For our clients using Eloqua, we’re happy to announce a new release of the NetProspex Data Enrichment App for Eloqua. Summary and details below. Happy data enrichment!

• Custom Mapping of Field Values
• New Credit Balance View
• Improved User Experience
• Additional Email Notifications
• Last Updated Field
• Optimized Error-handling

Custom Mapping of Field Values

You can now map NetProspex values to Eloqua picklist values. The fields that can be mapped are: Industry, Job Level, Job Function, Revenue Range, and Employee Count Range. This functionality resides on a new screen called “Value Mappings.”

View Credit Balance
Easily see your NetProspex account balance (the amount of credits available for appending via the connector.)

Improved User Experience
The user interface has been improved.  Input and output mappings are now on separate tabs. The field selection drop-downs now have type-ahead functionality.

Additional Email Notifications
Set up custom execution status notifications at regular intervals (e.g. every six hours) as well as receive daily, weekly or monthly updates.

Last Updated Field
To use as a potential trigger in data operations, including data synchronization with CRM, a new “Last Updated Field” NetProspex field is available, and can be mapped to an Eloqua field.

Optimized Error-handling
Error handling has been optimized to gracefully fail and retry at the batch level rather than at the record- evel for appropriate cases, including invalid (expired) Eloqua credentials, and zero credit balance.

Questions, comments? Reach out to Dmitry Grenader, Director of Product Management at dgrenader@netprospex.com

Did you know that 71% of brands plan to increase their content marketing budget in 2013? Do you ever wonder how marketers become content publishers?

If you’re a Boston-based marketer hoping to learn more about this world, improve the skills you’ve been cultivating in content marketing, and meet other smartypants marketers in the Boston area, please join us on June 6th at the Westin Copley Place for the Content Marketing Bootcamp.

The event is run by the talented folks at Kapost and Eloqua (an Oracle company), and sponsored by NetProspex, Annuitas, and Influitive.

Here are all the details:

• Thursday, June 6th, 2013
• 10:00am – 3:00pm / Bonus Financial Services Session: 3:00 – 4:00pm
• Boston, MA
• Free for qualified individuals

Register here and tell ‘em NetProspex sent you.

See you then!

Former CEO Gary Halliwell Promoted to Executive Chairman; Former President Michael Bird Promoted to CEO; Brian Serino Joins Team as SVP of Sales and Business Development

WALTHAM, Mass.– Leading provider of B2B sales and marketing data services, NetProspex, today announced key organizational changes at its senior level. Within these changes, former CEO and Co-Founder Gary Halliwell will now serve as executive chairman; former President Michael C. Bird assumes the responsibilities of CEO; and marketing technology industry veteran Brian Serino joins the team as senior vice president of sales and business development.

In his new role of CEO, Bird will continue to operationalize the company vision and drive overall growth. Bird joined NetProspex in January 2010 as chief revenue officer, moving to president in March 2012 where he oversaw sales, technology, business development, and marketing. Under his tenure, NetProspex saw 90 percent revenue growth year over year, 500 percent growth in customer base, and doubled headcount year over year. As executive chairman, Halliwell remains responsible for the vision of the company and long-term goals of the brand. His main focus-area will be maintaining differentiation in an increasingly crowded marketplace.

“We envisioned this level of senior transition when the timing was right for the organization, assuming we executed against our strategy and growth track,” said Halliwell. “Fortunately, we’ve experienced great success over the last seven years, and achieved incredible growth through fantastic market presence, an award-winning workplace culture, and notable customer success through our suite of B2B data management products.”

Serino joins NetProspex from marketing technology provider Neolane, where as vice president of sales, he built a highly-effective sales organization to scale all North America revenue resulting in 150 percent growth and a leadership position in the Forrester Wave. Formerly at Unica for eight years, Serino served in multiple senior sales management positions that included both vice president east, and vice president of North American sales. In his capacity at Unica, Serino drove a ten-fold increase in revenue, played a pivotal role driving Unica to a market leadership position, and supported the company’s successful IPO and eventual acquisition by IBM.

“We’re thrilled to have Brian on board to drive the execution of an aggressive growth strategy for NetProspex. He has proven experience growing high-performing sales teams that exceed goals and drive profitability at the same stage that our company is today,” said Bird. “As we reach 100 employees and continue to build and improve a suite of innovative products, it is the right time for an evolved management structure. The addition of Brian and other key players to the team leaves us well poised for the next chapter of the organization.”

About NetProspex

NetProspex is the smarter B2B data partner, helping marketing and sales organizations optimize their revenue impact through a suite of innovative data services. Thousands of B2B organizations rely on NetProspex to acquire targeted prospects, maintain and enhance their marketing data, and fuel high-performing sales prospecting efforts. At the core of NetProspex is an innovative crowd-sourced database, cleansed with proprietary CleneStepTM verification technology. The company’s free Data HealthScan offers insights about database accuracy and relevance, while CleneProspex ensures valid contact information all within a cloud-based platform known as Workbench. Marketers can enhance data with demographic and firmographic information, including specific technologies used at target accounts. For more information visit www.netprospex.com.

Contacts

Agency Contact:
Version 2.0 Communications
Katelyn Holbrook, 617-426-2222
kholbrook@v2comms.com
or
NetProspex Contact:
Katie Martell, 781-290-5712
Director of Buzz
kmartell@netprospex.com

The 2013 SiriusDecisions Summit, a must-attend B2B sales and marketing leadership conference, is next week in San Diego. NetProspex is proud to be a major sponsor of the event, and there are a few ways to interact with our team if you’re attending:

Boat party! 

Join NetProspex and your B2B colleagues on the high seas for drinks, heavy hors d’oeuvres, and music selected by our resident CEO and DJ Gary Halliwell. We’ll be cruising around the San Diego Bay on the luxurious California Princess yacht at the must-attend party of SiriusDecisions 2013!

The boat departs at 8:00pm directly behind the Hyatt, and will drop off in the same location at 10:00pm. Come see us at the show for more information or reserve your spot here.

Bike give-away!

Visit the NetProspex booth for your chance to win a custom NetProspex bike. We’ll ship one anywhere in the U.S. after the show, but you can take one for a test-drive in the booth!

  
Win a Nike+ FuelBand!

Pick up one of 4 healthy data buttons and be seen wearing them around the show for a chance to win a Nike+ Fuelband. We’ll pick winners during breaks in the exhibit hall, so make sure you’re seen wearing your button.

Real-life data management!

Watch our president Michael Bird present a case study on data management alongside Matt Heinz on Wednesday morning (5/8) at 8:00am or 9:00am.

—

We’re bringing plenty of copies of the Marketing Data Benchmark Report - revealing the true state of the data sitting in your marketing automation system or CRM. Read the full report (it’s free) — and you’ll find that over half of B2B companies in the U.S. are using unreliable data to fuel their marketing activity. Yikes!

Data maintenance is a lot like taking care of your personal health and wellness. You know you’ve got to eat right & stay active to feel and do your best. When there is a problem, you diagnose it and treat the symptoms. High-performing sales and marketing teams live by these rules when managing their data, and NetProspex is the smarter data partner who can help.

We look forward to seeing you at the show! Reach out at hello@netprospex.com with any questions.

Original coverage appeared at CMO.com. 

Data is a B2B marketer’s lifeline. To be successful in reaching potential customers, elevating existing customer relationships, and cultivating new sales leads, marketers must ensure that their contact databases are clean, current, and complete.

ARTICLE HIGHLIGHTS:

• More than 50 percent of companies work with unreliable or risky data.
• Data cleansing will be the main factor to make or break a campaign’s or event’s success.
• It’s time for marketers to stop ignoring the plague of dirty data.

Unfortunately, maintaining a healthy and viable contact database is easier said than done. As was shown in NetProspex’s The State of Marketing Data 2013 report issued earlier this year, even in today’s business landscape, where data mining technology is readily available to the B2B marketer, marketers struggle with issues surrounding phone connectabilty, email deliverability, and record incompleteness. In fact, more than 50 percent of companies work with unreliable or risky data. So what causeses marketers’ contact databases to remain lackluster and, more importantly, what are the strategies marketers can use to improve and ensure the constant health of their overall data quality?

We’ve turned to three industry experts, who offer marketers the following advice on what it takes to clean up and maintain a healthy contact database.

Beverly Chiarelli, Mimecast Senior Marketing Manager
“When building a marketing budget, ‘data cleansing’ often gets left behind because it is invisible when compared to events, email, direct mail, and advertising. Yet data cleansing will be the main factor to make or break a campaign’s or event’s success. A key component in the cleansing process is creating complete data that enables meaningful communications. As marketers up their game to provide appealing thought-leadership with the buyer’s needs and interests in mind, the effort will fall flat unless that content can go to specific audience segments that would welcome it rather than resorting to ‘buck-shot marketing.’”

Matt Heinz, Heinz Marketing President
“The primary reason marketers struggle with database hygiene is that they simply don’t pay attention to it. They focus the majority of their time on creating new lists, new leads, new offers, and creative materials while leaving their existing databases to remain stagnant and ignored. It is a huge hidden productivity drain for organizations. Their email delivery and response rates are suppressed. They’re more susceptible to spam filters and black lists. Their sales reps are calling phone numbers that do not work or are calling contacts that no longer exist. That is valuable time spent on generating unproductive leads.”

Samantha Stone, Marketing Advisory Network Founder and Senior Analyst
“While there is no fairy dust we can sprinkle to make our database magically complete, there are many tactics we can use to make an imperfect data set an efficient marketing device. The three strategies I use most often to operate under imperfect database conditions are give to get, incent sales, and append data.

“First, give to get: Content marketing has taught marketers to draw in potential buyers through great content, but we often end up forgetting about the opportunity to give to get in an ongoing fashion. Give to get isn’t just about the first time a visitor accesses a marketer’s assets–it’s about getting to know each other and trading information about the buyer’s challenges and the marketer’s offerings.

“Second, incent sales: Sales people talk to a company’s database everyday to gather information that could be hugely valuable, but that data does marketing no good if it sits in the notes field of the database or worse, on someone’s desk-side notebook. Incent sales by making information capturing easy and rewarding to those who excel.

“Finally, append data: By integrating contact databases across multiple data sources, marketers can append and converge known information to round out a meaningful picture of their potential buyer.”

The first step on the road toward clean, healthy data is, of course, identifying one’s database issues. Marketers should strive to assess the current state of their databases across email deliverability, phone connectability, record duplication, and record completeness. The real challenge lies in maintaining that healthy data on a constant basis. By working to adopt best practices, companies will be better positioned to avoid such risks and impact, such as:

• Falling short of revenue goals by not reaching target buyers.
• Damage to brand and sender reputation from poor email deliverability or redundant sends.
• Financial impact from increased records storage costs and inefficiencies.
• Limited segmentation, low conversions, and incorrect lead routing from a lack of sufficient data and incomplete records.

It’s time for marketers to stop ignoring the plague of dirty data in their marketing automation systems and CRM databases. According to a recent report from Eloqua, by simply maintaining good hygiene practices on the data driving campaigns, marketers can realize seven times the number of inquiries and four times the number of leads. So what are you waiting for?

Scott Brinker attended the recent Marketing Operations Executive Summit, and wrote a great recap of the new perception, importance, and  impact of marketing operations professionals.

Click here to read the original article.

“In the words of Craig Moore, a director at Sirius Decisions and the opening speaker, until recently, marketing operations was the island of misfit toys. It was definitely not the sexy side of marketing. It had little funding and little influence. If there was a metaphorical basement in the House Of Marketing, marketing operations was down there, shoveling data like coal.

But then a funny thing happened. The world got wired. Geek became chic. Customers were being won (or lost) by the experiences they had with companies on the web, with email, and via mobile devices. Data and software were moving from the back office to the front office. And the center of gravity in marketing started to shift to those who could make that machinery work.

In the land of non-technical marketers, might the marketing ops team be king?

Good operations is good marketing

According to the B2B marketing research that Craig presented, 67% of the buyer’s journey is now online. As prospects loosen the status quo, commit to change, and explore possible solutions, they do that through search engines and social networks. They form their impressions of vendors based on content and experiences delivered to them via the web and email.

Almost all of this happens before they ever talk to a salesperson.

More and more, we’re hearing stories of prospects who — by the time they actually want to talk on the phone — know more about the company’s offerings and its competitors than the sales representatives they end up talking with. That’s a challenge for another post, but according to Craig, 52% of lost sales are now being attributed to a failure of sales enablement.

To impress prospects, the content from marketing and sales has to be consistently great and the machinery that delivers it — the right content to the right people at the right time — has to function properly, almost frictionlessly. And the sophistication of that marketing machinery is continuing to grow explosively (see the marketing technology landscape for a representative sample).

So who runs all this rainmaking marketing machinery?

For many years, I’ve advocated for a role of a chief marketing technologist, who could serve at the right hand of the CMO as a kind of CTO of the marketing department. This role would be responsible for marketing technology strategy and operations. Forrester Research agreed with the recommendation of a marketing technology office. Gartner confirmed thatover 70% of high-tech organizations recently surveyed now have that role (although titles for the role run the gamut).

I still believe this role is more important than ever.

But listening to Craig frame the rapid evolution of marketing operations, it struck me that marketing operations may be the right home for marketing technology leadership. Either the head of marketing operations is effectively the chief marketing technologist, or a chief marketing technologist reports to him or her.

This wasn’t a particularly brilliant leap of intuition on my part — Craig came right out and said it: “The marketing operations leader becomes the CIO of marketing. Dealing with the marketing systems and the way that marketers use them is a role for marketing operations.”

The difference between a marketing technology office and a marketing operations group, however, is that marketing operations encompasses a broader collection of interrelated operational responsibilities, covering ROI, accountability, process optimization, and marketing enablement:

• Reporting and analytics
• Budget management
• Planning
• Process management
• Best practice syndication and training
• Marketing systems
• Data management and quality
• Market intelligence

Note that effectively all of these responsibilities are driven by software and data.

To fulfill these responsibilities, marketing operations is hungrily assimilating technology talent into its ranks, acquiring tech-savvy people from IT and students graduating college with technical degrees. At the summit, at least 1 in 8 people I talked to were IT folks or product developers who were transitioning into marketing operations.

Marketing operations also increasingly has a well-defined budget. “Marketing operations expands until economy of scale is reached, where ops full-time employees and budget are about 5% of marketing,” Craig reported.

And because marketing operations touches almost every other facet of marketing through process and enablement — as well as interfacing to sales, finance, the product organization, and IT — marketing operations is in the unique position to see across departments and silos in connecting the dots of the buyer’s journey. In the land of cross-silo blind men, marketing operations becomes the proverbial one-eyed king.

This why Craig believes that marketing operations will emerge as the strategic advisor to the CMO. Functioning as a “chief of staff,” the head of marketing operations will lead high-priority initiatives, shape organizational design, identify emerging marketing trends and best practices, and prepare a strategic budget.

Marketing operations leaders will be particularly well suited at the crossroads of marketing because they will be some of the few who speak all the key dialects of the Corporate Tower of Babel:

• “project and tech” to IT
• “balance sheet” to finance
• “pipeline” to sales

But — and it’s a big but — Craig cautions that for marketing operations leaders to truly realize that potential, they need to have more than just marketing and technology skills. They must also bring general management skills to the table — leadership, organizational design, change management, and global operational savvy:

As I look at the above diagram, I can’t help but think of the masthead for this blog:marketing, technology, management. I’ve always thought of that intersection as the sweet spot for a chief marketing technologist. But rolling that mission under a larger umbrella of marketing operations — elevating both disciplines to something greater than their origins — is an exciting idea.

I’ve said before that he who controls the software controls the marketing. If you add on top of that control of data, control of budget accountability, control of best practices, and control of cross-silo marketing and sales visibility and coordination, marketing operations may very well may become king.

Click here to read the original article.

Photo by Flickr user Alismith44

NetProspex is excited to be sponsoring two great events in San Francisco this week. The Marketo User Summit (April 8-10 at the Hilton Union Square) and Sales 2.0 (Four Seasons April 8-9).

We’ve brought plenty of copies of our recent Marketing Data Benchmark Report - revealing the true state of the data sitting in your marketing automation system or CRM. Read the full report (it’s free) — and you’ll find that over half of B2B companies in the U.S. are using unreliable data to fuel their marketing activity. Yikes!

Data maintenance is a lot like taking care of your personal health and wellness. You know you’ve got to eat right & stay active to feel and do your best. When there is a problem, you diagnose it and treat the symptoms. High-performing marketers live by these rules when managing their marketing data, and NetProspex can help.

• Our free Data HealthScan within Workbench returns a free health diagnosis of the current state of your contact list.
• You can leverage our data cleansing services to trim the fat and identify problematic records.
• Just like that protein shake after your workout, you can append and enrich records with missing contact/company information or key tech-install data to give yourself an extra boost of power.

Come visit the NetProspex team at each show. Grab one of these buttons:

If you’re spotted wearing one, you could win a Nike+ Fuelband!

More about the Nike+ Fuelband:

Designed to be worn throughout the day, the ergonomic, user-friendly NIKE+ FuelBand uses accelerometry to provide information about different activities through movement of the wrist via a LED dot matrix display. Four metrics are available: Time, Calories, Steps and NikeFuel. Unlike calorie counts, which vary based on someone’s gender and body type, NikeFuel is a normalized score that awards equal points for the same activity regardless of physical makeup.

Users set a daily goal of how active they want to be, and how much NikeFuel they want to achieve. The NIKE+ FuelBand displays a series of 20 LED lights that go from red-to-green as the user gets closer to their goal. The FuelBand syncs with the Nike+ website through a built-in USB, or wirelessly through Bluetooth to a free iPhone app, to record activity and track progress every day. The app interface also provides encouragement and motivation as goals are achieved.

* NetProspex is not affiliated with Nike Inc.

We look forward to seeing you in San Francisco!

New Drug Marks NetProspex Debut into Drug Manufacturing

April 1, 2013 (Waltham, MA) –  In a widely anticipated announcement, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved NetProspex-a-Phan, a delayed release capsule for the once-daily, oral treatment of marketer’s headache from bad data (MHAFBD).

NetProspex-a-Phan is manufactured from white blood cells of NetProspex employees, collected from their keyboards, and stimulates a patient’s immune system to reverse the effects of MHAFBD.

“The availability of NetProspex-a-Phan provides a new treatment option for all marketers,” said Harold Checkem, MD, acting director of the FDA’s Center for Evaluation and Research, “especially those in B2B companies with advanced MHAFBD who currently have limited effective therapies available.”

“MHAFBD is a debilitating condition that afflicts 60% of B2B marketers. Until now, there were very few options for treatment,” said Michael Bird, former President now Chief Medical Officer at NetProspex. ”We are confident that NetProspex-a-Phan will become the Advil for all B2B marketing data related headaches.”

In a pivotal phase 3 study, with a median follow-up of 12 months, B2B marketers treated with NetProspex-a-Phan (n = 356) had a median success rate of 100%, compared with B2B marketers treated with placebo (n = 178), which had a median success rate of 15%.
According to the FDA, the most common adverse reactions reported with the new drug are increases in confidence, massive proliferation in high-fives, walking taller, and bigger bonuses. The majority of adverse reactions were mild or moderate. Serious adverse reactions, which were reported in approximately one quarter of the patients receiving NetProspex-a-Phan, included some euphoria and smiling uncontrollably. Nothing in this press release is truthful or should be taken as such by any parties involved, especially the FDA.

About NetProspex
NetProspex is the smarter B2B data partner, helping marketing and sales organizations optimize their revenue impact by lowering the barriers to database management. Thousands of B2B organizations rely on NetProspex to acquire targeted prospects to fuel high-performing marketing campaigns and create sales pipeline. At the core of NetProspex is an innovative crowd-sourced database, cleansed with proprietary CleneStepTM verification technology. The company’s free Data HealthScan offers insights about database accuracy and relevance, while CleneProspex ensures valid contact information. Marketers can enhance data with demographic and firmographic information, including specific technologies used at target accounts. For more information visit www.netprospex.com

We’ve all heard the phrase “the tools make the man.” Well, male or female, inside sales managers are the lifeblood of a B2B prospecting and lead generation program. Are you arming them with the best tools to get the job done? Our friends at AG Salesworks, a teleprospecting and closed-loop marketing firm, developed a guide for Inside Sales Managers full of tools to help get the job done.

“The AG Salesworks’ Inside Sales Managers Guide to Resourcefulness is designed for anyone who is managing an inside sales team or for sales and marketing professionals involved in demand or lead generation.  In this guide you will find resources to support your B2B prospecting efforts and increase productivity by finding accurate contact data faster.”

Click here to check out the guide, and thank you to AG Salesworks for including NetProspex in their set of solutions recommendations.