Your Biggest Untapped Marketing Asset? : Best Practices in B2B Demand Generation

by Jason Stewart

Happy New Year everybody!

There was a line in yesterday's post by Jon Miller over at the blog Modern B2B Marketing (Unleash Your House Database with Lead Nurturing) that reminded me of a story. Jon said this about the typical B2B company's contact database...

"That database is a significant asset that gets undervalued at most companies. Think about it: if your average cost per new contact is even just $20 (a low assumption) and you have a modest database of 250,000 contacts, then your house database is a $5 million asset. Do you treat as such? How many other assets of that size do you have in your company?"

Once upon a time I worked in field marketing for a software company that was hard charging, spending lots of money and hiring like crazy. They were also about to implode (just like everybody else) because the time was 1999 and the bubble was about to burst. I got laid off, like lots of people did, and was working for another high-tech when that company asked me if I would like to come back to a much leaner version 2.0 of the company to run online marketing and manage a third party firm they had hired to work the phones generating appointments for their sales team. I took the job.

A few weeks after coming back, the CEO of the company asked me why I had returned. I'm sure he was hoping to hear about how I was extremely excited about the software, and the prospects for the company to pave the way in their space, and all of those other types of hyperbole. Needless to say, he was pretty shocked by my answer.

I told him the biggest reason was the database.

When I was there, the field marketing team was pretty large, and the management running the team was a huge proponent of the "if it is not in the CRM system than it does not exist" philosophy. I knew there were a lot of names in there, who had been touched and called regularly by a good team, and there were meticulous notes on all the interactions. It was a really great database that was going to make things much easier for me, right from the get-go.

That database was one of the company's most valuable assets, but he had never looked at it like that before.

How do you look at your house list? Is it an asset? And more importantly, with times being what they are, is it an untapped asset...?