The biggest challenge any revenue-generating professional will face is connecting with a customer — via email, phone, social media, or in person — and actually getting them to listen. It has become a ‘skimming’ society with too many priorities competing with too little time. The customer has issues and they’re looking for solutions. The window of opportunity to connect with them is limited solely to how soon they determine you either can, or cannot, help them. It’s that simple.

For Marketers, this is a big issue. The challenge most of them face is that they do not know their customer well. They may know the target industry, and job title, and company size. They may know a pain point or two. However, most of these known entities are based on assumptions or informal conversations with a small sample of the intended audience.

The only way to truly know how to engage your audience, such that they listen to your message, is to have sufficient data that allows you to create an “Ideal Customer Profile”; and that’s the rub. For most of us, our customer data is weak, if not outright embarrassing. We’re missing key pieces of information. We’re inconsistent with the data formats. We sacrifice quality in order to keep peace among the various personnel who work with the target audience and can’t always be bothered asking for the information required or completing the data entry that is necessary.

Bad data results in bad marketing. It’s impossible to implement a campaign that delivers the right message to the right person at the right time. There is just not enough information. Instead, Marketers deliver shotgun campaigns. It’s a pray-and-spray approach where the sheer number of contacts reached out, perhaps via email, will result in a handful of potential conversions that Sales can work. However, even this style of marketing can only work for so long before your audience simply ignores you because you’re adding no value and wasting their time; the same ‘time’ that we know is in short supply.

With all of this as our reality, what can we do?

Watch this video. It was recorded at the 2015 Dreamforce. It tackles the issue, shows the solution, describes the effort, and demonstrates the tools. Start here.

This video will show you three ways that the right data improves customer engagement.

Watch the Session