complete, accurate and up-to-date dream list. As CEO or business owner of a small or medium sized business (SMB), this makes a lot more sense than a white Christmas. This asset will set your business up for growth in 2019 and you won’t have to shovel.
Dream List: Definition according to For Marketing Matters
A company asset that represents all contacts including customers, prospects, partners and influencers. This is an essential element in a company’s marketing foundation. It is necessary to effectively target and essential for building and maintaining awareness. It can be as simple as an Excel spreadsheet or be a CRM.
What is the origin of the name?
Mary Honan, Principal of For Marketing Matters, established the name back in 2008 as she developed the concept of the 13 essential elements of a solid foundation for any business.
So why does a Dream List matter to your business?
Below are five simple examples of how your business could use a Dream List to plan and execute some simple tactics. Without a Dream List these following scenarios prove to be not-so-simple:
- Sending out a holiday message to reach all your customers. You need a current, accurate list with mailing addresses or email addresses. That information comes from your Dream List.
- Sending out gifts to your top customers. To do this, you need to define your top customers. Missing a valuable customer would be a shame so your company would count on the Dream list to confirm your company’s definition of top customers and run a list with mailing addresses to order and deliver the gifts.
- Sending out an email to your key partners letting them know you will be closed at noon on Christmas Eve and reopened for business on Wednesday the 26th. The Dream List would be the source of your partners who need to know your holiday hours so you can confidently inform them relying on valid emails in the Dream List.
- Informing contacts in a market sector of a recorded webinar that you invite them to listen to. You need to be able to target just the contacts coded in this industry sector. Use the Dream List to sort by industry sector to reach the right audience.
- You have identified architects as an important referral source to grow your business. In searching your Outlook contacts, you only 15 contacts. This is an inadequate quantity to support your targeted growth numbers. You need a strategy to grow more referral sources. You use reports from the Dream List to measure progress made in building these key contacts for your business.
Marketers say content is king. Content is critical for effective marketing. However, quality content is not as impactful in the absence of a reliable Dream List. The Dream List is the mechanism, the data source, to ensure your content reaches the right audience.
Whether you are CEO or business owner of a SMB or CEO of a large entity, reliable and accurate customer and prospect data is typically a challenge. When it comes to customer and prospect data, first get a sense of the problem you are seeking to solve. Is it data quality or is it lack of quantity? or both?
- Quality: garbage in and garbage out. Are emails missing? Are contacts outdated, being from 7 sales reps ago? Run some baseline reports and analyze the data.
- Quantity: commonly, the statistics about the data are misleading or useless. Having a lot of bad data is of no use to your business. Quantity matters to ensure marketing has critical mass (client specific metric) to ensure you have enough prospects to reach to support your sales goals.
Below are some suggestions to put standards in place to improve data quality and build the quantity of contacts in your dream list.
5 Starting Points for a Useful Dream List:
- Define your industry sectors. This past year, we cleaned up a client’s CRM. They had 24 industry sectors defined. The level of specificity was not useful for target marketing so we simplified the list to four sectors. Sub industries were defined, agreed to and implemented within the CRM to enable further segmentation.
- Put every contact in a status such as customer or client and prospect. Real simply if they do business with you, they are a client or customer. If you want them to do business with you and they don’t yet, they are a prospect. Don’t over complicate it. Make it clear and clean. Do not have competitors mixed in. Code competitors clearly so marketing dollars are not wasted informing your competition about your marketing strategies.
- Segment your customers. Again keep it simple. We categorize customers in 1 of 3 categories: A is an ideal customer whom you would like to clone; B is ok, but not ideal. C is affectionately ‘pond scum”. We do not want to attract Cs and we do not market to Cs. This should be done at the company or account level.
- Capture email addresses, phone number and full address early in the sales process. For the above examples of why you need a Dream List, don’t assume you will never need a mailing address…Murphy’s Law will strike.
- Define your system of record. If you have a CRM, that should be your system of record. Any other systems (e.g., Constant Contact) should be updated from the CRM. Avoid duplicating effort to manage data quality. Maintaining data quality It is a tough, ongoing job that demands discipline. Make a flow chart. Do not assume others in your organization know how the data flows. Update data once and then implement processes so the update logically flows to other subsystems fed by the system of record.
Two Client examples of dream list progress in 2018:
Establishing and maintaining a useful Dream List is not easy. It is an ongoing effort that should involve marketing and sales. Below are two client examples where For Marketing Matters (FMM) led the 2018 effort to make big improvements in the data to enable effective and efficient marketing:
Client #1: A $3mm company without a CRM. Building and maintaining awareness of the brand and the company’s capabilities are the marketing priorities. To do this, we have been laser focused on building more contacts who represent a key referral source as well as introducing the brand to GCs having select titles/job responsibilities. As the marketing department we have built and expanded the Dream List we need to effectively and efficiently reach prioritized target audiences.
Summary of Dream List progress made in 2018:
- Dream List quantity grew by 58%
- Quality – percentage of contacts with email address grew to 91%
- Contacts representing top referral source grew by 470%
- Contacts coded as General Contractors with appropriate titles doubled in 12 months
Client #2: A $3mm company with a CRM, but data quality was an issue. Data was old, not being managed and key fields were not being captured consistently. Once the new website was launched, our marketing efforts focused on data quality and data quantity as increasing awareness and generating leads was the focus of the marketing plan. The marketing plan defined the goals for improving the data in the CRM and weekly meetings included review of reports to clean out garbage. Data standards were established and processes were developed to support effective ongoing management of data entered into the CRM. With Education being a priority sector to fuel sales growth, we worked as a team with sales and account management to improve the quality of the data in this sector and marketing expanded the list considerably. Below summarizes progress made in both quality and quantity so we can now efficiently and effectively reach our target audiences without concerns about data quality.
Summary of Dream List progress made in 2018
- In 11 months, quantity of the Dream List grew 164%
- Quality improved in parallel with contacts having email addresses increasing from 78% to 100%
- Building awareness and generating leads: The number of prospects grew to 85% of the Dream list; enabling marketing to efficiently and effectively reach ~2000, up from 350.
- Targeting: 11 months ago, 34% of the Dream list were not categorized by industry. One third of the contacts could not be reached with industry-specific messages. Today 100% of the contacts are categorized by industry.
These clients are not dreaming of a dream list. With the above completed in 2018, 2019 will include ongoing management of data quality while targeting growth in select areas to fuel ongoing awareness and lead generation.
Make your dreams a reality. Take action on your Dream List. It will set you up for efficient and effective marketing and sales efforts with measurable ROI.