He or she is responsible for creating, updating, maintaining and validating the database and provide reports of the data. He or she is should be able to prioritize work in line with project management decisions. The responsibilities of the Data Entry Specialist is to manage the database by reviewing, cleaning and auditing the data in compliance with standard operating procedures and client guidelines.

Competencies:

• Work precisely according to procedures, rules and regulations.
• Consistency in delivering positive results, following tasks through from start to finish and meet deadlines.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills and be able to follow oral and/or written instructions.
• Must have an exceptional eye for detail and be an accurate typist.
• Work as a team player and be honest and dependable.
• Ability to work unsupervised taking responsibility for own actions and must be able to maintain company confidentiality.

Responsibilities include but are not limited to:

• Create, update, maintain, review and audit data into our CRM system with standard operating procedures and client guidelines (Salesforce.com experience beneficial).
• Create, update and maintain the database in various Excel spreadsheets (Experience with pivot tables and formulas is an advantage).
• Prioritize work in the line with project management decisions.
• Create/prepare and distribute reports of the data entered.
• Query data inconsistencies that are not in compliance with standard operating procedures and client guidelines

Experience/Requirements:

• Working knowledge of record management procedures.
• Working with a wide variety of computer systems, software and databases.
• 2+ years in a similar position.
• Bilingual (Spanish and English – Portuguese is a plus).

This position is a contract position. To apply, please send your resume, salary expectations and three contactable references to careers@thinkelevate.com

Whilst traditionally a marketing campaign with the objective of New Business Development might see results of 10 percent of the number of companies marketed to. We have recently run campaigns that have tripled, even quadrupled the number of teleconferences and meetings set, compared to the traditional approach. How? We don’t give up until we get definitive results with every company. We call it: Total Domination!

To find out more about ELEVATEs Lead Nurturing capabilities and approach to Total Market Domination, visit www.thinkelevate.com/lead_optimization.asp

-Nick

The key to really making an impact is to make the message really personal to the challenges that person is facing- It makes it relevant.

All too often, we see content that is trying to be “all things to all men” –in reality the Head of Finance has a completely different set of needs than the Head of IT, even regarding the same service offering.

If you segment your message based on the role of the person you are targeting the results are more improved because it’s about them, it’s about their pain, it’s about their challenges – ITS ALL ABOUT THEM.

And the stats show it – The email marketing benchmark guide by MarketingSherpa highlights that open rates for segmented versus non-segmented email campaigns are as much as 20% higher .

It’s not just all about the message either.

There are two fundamental building blocks to any successful campaign Data Quality and Database Segmentation.

1. Data Quality
Whilst you may have an up-to-date database of clients with opt-in email addresses, understanding how their role differentiates from their title may make a big difference in what messages you send them. Just because someone has the title of Chief Marketing Officer, doesn’t immediately flag that the person has responsibility for Sales or Product Development and would be interested in your marketing collateral surrounding those areas of your expertise. You may be missing out a whole segment of your database here. Complete and accurate records for each contact in your database will enable you to slice and dice your data like a Japanese sushi chef.

2. Database Segmentation
Beyond a database of accurate contact information, it’s fundamental for each record to be tagged accordingly based on their area of interest. Too often we see marketeers attempting to build campaign target lists based on a job title match. Ensuring your CRM system is correctly set up to capture data segmentation points such as role, gender, area of interest. No longer will your senior executives and marketeers have to troll through excel lists searching titles, but quickly report on these segmentation fields.

Has your organization adopted segmented messaging across its marketing function? Have you seen shorter relationship building times as a result? How important do you rate having a well segmented database for your sales and marketing campaigns?

-Nick

24 months ago, times were simpler, decision makers made decisions on their own – budgets were plentiful and everything had a steady flow – then kaboom everything changed!

Decisions started being made by committees – no-one wanted to make a decision on their own

Every Dollar, Pound or Euro of budget needed to be signed off by senior executives, but only after huge scrutiny.

People you had never heard of started popping up and blocking the process.

Does this sound familiar as it relates to you as a buyer and also as to how your organization is trying to keep up with the ever shifting marketing and business development lifecycle?

It’s no secret that things have changed – the challenge is how organizations are responding to it. One of things that’s often missed by marketing and business development teams is that the number of people that they now need to influence has dramatically increased.

Its not that the decision makers you normally target have changed, it’s the people who you never saw before who are having a significant effect on the whole buying process. These are the people who have the power to “Veto”, but not necessarily the power to say “Yes” – generally known as the Technical Buyer.

As a result, the various members of these newly formed committees need to be influenced – they need to be courted as much as the normal suspects – and thus alleviate the risk of rejection from these additional technical buyers in each committee.
The key to overcoming these challenges is making sure that you are broadening your horizons and getting to all of the people that will be involved in the decision making and purchasing process – long before you are into the sales cycle.

The questions to ask yourself are: 

• Do you know who these people are?
• Do you have their contact details in your CRM system?
• Are they tagged appropriately to receive the relevant marketing collateral and thought leadership?

To find out more about ELEVATEs approach to improving your data accuracy, and increasing revenue, visit www.thinkelevate.com/data_transformation.asp

-Nick

We have all had mail where our name is spelt incorrectly, wrong salutation, wrong title or even worse when it was addressed to our predecessor at a company that left years ago.

How does this make you feel? How does it make you view the company that’s sending the information? It doesn’t instill much confidence does it?

The importance of getting someone’s name and title spelt correctly along with making sure that you have their gender correct is the first step in building a trusted relationship.
Sounds simple right?

You’d think so, but in far too many instances, people assume information and that can be extremely harmful when reaching out to an executive you are looking to build a strong bond with, and it’s the little things that count!!

Below are just a few examples of how things can go wrong

Jerry or Jerri – male or female– well believe it or not most people assume it’s a man, without even checking the gender.

Steven or Stephen, White or Whyte – it’s the little things that can really elevate your profile in an instant.

Many companies believe the information they find from web based research is correct – however with over 15 years experience having conducted 5,000+ business development and marketing projects, we have seen this is certainly not the case.
All too often corporate web sites are out-of-date and have miss-spellings, along with job roles and titles being inaccurate – all starting the cycle of brand and relationship damage – before it’s even started.

The most accurate way to ensure you have this information correct is by personally talking to the company in question, the next step is ensuring that your CRM system is set up to capture these data points accurately, so that it is easily accessible when conducting your marketing and business development outreach.

So if you want to build trust and credibility – the first step is getting the name right!

To find out more how ELEVATE can help you build your trust and credibiltiy with accurate contact details for all your key decision makers, visit www.thinkelevate.com/data_transformation.asp

-Nick

-Nick

My thoughts immediately went to “that’s all well and good, but they don’t mention how they capitalize on this to drive leads and revenue”. All to often we see great pieces of content produced by Marketing and other Thought Leaders in the firm, but it needs to be turned into real tangible results.

A lot of people read great articles and have good intentions, but they seldom turn that thought into action.

We believe the key lies in creating a two way dialogue – picking up the phone to the senior executive – and arranging meetings to discuss how this new trend or area of expertise relevant to their organization.

For one of our consulting clients, we just implemented such a program – through our telephone outreach we generated over 20 meetings with c-suite Executives across only 80 of the Fortune500 Companies – all on the back off one piece of thought leadership. Something that has never before done before in the firm.

What is your experience with arranging meetings with Senior Executives in Best in Class companies – How do you do it? Does a “content marketing” strategy work? Can you attribute deals to a particular piece of research or thought leadership?
Please share your thoughts.

Thanks

Nick

Here’s our Top 10:

1. I’m booked for at least six weeks. I couldn’t handle another deal if it landed on my desk.
2. My business development discussions, if I get into a good one, take an hour. I only have 45 minutes to make calls now so I should wait until I have more time.
3. This isn’t a good use of my time. Somebody else should source leads and I should deliver work.
4. I’m not good at it so what’s the use? (And I sure can’t tell anyone this, so I’ll make up another reason.)
5. In my business, leads only come through referrals. Proactive outbound business development, even networking, doesn’t work. Why bother?
6. I’m deathly afraid of selling.
7. If I reach out to prospects, I will sound like a used car salesperson. Since I’m a professional, I can’t set up that dynamic.
8. I know how to talk about what I do (I think). Yet, for some strange reason, the words never come out right.
9. I don’t even know who to contact. I have the time and the will, but what do I do?
10. I hate selling.

Regardless of your reason, the end result is the same; another day goes by and you don’t work on business development.

Most CPAs (or technology consultants, or lawyers, or management consultants) show up in the morning and start doing accounting. They crunch numbers, manage teams, and take client meetings. Maybe there’s an hour and a half window in their schedule in the late afternoon. Here’s what most of them won’t do with that time: business development.

That’s right, 9 out of 10 professionals agree that engaging anything but business development in their open time slot is best to whiten teeth and freshen breath. The number one reason that professionals fail at business development: finding something else to do, or doing nothing, when they could be developing business.

Fortunately, the answer is simple: Start selling now.

Unfortunately, it is not that easy to take a deeply embedded behavior (not selling), flip a switch, and be able to do today what you did not, or could not, do yesterday.

And it doesn’t work like that for professionals who want to develop business.

You can’t just magically develop a hankering for dialing the phone. For the most part, it takes a robust personal change effort to make the transition from business-development-avoider to focused-client-developer.

3 ways to break the cycle:

1. Respect the effort. Realize that it takes significant time, effort, energy, and sometimes resources to develop business and stick with it.
2. Leverage your team. Seek help if you are stuck in a sales avoidance rut. Breaking out of a rut alone is extremely difficult. You will find help in the form of a peer, coach, boss, or someone else. Whoever it is, involving the right people increases your chance of success.
3. Develop an ongoing strategy. Before you engage in ongoing business development, know what tactics you are going to employ and why. If you have a clear end goal, and know how each tactic you undertake helps to get you there.

We make light of excuses for avoiding business development in order to raise the issue. Breaking the cycle of excuses and starting to develop business is never as easy as it sounds. But you can do it. Do what you need to do to prepare for success, know what you are going after, and then “just do it”

I was recently discussing this with a CMO from one of the top 10 consulting firms, in particular, how the role of the marketeer has changed over the years and how the demands being put on the marketing function to justify their role in generating business is increasing every day!

Based on this and other similar discussions, I believe that in the next year of so – Marketing Leads will be targeted with actual revenue figures as part of their objectives. Will those who meet these objectives be heroes? And those Marketeers who don’t be a thing of the past?

How do you see the role of marketing changing to meet the revenue demands of the business in a more justifiable way?

To find out how ELEVATE can assist with optimizing leads that actually drive revenue to your organisation, visit www.thinkelevate.com/lead_optimization.asp

-Nick

Correct – however in reality, when you really start to look at the information that you have – is it really complete, accurate and everyone accounted for?

Are you confident that you can touch every single company at the level you require to convey your message correctly?

Based on our experience over, most firms are missing over 37% of their total available market, in addition to this they don’t proactively update their database on a regular basis.

The impact that this has on your marketing efforts is huge – not only is the firm NOT connecting with all the relevant decision makers, the number of these decision makers are constantly diminishing – reducing even further the impact marketing has on this target market.

The key to reaching your Total Available Market is twofold.
- Firstly, identify every relevant organization and decision maker, and
- Secondly to make sure it stays that way – updated
I would be delighted to learn your experiences identifying and reaching your target available market.
If you would like to find out more how ELEVATE can help you in these goals, do not hesitate to contact me directly.

-Nick

Several people in my network have been boasting their increased pipeline activity since implementing marketing automation as well as the justification that marketing can now make on the revenue it provides to their service line or business unit. Now, they can directly demonstrate the value and secure a greater budget to focus on key revenue generating activities.

On the flip side, the increased visibility shows the vulnerabilities of marketing and client teams. I just received an email this morning from a Service Line Lead – asking how he can fix the problem of his teams not following up hot prospects fast enough – he was furious that all these key targets were being left to their own devices.

We would like to hear your thoughts and experience on using Marketing Automation technologies, what value they bring and also how much or little you know about the benefits and downfalls.