files. Our team seamlessly integrates them into our secure servers, enabling automated call processes.
- Technology Configuration & Access: Our IT team configures our information system for optimal performance and grants you access to monitor the real-time progress of your qualification campaign through detailed reports.
- Personalized Call Scripting: We provide your team with a customized call script that our experienced telemarketers will follow to ensure consistent and effective communication.
- Gauging Sales Interest: During each call, our telemarketers will assess the prospect's interest in scheduling a face-to-face or phone meeting with your sales representatives.
- Delivery of Updated Files: Upon completion of the qualification process, you'll receive your updated customer file, ready to be leveraged for successful marketing campaigns.
Essential Data for B2B and B2C Customer File Qualification
Leads Provider conducts file qualification campaigns for both B2B and B2C companies. While core details like phone number, email address, and contact name are crucial in any context, the specific information we collect differs based on your business type.
B2B Customer Qualification Essentials
Company Legal Data:
This includes company name, SIRET number, VAT number, RCS number, etc.
Industry Sectors (APE Code):
Understanding your customers industries (identified by the APE code) is vital. This helps tailor your offerings to their specific needs and interests.
Company Size:
Along with industry, company size (determined by turnover or employee count) influences their needs and budget for your products or services.
Contact Role:
The role of the contact person within the company is a critical factor. Knowing if you're speaking with a CEO, marketing director, IT director, or someone else determines their decision-making authority and allows for personalized communication strategies.
B2B Contact Information:
Beyond email, Leads Provider prioritizes collecting direct phone numbers (landline or mobile) for B2B contacts, facilitating a more personalized customer experience.
B2C Customer Qualification Essentials
The age of your customers and prospects
Customer and prospect age helps your company understand their consumption patterns and suitable product/service offerings. This allows for segmentation and targeted marketing campaigns.
The type of your customers and prospects
Similar to age, gender influences consumer behavior. This data allows for clear segmentation and personalized marketing interactions, including tailoring email content and titles based on gender.
Data relating to purchasing behaviour and the customer journey
This includes order frequency, purchase amount, last purchase date, etc. This data helps identify customer segments based on spending habits, allowing you to tailor marketing strategies to improve brand awareness and loyalty.
The interests of your customers and prospects
Leads Provider's telemarketers ask targeted questions to identify customer and prospect interests, enabling you to run highly relevant marketing campaigns.
Customer satisfaction data
Leads Provider collaborates with you to develop specific questions that assess customer satisfaction with your products, services, and overall interactions with your company. This data is crucial for improving customer experience and identifying areas for optimization in your customer relations.
Geographical Location (B2C):
Depending on your products and services, geographical location data can be important for B2C customer files
It's important to note:
1. The criteria listed above represent the foundational elements of B2B and B2C customer file qualification.
2. The specific data collected depends on your unique goals, needs, and industry sector.
3. Leads Provider conducts brainstorming sessions with clients to create a comprehensive list of data points relevant to your specific requirements.
FAQ
Here are the main criteria used to qualify BtoB customer files:
- Company size: classify companies according to their size: VSE, SME, ETI or Large Enterprise. This classification can be based on the number of employees and/or turnover.
- Business sector: an interesting criterion for understanding the specific characteristics of each sector and customising your marketing campaigns.
- Geographical location: this criterion is important for targeting specific regions, countries or any other relevant geographical division.
- Persona function: qualify contacts according to their function and responsibilities, such as general management, IT, purchasing, human resources, etc. This enables you to target the most relevant contacts for your solutions.
- Hierarchical level: It can be useful to qualify personas according to their hierarchical level in order to identify decision-makers and influencers.
- Customer relationship history: the history of interactions with the customer company, such as information on previous orders, contracts signed, complaints, previous communications, etc.
Before activating any commercial operations, you need to have a qualified file. Here's a very effective approach:
- Process, purify: clean, standardise and deduplicate your customer data.
- Apply the fundamentals of segmentation: with simple solutions (CRM, or even simple Excel filters), it is perfectly possible to segment your file effectively.
- Maximise the performance of your customer database: your database is segmented, and you can then evaluate and prioritise the performance of each segment in terms of its contribution to your company's results.
- Determine the performance levers: identify the levers to be activated for each segment to boost your company's financial results.
- Work on inactive customers: target your inactive customers and surprise them with new offers and features to win them back.
- Convert your unconverted prospects: once you've segmented your file, you'll notice that there are a significant number of unconverted prospects. These will help you to achieve rapid results by offering them attractive deals.
There are a number of tools and software packages available to help you qualify your customer database. Here are a few examples:
- CRMs: CRMs such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Zoho CRM offer functionalities for managing and qualifying customer files. They enable data to be centralised, interactions to be tracked and contacts to be segmented according to various criteria.
- Data enrichment solutions: services such as Clearbit, ZoomInfo, Dropcontact and PhantomBuster enable customer data to be enriched and qualified.
- Marketing automation tools: platforms such as Marketo, Mailchimp and Lemlist offer interesting marketing automation functions.
- E-mail address verification and validation services: services such as NeverBounce, BriteVerify, ZeroBounce and Dropcontact help to verify and validate the e-mail addresses in your customer file. This eliminates invalid addresses and improves the quality of your contacts.
- Lead scoring tools: solutions such as Leadfeeder, Lead Forensics and MadKudu provide lead scoring functionality. They assess the level of interest and qualification of prospects by analysing their online behaviour, website interactions and other relevant data.
A database naturally degrades by almost 20% per year.
- BtoB file: To keep your BtoB file qualified, it is recommended that you update your customer database every 6 months. However, the frequency of qualification of a BtoB file can vary according to various factors. If you run regular and intensive marketing campaigns, it is advisable to update your database and re-evaluate its segmentation more frequently. This will ensure that your campaigns are effective, relevant and targeted.
- BtoC file: we recommend that you qualify your BtoC customer file on an annual basis. This allows you to check existing information, delete obsolete contacts and add new data if necessary. However, you should consider updating your customer database more frequently if your business is more dynamic or if you make significant changes to your products. For example, launching new products or targeting new market segments.
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Don't hesitate to write to us or call us to get in touch with our customers and discuss your requirements.
