2012 Data Acquisition Report

Presented by

he 2012 Data
Acquisition Report:
New Technologies Reinvent List
Building With Innovative Methods
For Sourcing Profitable Prospects

Sponsored by

“Despite the rising
It’s been firmly established that data quality cost and importance of
has a direct correlation to the success (or customer data, only 11% of
failure) of marketing and sales efforts. That respondents said they are able to
fact has now sparked a parallel discussion: manage it very effectively.”
how is prospect data being sourced in the - Customer Data Acquisition: The Keys
first place? The emerging view is that data to Effective List Management
acquisition — the precursor to all database - IDC CMO Advisory
creation — wields tremendous influence Service
over BtoB pipeline quality, campaign
effectiveness and, ultimately, revenue
importance of customer data, only 11% of
performance.
respondents said they are able to manage it
Coming into focus is the reality that data very effectively,” the report states. IDC said
acquisition strategy is either inadequate or its advisory work with marketing executives
completely absent, and that much list rental/ reveals that data acquisition and hygiene
purchase activity is mired in pre-automation currently suffer from three primary ailments:
practices. However, progressive firms are
• Lack of central authority to
making breakthroughs using efficient new
understand who owns customer data at
models of third-party list/contact acquisition.
an enterprise level;
Recent research validates these approaches.
• Inconsistent definitions of customer
In its February 2011 survey, Customer
records and key fields within legacy
Data Acquisition: The Keys to Effective List
applications (sales/CRM, finance/billing,
Management, IDC sampled list acquisition
service, pricing, provisioning and support);
budgets, behaviors and beliefs among BtoB
and
organizations. While respondents said their
spending on third-party data will increase in • Fragmented usage policies that lack
2011 and 2012, the findings expose some enforcement.
major caveats. “Despite the rising cost and
“The traditional list business is undergoing
rapid change. First, there are many new
sources and technologies for acquiring
names. Web scraping, social media and all
forms of inbound marketing are changing
the landscape. Second, consumer behavior
and attitudes around privacy are changing.
And, of course, the legislative environment
is changing, as well. Global marketers must
understand and comply with regulations
that vary by region and country.”
Brian Kardon,
Chief Marketing Officer, Eloqua

The 2012 Data Acquisition Report
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With so many new factors compounding data “To make smart data investments, inventory
disarray, marketers are looking for guidance. viable data sources to learn what’s available
This white paper will present best practices in internally and externally, and then investigate
data acquisition as expressed by some of the the strengths and weaknesses of each
top minds in data marketing and analysis. source to address specific data needs.”

Data Discipline: Why It’s - SiriusDecisions, Inc.
Needed And How To Apply It
A byproduct of CRM and marketing previously cited IDC report. “Data acquisition
automation inroads is the revelation that many is the critical front end to that process. It
companies are squandering money marketing should be formally defined with process and
to faulty databases. This has forced recent policy support to ensure the company gets
advancements in the data discipline, and the most valuable data it needs, and makes
cast marketing teams as the default owners. the best and fastest use of it.”
Data policy is coalescing slowly, with more
Murray said defining customer creation as
advanced players emphasizing acquisition.
an enterprise process is a significant shift
“To gather account and contact data, put that implies three major initiatives for senior
multiple sources to work,” stated analyst executives who intend to remain competitive:
firm, SiriusDecisions, Inc. “This helps to keep
1. Standardizing data;
data current and complete, resulting in a rich
understanding of accounts and contacts that 2. Creating a multi-tiered data governance
enables marketing to get the right message structure; and
to the right prospect at the right time.” The
3. Implementing a master data management
firm noted that companies earning less than
architecture.
$1 billion in revenue typically lack internal
database expertise at the marketing and sales
level – where it does the most good – which
places many BtoB firms in a Catch 22. But
there are solutions.

“To make smart data investments, inventory
viable data sources to learn what’s available
internally and externally, and then investigate
the strengths and weaknesses of each source
to address specific data needs,” stated
SiriusDecisions.

Data acquisition policy and strategy are
closely linked. “BtoB companies need to
define customer creation as an enterprise
process, and not something that just happens
in marketing and sales,” said Gerry Murray,
Research Manager at IDC and author of the

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Other research supports the idea that
To restore trust
data standardization, governance and
in their services,
management are best accomplished by
some firms are employing
dedicated personnel equipped with business
technology to overcome list
intelligence (BI) tools. In its May 2011 report,
fatigue and data decay.
Business Intelligence Command and Control
for the Chief Supply Chain Officer, Aberdeen
Group found that best-in-class organizations
share common characteristics pertaining to
internal data roles and the use of technology: for crowdsourcing, social media crawling,
keyword search and role-based profiling.
• Best-in-class companies are 40% more
likely than all others (the Industry Average However, with providers all claiming the same
and Laggard companies combined) technology improvements to compensate for
to have a single individual or team past list failures, once-bitten marketers are
responsible for collecting and managing twice shy when buying prospect data.
operational data; and
Bridging this confidence gap is innovative
• Best-in-class companies are 72% more vendor-neutral platforms. These next-gen
likely than all others to have implemented data tools deliver value by blending analytics,
an operational BI solution. campaign meta-metrics and strategic insights
to more precisely select choice records from
New Data Acquisition multiple sources in a portfolio approach.
Models & Methods
Leaders in this space, including Oceanos,
Legions of marketers have had bad whose proprietary List Optimizer tool and
experiences renting and buying lists from KnowledgeBank analytics capabilities allow
third party vendors. The familiar story goes marketers to draw data from a selection of
something like this: a marketer allocates name-brand BtoB databases in a preview
budget to buy a “qualified list from a reputable file format. Funds are committed only after
vendor” for lead-gen purposes. Relevant queries yield a fresh and precise list of net
content is created based on list attributes new targets. In this way, the company’s Data
(vertical, demographics, titles), and emails are Asset Management Group partners with select
sent. But open rates, click-through rates (CTR) clients to provide risk mitigation, diversification
and prospect engagements resulting from the and cost certainty strategies to ensure data
campaign are dismally low. Meanwhile hard investment optimization.
bounces, undeliverable addresses and opt-
outs are unacceptably high. Such results have “We’ve been likened to a general contractor,
soured many marketers on list vendors as a with the various data vendors being the sub-
group. contractors in that comparison,” said Brian
Hession, President of Oceanos. “Another
To restore trust in their services, some firms analogy is that we operate like a ‘data mutual
are employing technology to overcome list fund.’ Clients invest their annual data budget
fatigue and data decay. In addition to frequent with us and we allocate it to different data
list scrubbing, new algorithms are being used providers based on their audience and list

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performance. Our network of providers
include databases that allow you to The ability to cull
‘purchase’ multi-channel records along with preview files of prospects
‘rental’ sources such as trade publications, from multiple lists, rendering a
associations/communities, research firms and single master list before allocating
buyer files. We have the flexibility to shift a marketing dollars, is a game
client’s data acquisition budget as needed, so changer in the data acquisition
they’re never locked into any single source.” realm.

The ability to cull preview files of prospects
from multiple lists, rendering a single master
list before allocating marketing dollars, is a
game changer in the data acquisition realm.
Both sales and marketing will seek
Bearing this out, IDC’s report “…recommends relationships with firms that can assemble
that list acquisition models be determined by “smart records” and can then help them
market strategy, intended use, pricing and understand its application within the marketing
other factors that drive value. This will help and sales process. Smart records will improve
mitigate the frustrations with list quality that sales and marketing efficiencies and ultimately
can arise when sourcing multiple data types optimize demand waterfall performance.
without a formal requisitioning process or third
party expertise.”

“In the near future, marketers will look beyond
the standard contact record and will seek
“smart records,” Hession noted. “These
records will include business intelligence
(BI) in addition to the contact and business
demographic information. For example, a
smart record might include technology brands
in use and job role, along with social media
intelligence. Sales and marketing will analyze
the appended BI and extrapolate additional
intelligence.”

5

Conclusion
Data acquisition policy and strategy are slowly taking shape. Marketers are starting to scrutinize
data sources, separating reliable feeder channels and methods from the unreliable. One area of
concentration is the self-sourcing of prospects using web forms.

“Self-sourcing is an inherent part of most marketing and sales functions,” Murray said. “Many
companies get the majority of their contacts from web forms. However, this data is notoriously
dirty. The obviously bad entries can be vetted easily. The hard to correct issues – such as getting
personal versus business emails, company names spelled many different ways, business unit
demographics as opposed to corporate – can prevent high quality leads from being processed
effectively. As a result, self-sourcing is not the best way to get clean data into your database and
does not qualify as a best practice.”

Conversely, the “portfolio” approach to data acquisition has emerged as a best practice. In the
research brief Marketing Data Sources: The Balanced Portfolio, analyst firm SiriusDecisions, Inc.
states, “While it would be convenient to get everything from a single source, this ‘bet the farm’
model works about as well as the average single-stock portfolio.”

“Gathering data from a portfolio of sources improves the odds of success and reduces the
risk that insufficient or inaccurate data will sap the effectiveness of account-based or named
account marketing, or hinder efforts to improve overall segmentation and targeting,” according
to SiriusDecisions, Inc.

At the forefront of the portfolio data movement are companies including Oceanos, whose
proprietary technology pulls contact records from a group of reputable databases to build
hyper-efficient prospect lists. Also on the rise is the use of list/campaign metadata – aggregated
performance metrics used to optimizing strategies and lists pre-deployment.

Next-gen techniques are going a step further with a new wave of data ROI tools. One example
is the Opportunity Calculator found on the Oceanos web site. This tool takes industry averages
and actual client campaign metrics and compares the costs of vendor-neutral data acquisition
to one-off data buys and in-house list performance. Efficiencies of the portfolio approach are
compelling, especially to marketers seeking trustworthy prospect data to fuel growth.

Best practices for data acquisition and list building can be summarized as follows:

1. Assign ownership of data acquisition and management to a person or team;

2. Have a defined set of attributes for contacts you need to acquire data on. This leads to
much more effective and efficient buys;

3. Don’t use any single data source. The portfolio approach has major advantages;

4. If you don’t understand the differences between data sources – or the data acquisition
market in general – use third party expertise to bridge the gap.

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About Oceanos

Headquarters
Oceanos provides custom data solutions to optimize sales and marketing performance, guided
892 Plain Street by its vision of list intelligence. The firm’s proprietary List Optimizer technology builds data
Suites 8-10
Marshfield, MA 02050 sets, from a portfolio of data providers, with unmatched precision and reach to power all types
of demand creation and database building programs. This combination of data access and
781.804.1010
www.oceanosinc.com advanced search provides sales and marketing with a continual pipeline of contact and account
intelligence to support all levels of the demand waterfall. The result is a robust, repeatable,
demand creation engine.

To optimize campaign performance, Oceanos’ Data Asset Management Group works closely
with select clients to provide additional risk mitigation, diversification and cost certainty
strategies. Oceanos clients are typically large private or public companies within the software,
manufacturing, retail, business services, education, healthcare, electronics, and information
services industries. Their success has placed them on the Inc. magazine fastest growing private
company list three consecutive years.

For an independent analysis of Oceanos, reference our SiriusDecisions vendor profile:
http://www.oceanosinc.com/Oceanos_Sirius_Profile.pdf

About List Optimizer™
The List Optimizer builds custom data sets to optimize sales and marketing performance,
guided by our vision of List Intelligence. The software’s specialized search and segmentation
algorithms identify and aggregate company and contact level information from a wide portfolio
of third-party marketing and research databases. The result is a robust, repeatable, demand
creation engine to support all levels of the demand waterfall.

About DemandGen Report
DemandGen Report is a targeted e-media publication spotlighting the strategies and solutions
411 State RT 17
Suite 410 that help companies better align their sales and marketing organizations, and ultimately, drive
Hasbrouck Heights, NJ growth. A key component of our coverage focuses on the sales and marketing automation tools
07604
that enable companies to better measure and manage their multi-channel demand generation
1.888.603.3626 efforts.
www.demandgenreport.com

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2012 Data Acquisition Report

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2012 Data Acquisition Report