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DUN & BRADSTREET
Four Data Keys to Building Your
Business’s Most Valuable Relationships
in an Inbound Marketing World
With Introduction by Rishi Dave, Chief Marketing Officer, Dun & Bradstreet
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Introduction
Today’s marketers face an environment where the customer has
taken full control of the buying process. No longer dependent
and bound only to information pushed to them, the Internet has
leveled the playing field – allowing customers and prospects to
learn and research the products and services they will buy in the
way they want to buy them.
Rishi Dave
is D&B’s Chief
Marketing Officer
@RishiPDave
It is also clear that marketing departments are leading the way.
This shift in empowerment to the customer/consumer creates
a big challenge for businesses like yours. Your customers now
expect the companies they interact with to understand their
unique needs from the start and respond appropriately. And it
is critical for businesses to be ready when the customer is. You
must be able to access the data and insight you need to have
the right conversation with the right customer at the right time.
As the primary voice and advocate of the customer within an
organization, it is up to us to make sure data is systematically
integrated across the enterprise, making it far easier to
manage customer insight and all connections with clients,
prospects, partners, employees, media and society at large.
We can make it easier for our companies to see opportunities
for growth with a preparedness that can propel a business
forward and differentiate itself from their competition.
Deep data integration enables world-class experiences and
relationships to form even though prospects push their initial
person-to-person engagements with businesses later into the
sales cycle than ever before.
In whatever way a business engages with a customer or
prospect – whether it’s through marketing automation,
customer relationship management, or other technologies
or tactics – it is clear that access to relevant, timely and
comprehensive business insight is now mission critical.
At Dun & Bradstreet, data is in our DNA. Making sense of the
world’s data – turning it into insight – is core to our business and
proud history. In fact, based on the size of our global database,
some say we run the world’s largest customer master data
management project.
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“It’s not purely
about data for
data’s sake. It’s
about the insight
to understand
people, entities
and relationships
better than your
competitors.”
It’s not purely about data for data’s sake. It’s about the insight
necessary to understand people, entities and relationships in a
manner that positions organizations to win business.
Foundational to success in leveraging data for insight is achieving transparency in business relationships. And with the global
speed and spread of business today, we know that developing
a complete and actionable view of prospects, customers,
partners and suppliers is key to data-driven growth.
We’re often asked to share perspectives on companies that are
best at leveraging analytics to bolster customer relationships.
In this paper, we’ll share four key values and best practices we
have seen as we work with thousands of companies around the
world. We hope you find it valuable.
Rishi Dave
Chief Marketing Officer
Dun & Bradstreet
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Increasingly,
chief marketers
are the
champions of
customer-centric
cultures and the
architects of
elevated
customer
experience.
– State of Marketing™
– CMO Council 2014
Executive Summary
For today’s marketer, a seismic shift has taken place between
companies and customers. A global, networked digital economy has leveled the world’s playing field, eliminated cross-border
barriers and opened up the world marketplace. Today, even the
smallest business can operate in remote parts of the world. In
addition, the availability of massive amounts of information has
put the customer in control of the way they learn and research
products and services. No longer bound only by information
pushed to them, before they are ready to make a buying
decision, customers and prospects can self-nurture, which is
the process of educating oneself and moving down the buying
cycle without engaging a potential vendor or partner. As the
Corporate Executive Board has reported, 57% of the buyer’s
journey for B2B customers now takes place before any person-to-person contact is made with a sales team member.
As a result, marketing activities need to be about early intervention and building relationships that start as early as customers
or prospects begin to explore new solutions and ideas. These
early connections can build and increase in value over time to
significantly move business forward. This is the spark for the
content-led, inbound marketing revolution driving so much
activity for B2B brands. And the key to successfully implementing this – to building these relationships largely via content and
digital – is having the data and insights to deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time right from the first
interaction onward. Companies that understand this are most
likely to outperform competitors across a complete customer
lifecycle. Indeed, according to Accenture’s 2014 CMO Insights
Survey, 89% of high-growth companies place a high importance
on customer experience compared to 60% of their low-growth
counterparts.
As a business’s geographic location becomes irrelevant and
more data, including multi-lingual data, is available, the globalization of business relationships and the challenge of accurately
identifying a business is one that could easily overwhelm even
the most sophisticated company. With the abundance of data
now available to all, what we can know about a business – at
any given time, anywhere in the world – has been transformed.
And even as businesses begin to leverage more data from a
number of new sources they still struggle for insight or “nirvana,” which is the ability to connect their own rich, internal,
transactional data with external data to predict future behavior.
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Based on
the successful
efforts we see in
the companies
we work with,
we are able to
hone in on
four key elements
of creating a
data-driven
advantage for
your company
in this customercentric, inboundmarketing world:
1. GLOBAL DATA TRANSPARENCY AND
CONSISTENCY ARE
THE FOUNDATION OF GROWTH
.
2. IDENTITY RESOLUTION EMPOWERS FORESIGHT
3. CUSTOMER ANALYTICS LET YOU CAPTURE
UPSIDE AND REDUCE RISK
4. MARKETING’S CALLING: INSPIRE AND
LEAD THE DATA EMBRACE
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1.
GLOBAL
DATA
TRANSPARENCY
AND
CONSISTENCY
ARE THE
FOUNDATION
OF GROWTH
Globalization has rendered the modern world flat. With increasing ease and lightning speeds, business can be conducted all
over the world. While these advances offer tremendous opportunity, the companies best positioned to take advantage of a
global marketplace are those with access to the insight needed
to confidently conduct business in the new world order.
Consistent data across the enterprise is the key to achieving the
transparency that leads to insight. You need to create a single,
complete and actionable view a customer or prospect business
built on a foundation of high-quality data. Together, these elements can enable an optimal and compelling customer experience. But consistency and transparency won’t just happen.
The Best Practice: Achieving global consistency and transparency lets you create laser-precision in your targeting and make
it far less likely that you will miss an opportunity. Implementing
this successfully is a two-fold process:
1) You must first understand the business challenges you are
trying to solve and make sure you have access to the quality
foundational data that is needed to enable insight and
action. Work with your partners across the company to hone
in on these holistically; identify the data that you need to
solve these challenges; and then create benchmarks to
assess your progress.
2) You must obtain executive-level commitment and advocacy
for enterprise-wide global data consistency so data governance (Master Data Management) can to be leveraged
as a competitive asset for your marketing team and for the
company as a whole.
Transparency into global business relationships begins with a
foundation that combines a single, complete and actionable
view of a business. How Dun & Bradstreet partners with
companies like yours to achieve this:
WHAT YOU KNOW
WHAT WE KNOW
Website Traffic
Activity ‘Signals’
Sales Interaction
Financial Health
Marketing Outreach
Legal Hierarchy
Purchase History
Search Inquiries
Bill To, Ship To
Spend Behavior
Product Usage
Contacts / Buyers
Product Lifecycle
Payment History
Finance / Collections
Age, SIC, Size, Geo
Customer Service
Economic Trends
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2.
IDENTITY
RESOLUTION
EMPOWERS
FORESIGHT
With mountains of data available – structured and unstructured
company’s overall business strategy. If data governance is
– it’s challenging to validate a business, link it to a larger corpooperated as a cost center or part of IT or one isolated part
rate parent entity and understand the people associated with
of the organization, the value must consistently be justified.
the business. “Identity Resolution” (IR) is a rigorous methodolThe Best Practice: Companies that have the ability to
ogy – an art and a science that transforms data into insight and
understand the connections and relationships between
foresight and creates a standardized definition of an “entity.”
companies and individuals can organize seemingly disparate
IR gets at the heart of understanding people, entities and
data points into a powerful, comprehensive and contextual
relationships. As the lines between global and local and
view. This creates a decisive advantage over competitors that
business and consumer become more blurred, IR enables
lack this insight.
companies to leverage data across multiple languages and
writing systems to tackle a range
of business challenges that
Linking businesses by legal structure or association
can improve operations and
increase sales and profits.
The result is a competitive
advantage gained by bringing
Same
Business
a single, unique insight into
Family
customers, partners, suppliers
and the markets they serve.
Same
Same
This process of integrating and
transforming foundational and
firmagraphic data into insight
advances your marketing team’s
decision-making abilities and
therefore must be part of the
Business
Entity
Resolving commercial
identity to single view
Person Associated
with Business
Resolving personal identity
in context of business
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3.
CUSTOMER
ANALYTICS
LET YOU
CAPTURE
UPSIDE AND
REDUCE RISK
Visibility into future growth and expansion or contraction
and more risk.
And what if you knew about both of these scenarios a year to
18 months in advance?
Companies that leverage analytics across the customer lifecycle
The Best Practice: Advanced analytics means leveraging data
are more likely to outperform their competition by significant
to anticipate changes in customer behaviors before they manmargins when it comes to sales, profits, growth and ROI. Again
ifest themselves in traditional ways. When it comes to finding
citing the recent Accenture CMO insights study, 86% of highnew sources of growth and avoiding risk, these anticipatory
growth companies use data and analytics to maximize marketanalytics offer a compelling value proposition and a continuous
ing impact vs. 65% for low-growth companies. A large part of
feedback loop that lets you be nimble and informed in all key
this analytics-driven growth is creating visibility into a company’s
customer-related decisions:
future. Are the signs pointing to
growth and expansion or are they
ATTRACTIVENESS
BEHAVIORAL ANALYTICS
RESPONSIVENESS
showing a propensity for contraction?
Attract
Not all customers and prospects are
equal. Imagine you had access to
an early alert system that gave you
informed visibility:
1) That an important customer was
on the brink of a major
business expansion
2) That certain businesses in your
portfolio would experience a
significant risk profile decline
Portfolio/
Total
Market
Target
Historical
Interaction
Priortize
New
Qualified
Leads
Cultivate
Convert
Scored
Leads
Buyers
Grow
Repeat
Buyers
Foundational
global data
Look-alike
models
Conversion
models
Treatment
optimization
Anticipating
future needs
Basic
firmographic
profiling
Response
models
Time to close
models
Sales forecast
optimization
Share of wallet
estimation
Opportunity
sizing
Opportunity
sizing
Standard
demand
estimators
Risk pre-screen
scores
Engaged
Buyers
Customer
& lead
management
actions
Channel
assignment
CONTINUOUS FEEDBACK LOOP
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4.
MARKETING’S
CALLING:
INSPIRE
AND
LEAD THE
DATA
EMBRACE
Customer centricity is top of mind. Way before the adjective
“Big” was added to the word “data” businesses were trying to
make sense of their information to better understand customer
needs. In fact, “big” may equate not to size, but instead to importance. There’s probably not a C-suite executive in the world
that doesn’t believe that data and analytics are critical drivers
of business success. However, most leaders struggle with how
to lead a data-driven transformation that truly enables data to
perform its most amazing feats.
Yes, thriving in the content-led, inbound marketing world
necessary for a growing number of B2B brands requires a lot
of things. You must have great content that is personalized for
maximum relevance. You must have sophisticated lead
management capabilities. Your systems and processes must –
in many cases – be re-thought so they can work well together.
But it all starts with complete, integrated, high-quality data.
And by starting there you can actually lead the company’s goals
to achieve this throughout the organization.
Marketing organizations are natural champions of a
data-driven approach that enables the entire organization to
operate with higher degrees of customer centricity. Today’s
marketers are in the best positions to bring “voice of the
customer” insights into senior-level conversations to secure
funding and rally the rest of the organization’s business-unit
stakeholders into taking a more disciplined approach to
leveraging data enterprise-wide. Marketers are accustomed
to leveraging data in systems and marketing campaigns,
and depending on how far they have already automated the
company’s marketing processes and adopted a CRM
application, they are well suited to help a company continue
to efforts to integrate data company-wide.
The Best Practice: Nurture an intellectually curious
organization that isn’t afraid to leverage data and analytics
for stand-out insights.
Philosophically, unlocking the value of big data begins with
organizational curiosity. At each company, the challenges
are different and the data is different. The degree to which
a business can become more market-minded and create a
culture of consistent interest, inspection and curation with
data is directly correlated to the amount of competitive
advantage the organization will derive from data.
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4.
MARKETING’S
CALLING:
INSPIRE
AND
LEAD THE
DATA
EMBRACE
The good news is that data is no longer boring; it’s gone
mainstream. Sports analytics have paved the way for more
informed spectators to make predictions based on hard
evidence and analytics. This ubiquitous use of predictive
analytics has exploded interest in using data in a multitude
of ways to predict future outcomes. Most sports and even
virtual fantasy sport leagues are using data to make more
informed decisions about the teams and players they want to
support. The same approaches can be applied to marketing
and business.
The Best Practice: Be sure your organization has a base-line
understanding ready to ask your data the right questions
Always understanding the business problems you are trying to
solve is critical. Today, the capacity to effectively leverage data
and analytics is there. By asking the right questions, a business
with a foundation of quality data can more easily shift from
transactional to transformational in its use of data. In our
experience, companies can experience at least a 30%
improvement in performance with new data assets that identify
opportunity and risk with greater precision. They ask their data
the right questions.
The Best Practice: Put quality data over quantity of data
Transparency, insight and foresight are the fuel for today’s more
sophisticated marketing automation and CRM applications. As
the world’s “digital universe” continues to explode, the reliance
on data-driven insight as a means to solve business challenges
and fuel business growth is expected to increase. Companies
that stay ahead of the curve in leveraging data enterprise-wide
will be well-positioned to move along the data continuum and
take advantage of greater predictive insights and anticipatory
analytics as they become available and further integrated into
business processes.
Using analytics enables your marketing and, therefore, sales
teams to organize their follow-up by potential opportunity.
This ensures your resources are efficient and effective. By
prioritizing on behaviors in addition to firmagraphics you can
ensure your marketing team is aligned with their partners in
sales and finance. This streamlines the pre- and post-capture
process as well as improves customer experience. Lead
prioritization also enables leaders to assign prospects with
the highest potential to the right sales resource with the best
chance of capturing the opportunity.
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4.
MARKETING’S
CALLING:
INSPIRE
AND
LEAD THE
DATA
EMBRACE
The Best Practice: Move ahead with advanced analytics
that deliver insight and foresight and powerful results that
companies need to move ahead of the competition
getting ahead of competition. New innovative approaches for
marketing optimization can flip the paradigm and deliver
compelling ROI and breakthrough growth.
Gaining first-mover advantage and getting ahead of your
competition is critical in a crowded global marketplace. In
marketing, traditional demand estimation is no longer enough.
Non-traditional proxies and signal data are radically advancing
the levels of predictiveness we can achieve for deeper
understanding of a company’s propensity to buy.
As globalization continues to be a significant force in facilitating
business interactions, those organizations that adopt and adapt
data-driven strategies will be well positioned to enjoy significant
levels of business growth. As marketers and their cross-functional colleagues get more and more nimble in leveraging data
enterprise-wide, with increasing levels of transparency and
foresight, they can confidently move into the areas of advanced
anticipatory analytics that are now on the cusp of becoming
solid business solutions. These advances include “Signals” and
“Proxies” that assess obscured predictive patterns to predict an
event in the future.
For example, understanding spending proxies in different
verticals can help you identify business need and opportunity
with laser-like precision.
Advanced analytics are also highly valuable in persona
marketing – the art of profiling customers to find more like
them. It lets you reduce the cost of precision-targeted
marketing campaigns, nurture prospects, improve the
hand-off of qualified leads to sales and reduce staff time
in manual consolidation of account activity.
Businesses that are increasing sales and marketing efficiency
and effectiveness at every stage of the acquisition lifecycle are
Organizations that become nimble in leveraging data across
their business can confidently move into the areas of advanced
anticipatory analytics that are now on the cusp of becoming
solid business solutions. Among these advances in analytic
strategies are the use of “signals” and “proxies” that can assess
obscured predictive patterns to predict an event in the future.
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With more
powerful data,
analytics and
advanced
technology
solutions like
mobility, today’s
businesses can
operate with
the foresight
they need
to turn data
into action –
in real time.
The Summary
For today’s CMOs, the world is rapidly moving from data to
insight to foresight and then into action. While many marketing
executives are now partnering closely with the technologists
in their organizations, the next phase may be less about the
technology and more about the ability to turn the data into
the insight needed to create great experiences for customers.
Businesses have worked hard over the last three decades to get
to this point. They are well positioned to reap the benefits from
all this heavy lifting, but it doesn’t mean it’s a “layup.” Many
marketing leaders will struggle with this three, five, seven, even
ten years from now if they don’t learn how to assess whether
their actions are having the desired impact.
With more powerful data, analytics and advanced technology
solutions like mobility, today’s businesses can operate with the
foresight they need to turn data into action – in real time. We
now see businesses combining their own data with third-party
data and insights to pack a more powerful punch when going
after customers and prospects they care about. One way they
do this is by embedding the necessary insight directly into the
workflows of CRM and marketing automation applications. This
approach enables enterprises to access this insight on mobile
devices to profile top customers and target new prospects.
In addition to better targeting prospects and growing customers, they can also predict and bypass future credit and supply
chain risks to better focus resources. The result is improved
business performance, higher levels of customer satisfaction
and accelerated growth.
If you’re still at the descriptive phase – if you’re still having conversations about Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Business Intelligence (BI) tools – you are probably getting anxious
to shift to a faster pace, to move to foresight and action phase.
Dun & Bradstreet is among the companies pushing the
anticipatory analytics envelope with an eye toward tying back
to the business problems and the issues we want to resolve.
When you focus on that, you earn a point of differentiation in
the marketplace.
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A few final thoughts as you prepare to get back to the business
at hand.
–Embrace what’s next – Embrace globalization and the big
data transformation and write your own company’s chapter.
–Build your Roadmap – Get help from those that invest the
time to understand your business process and the challenges
you want to solve.
–Curate the Data – Understand the data sets that are valuable
to your business – those that bring transparency and foresight
to your business relationships.
–Leverage your transactional data assets – Call Center data
and other sentiment data available in your own business can
provide very unique and powerful insights.
As Big Data continues to deliver new opportunities, D&B is here
to help businesses transform their marketing efforts by leveraging data, insight and analytics to both fuel CRM and marketing
automation applications and be ready to meet the evolving
demands of today’s more informed and expectant customers
and prospects. Learn more about the ways D&B can support
your marketing initiatives at www.dnb.com/connectors
D&B (NYSE:DNB) is the world’s leading provider of commercial
information and insight on businesses, enabling companies for
173 years. D&B’s global commercial database contains more
than 240 million business records and provides customers
quality business information—solutions that customers rely on
to make critical business decisions. For more information, visit
www.dnb.com.
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Worksheet – Benchmark your organization
Assess where your organization stands on the continuum to unlocking the value of big data and get customized recommendations for accelerating
your organization’s success. The chart below is a good way to see how your company compares with ideal benchmarks at leading companies.
Company Name:
Industry:
DATA
DIMENSIONS
IDEAL
BENCHMARK
DEFINITION
100%
Your assessment of how well your organization
leverages data
Enterprise-wide
How consistent your data is across your organization
Updated Daily
How often data is refreshed
Real-time
Company-wide access to updated data
Data Governance strategy
Yes
Our company has a Data Governance Strategy in place
Entity Matching
Yes
Single view of the Customer without duplicates
90-100%
Percentage of emails that reach intended recipients
Marketing Response Rate (B2B)
3-4%
Percentage of emails without a significant
offer that generate a response
Acquisition Rates
2-3%
For every customer you lose,
you replace with a new customer
Customer Retention Rates
>90%
Data is helping you retain customers
Data helps us reduce DSO
2-3 days
You collect accounts receivable faster,
reducing Days Sales (or Billed) Outstanding
YOUR
BENCHMARK
RANKING: OPPORTUNITY
OR OPTIMIZED?
At our organization….
We are data-driven
BUSINESS IMPACT
Data consistency
Data latency
Access to data
Marketing Deliverability Rate
A B O U T D U N & B R A D S T RE E T
Dun & Bradstreet (NYSE: DNB) grows the most valuable relationships in business. By uncovering truth and meaning from data, we connect customers with the prospects, suppliers, clients and partners that matter most, and have since
1841. Nearly ninety percent of the Fortune 500, and companies of every size around the world, rely on our data, insights and analytics. For more about Dun & Bradstreet, visit DNB.com.
© Dun & Bradstreet, Inc. 2015. All rights reserved. (DB-4106 3/15)
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