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Four Data Keys to Building Your Business’s Most Valuable Relationships in an Inbound Marketing WorldWith Introduction by Rishi Dave, Chief Marketing Officer, Dun & Bradstreet

D U N & B R A D S T R E E T

RELENTLESS

CUSTOMER

CENTRICITY

R E L E N T L E S S C U S T O M E R C E N T R I C I T Y

Dun & Bradstreet | 2

Introduction

It is also clear that marketing departments are leading the way.

As the primary voice and advocate of the customer within an organization, it is up to us to make sure data is systematically integrated across the enterprise, making it far easier to manage customer insight and all connections with clients, prospects, partners, employees, media and society at large. We can make it easier for our companies to see opportunities for growth with a preparedness that can propel a business forward and differentiate itself from their competition. Deep data integration enables world-class experiences and relationships to form even though prospects push their initial person-to-person engagements with businesses later into the sales cycle than ever before.

At Dun & Bradstreet, data is in our DNA. Making sense of the world’s data – turning it into insight – is core to our business and proud history. In fact, based on the size of our global database, some say we run the world’s largest customer master data management project.

Today’s marketers face an environment where the customer has taken full control of the buying process. No longer dependent and bound only to information pushed to them, the Internet has leveled the playing field – allowing customers and prospects to learn and research the products and services they will buy in the way they want to buy them.

This shift in empowerment to the customer/consumer creates a big challenge for businesses like yours. Your customers now expect the companies they interact with to understand their unique needs from the start and respond appropriately. And it is critical for businesses to be ready when the customer is. You must be able to access the data and insight you need to have the right conversation with the right customer at the right time.

In whatever way a business engages with a customer or prospect – whether it’s through marketing automation, customer relationship management, or other technologies or tactics – it is clear that access to relevant, timely and comprehensive business insight is now mission critical.

Rishi Dave is D&B’s Chief

Marketing Officer

@RishiPDave



“It’s not purely about data for data’s sake. It’s

about the insight to understand

people, entities and relationships better than your

competitors.”

It’s not purely about data for data’s sake. It’s about the insight necessary to understand people, entities and relationships in a manner that positions organizations to win business. Foundational to success in leveraging data for insight is achiev-ing transparency in business relationships. And with the global speed and spread of business today, we know that developing a complete and actionable view of prospects, customers, partners and suppliers is key to data-driven growth.

We’re often asked to share perspectives on companies that are best at leveraging analytics to bolster customer relationships. In this paper, we’ll share four key values and best practices we have seen as we work with thousands of companies around the world. We hope you find it valuable.

Rishi Dave Chief Marketing Officer Dun & Bradstreet




Increasingly, chief marketers

are the champions of

customer-centric cultures and the

architects of elevated

customer experience.

– State of Marketing™ – CMO Council 2014

Executive Summary

activity for B2B brands. And the key to successfully implement-ing this – to building these relationships largely via content and digital – is having the data and insights to deliver the right mes-sage to the right audience at the right time right from the first interaction onward. Companies that understand this are most likely to outperform competitors across a complete customer lifecycle. Indeed, according to Accenture’s 2014 CMO Insights Survey, 89% of high-growth companies place a high importance on customer experience compared to 60% of their low-growth counterparts.

As a business’s geographic location becomes irrelevant and more data, including multi-lingual data, is available, the global-ization of business relationships and the challenge of accurately identifying a business is one that could easily overwhelm even the most sophisticated company. With the abundance of data now available to all, what we can know about a business – at any given time, anywhere in the world – has been transformed. And even as businesses begin to leverage more data from a number of new sources they still struggle for insight or “nir-vana,” which is the ability to connect their own rich, internal, transactional data with external data to predict future behavior.

For today’s marketer, a seismic shift has taken place between companies and customers. A global, networked digital econo-my has leveled the world’s playing field, eliminated cross-border barriers and opened up the world marketplace. Today, even the smallest business can operate in remote parts of the world. In addition, the availability of massive amounts of information has put the customer in control of the way they learn and research products and services. No longer bound only by information pushed to them, before they are ready to make a buying decision, customers and prospects can self-nurture, which is the process of educating oneself and moving down the buying cycle without engaging a potential vendor or partner. As the Corporate Executive Board has reported, 57% of the buyer’s journey for B2B customers now takes place before any per-son-to-person contact is made with a sales team member.

As a result, marketing activities need to be about early interven-tion and building relationships that start as early as customers or prospects begin to explore new solutions and ideas. These early connections can build and increase in value over time to significantly move business forward. This is the spark for the content-led, inbound marketing revolution driving so much



1. GLOBAL DATA TRANSPARENCY AND CONSISTENCY ARE

THE FOUNDATION OF GROWTH

.

2. IDENTITY RESOLUTION EMPOWERS FORESIGHT

3. CUSTOMER ANALYTICS LET YOU CAPTURE UPSIDE AND REDUCE RISK

4. MARKETING’S CALLING: INSPIRE AND LEAD THE DATA EMBRACE

Based on the successful

efforts we see in the companies

we work with, we are able to

hone in on four key elements

of creating a data-driven

advantage for your company

in this customer- centric, inbound- marketing world:



1.

GLOBAL DATA

TRANSPARENCY AND

CONSISTENCY ARE THE

FOUNDATION OF GROWTH

Globalization has rendered the modern world flat. With increas-ing ease and lightning speeds, business can be conducted all over the world. While these advances offer tremendous oppor-tunity, the companies best positioned to take advantage of a global marketplace are those with access to the insight needed to confidently conduct business in the new world order.

Consistent data across the enterprise is the key to achieving the transparency that leads to insight. You need to create a single, complete and actionable view a customer or prospect business built on a foundation of high-quality data. Together, these ele-ments can enable an optimal and compelling customer experi-ence. But consistency and transparency won’t just happen.

The Best Practice: Achieving global consistency and transpar-ency lets you create laser-precision in your targeting and make it far less likely that you will miss an opportunity. Implementing this successfully is a two-fold process:

1) You must first understand the business challenges you are trying to solve and make sure you have access to the quality foundational data that is needed to enable insight and action. Work with your partners across the company to hone in on these holistically; identify the data that you need to solve these challenges; and then create benchmarks to assess your progress.

2) You must obtain executive-level commitment and advocacy for enterprise-wide global data consistency so data gov-ernance (Master Data Management) can to be leveraged as a competitive asset for your marketing team and for the company as a whole.

Transparency into global business relationships begins with a foundation that combines a single, complete and actionable view of a business. How Dun & Bradstreet partners with companies like yours to achieve this:

WHAT YOU KNOW WHAT WE KNOWWebsite Traffic Activity ‘Signals’

Sales Interaction Financial HealthMarketing Outreach Legal Hierarchy

Purchase History Search InquiriesBill To, Ship To Spend BehaviorProduct Usage Contacts / Buyers

Product Lifecycle Payment HistoryFinance / Collections Age, SIC, Size, Geo

Customer Service Economic Trends



2.

IDENTITY RESOLUTION EMPOWERS FORESIGHT

With mountains of data available – structured and unstructured – it’s challenging to validate a business, link it to a larger corpo-rate parent entity and understand the people associated with the business. “Identity Resolution” (IR) is a rigorous methodol-ogy – an art and a science that transforms data into insight and foresight and creates a standardized definition of an “entity.” IR gets at the heart of understanding people, entities and relationships. As the lines between global and local and business and consumer become more blurred, IR enables companies to leverage data across multiple languages and writing systems to tackle a range of business challenges that can improve operations and increase sales and profits. The result is a competitive advantage gained by bringing a single, unique insight into customers, partners, suppliers and the markets they serve.

This process of integrating and transforming foundational and firmagraphic data into insight advances your marketing team’s decision-making abilities and therefore must be part of the

company’s overall business strategy. If data governance is operated as a cost center or part of IT or one isolated part of the organization, the value must consistently be justified.

The Best Practice: Companies that have the ability to understand the connections and relationships between companies and individuals can organize seemingly disparate data points into a powerful, comprehensive and contextual view. This creates a decisive advantage over competitors that lack this insight.

Linking businesses by legal structure or association

SamePerson Associated

with Business

SameBusinessFamily

SameBusiness

Entity

Resolving commercialidentity to single view

Resolving personal identityin context of business



3.

CUSTOMER ANALYTICS

LET YOU CAPTURE

UPSIDE AND REDUCE RISK

Visibility into future growth and expansion or contraction and more risk.

Companies that leverage analytics across the customer lifecycle are more likely to outperform their competition by significant margins when it comes to sales, profits, growth and ROI. Again citing the recent Accenture CMO insights study, 86% of high-growth companies use data and analytics to maximize market-ing impact vs. 65% for low-growth companies. A large part of this analytics-driven growth is creating visibility into a company’s future. Are the signs pointing to growth and expansion or are they showing a propensity for contraction?

Not all customers and prospects are equal. Imagine you had access to an early alert system that gave you informed visibility:

1) That an important customer was on the brink of a major business expansion

2) That certain businesses in your portfolio would experience a significant risk profile decline

And what if you knew about both of these scenarios a year to 18 months in advance?

The Best Practice: Advanced analytics means leveraging data to anticipate changes in customer behaviors before they man-ifest themselves in traditional ways. When it comes to finding new sources of growth and avoiding risk, these anticipatory analytics offer a compelling value proposition and a continuous feedback loop that lets you be nimble and informed in all key customer-related decisions:

ATTRACTIVENESS

Foundationalglobal data

Basicfirmographicprofiling

Standarddemandestimators

Risk pre-screenscores

Attract Target Priortize Convert Cultivate Grow

Look-alikemodels

Responsemodels

Opportunitysizing

Conversionmodels

Time to closemodels

Opportunitysizing

Channelassignment

Treatmentoptimization

Sales forecastoptimization

Anticipatingfuture needs

Share of walletestimation

Customer& leadmanagementactions

RESPONSIVENESS BEHAVIORAL ANALYTICS

CONTINUOUS FEEDBACK LOOP

Portfolio/Total

Market

HistoricalInteraction

ScoredLeads

RepeatBuyers

EngagedBuyersBuyers

NewQualified

Leads



Customer centricity is top of mind. Way before the adjective “Big” was added to the word “data” businesses were trying to make sense of their information to better understand customer needs. In fact, “big” may equate not to size, but instead to im-portance. There’s probably not a C-suite executive in the world that doesn’t believe that data and analytics are critical drivers of business success. However, most leaders struggle with how to lead a data-driven transformation that truly enables data to perform its most amazing feats.

Marketing organizations are natural champions of a data-driven approach that enables the entire organization to operate with higher degrees of customer centricity. Today’s marketers are in the best positions to bring “voice of the customer” insights into senior-level conversations to secure funding and rally the rest of the organization’s business-unit stakeholders into taking a more disciplined approach to leveraging data enterprise-wide. Marketers are accustomed to leveraging data in systems and marketing campaigns, and depending on how far they have already automated the company’s marketing processes and adopted a CRM application, they are well suited to help a company continue to efforts to integrate data company-wide.

Yes, thriving in the content-led, inbound marketing world necessary for a growing number of B2B brands requires a lot of things. You must have great content that is personalized for maximum relevance. You must have sophisticated lead management capabilities. Your systems and processes must – in many cases – be re-thought so they can work well together. But it all starts with complete, integrated, high-quality data. And by starting there you can actually lead the company’s goals to achieve this throughout the organization.

The Best Practice: Nurture an intellectually curious organization that isn’t afraid to leverage data and analytics for stand-out insights.

Philosophically, unlocking the value of big data begins with organizational curiosity. At each company, the challenges are different and the data is different. The degree to which a business can become more market-minded and create a culture of consistent interest, inspection and curation with data is directly correlated to the amount of competitive advantage the organization will derive from data.

4.

MARKETING’S CALLING: INSPIRE

AND LEAD THE

DATA EMBRACE



The good news is that data is no longer boring; it’s gone mainstream. Sports analytics have paved the way for more informed spectators to make predictions based on hard evidence and analytics. This ubiquitous use of predictive analytics has exploded interest in using data in a multitude of ways to predict future outcomes. Most sports and even virtual fantasy sport leagues are using data to make more informed decisions about the teams and players they want to support. The same approaches can be applied to marketing and business.

The Best Practice: Be sure your organization has a base-line understanding ready to ask your data the right questions

Always understanding the business problems you are trying to solve is critical. Today, the capacity to effectively leverage data and analytics is there. By asking the right questions, a business with a foundation of quality data can more easily shift from transactional to transformational in its use of data. In our experience, companies can experience at least a 30% improvement in performance with new data assets that identify opportunity and risk with greater precision. They ask their data the right questions.

The Best Practice: Put quality data over quantity of data

Transparency, insight and foresight are the fuel for today’s more sophisticated marketing automation and CRM applications. As the world’s “digital universe” continues to explode, the reliance on data-driven insight as a means to solve business challenges and fuel business growth is expected to increase. Companies that stay ahead of the curve in leveraging data enterprise-wide will be well-positioned to move along the data continuum and take advantage of greater predictive insights and anticipatory analytics as they become available and further integrated into business processes.

Using analytics enables your marketing and, therefore, sales teams to organize their follow-up by potential opportunity. This ensures your resources are efficient and effective. By prioritizing on behaviors in addition to firmagraphics you can ensure your marketing team is aligned with their partners in sales and finance. This streamlines the pre- and post-capture process as well as improves customer experience. Lead prioritization also enables leaders to assign prospects with the highest potential to the right sales resource with the best chance of capturing the opportunity.

4.


AND LEAD THE

DATA EMBRACE



The Best Practice: Move ahead with advanced analytics that deliver insight and foresight and powerful results that companies need to move ahead of the competition

Gaining first-mover advantage and getting ahead of your competition is critical in a crowded global marketplace. In marketing, traditional demand estimation is no longer enough. Non-traditional proxies and signal data are radically advancing the levels of predictiveness we can achieve for deeper understanding of a company’s propensity to buy.

For example, understanding spending proxies in different verticals can help you identify business need and opportunity with laser-like precision.

Advanced analytics are also highly valuable in persona marketing – the art of profiling customers to find more like them. It lets you reduce the cost of precision-targeted marketing campaigns, nurture prospects, improve the hand-off of qualified leads to sales and reduce staff time in manual consolidation of account activity.

Businesses that are increasing sales and marketing efficiency and effectiveness at every stage of the acquisition lifecycle are

4.


AND LEAD THE

DATA EMBRACE

getting ahead of competition. New innovative approaches for marketing optimization can flip the paradigm and deliver compelling ROI and breakthrough growth.

As globalization continues to be a significant force in facilitating business interactions, those organizations that adopt and adapt data-driven strategies will be well positioned to enjoy significant levels of business growth. As marketers and their cross-func-tional colleagues get more and more nimble in leveraging data enterprise-wide, with increasing levels of transparency and foresight, they can confidently move into the areas of advanced anticipatory analytics that are now on the cusp of becoming solid business solutions. These advances include “Signals” and “Proxies” that assess obscured predictive patterns to predict an event in the future.

Organizations that become nimble in leveraging data across their business can confidently move into the areas of advanced anticipatory analytics that are now on the cusp of becoming solid business solutions. Among these advances in analytic strategies are the use of “signals” and “proxies” that can assess obscured predictive patterns to predict an event in the future.



The Summary

workflows of CRM and marketing automation applications. This approach enables enterprises to access this insight on mobile devices to profile top customers and target new prospects.

In addition to better targeting prospects and growing custom-ers, they can also predict and bypass future credit and supply chain risks to better focus resources. The result is improved business performance, higher levels of customer satisfaction and accelerated growth.

If you’re still at the descriptive phase – if you’re still having con-versations about Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and Busi-ness Intelligence (BI) tools – you are probably getting anxious to shift to a faster pace, to move to foresight and action phase. Dun & Bradstreet is among the companies pushing the anticipatory analytics envelope with an eye toward tying back to the business problems and the issues we want to resolve. When you focus on that, you earn a point of differentiation in the marketplace.

For today’s CMOs, the world is rapidly moving from data to insight to foresight and then into action. While many marketing executives are now partnering closely with the technologists in their organizations, the next phase may be less about the technology and more about the ability to turn the data into the insight needed to create great experiences for customers. Businesses have worked hard over the last three decades to get to this point. They are well positioned to reap the benefits from all this heavy lifting, but it doesn’t mean it’s a “layup.” Many marketing leaders will struggle with this three, five, seven, even ten years from now if they don’t learn how to assess whether their actions are having the desired impact.

With more powerful data, analytics and advanced technology solutions like mobility, today’s businesses can operate with the foresight they need to turn data into action – in real time. We now see businesses combining their own data with third-party data and insights to pack a more powerful punch when going after customers and prospects they care about. One way they do this is by embedding the necessary insight directly into the

With more powerful data,

analytics and advanced

technology solutions like

mobility, today’s businesses can

operate with the foresight

they need to turn data

into action – in real time.



As Big Data continues to deliver new opportunities, D&B is here to help businesses transform their marketing efforts by leverag-ing data, insight and analytics to both fuel CRM and marketing automation applications and be ready to meet the evolving demands of today’s more informed and expectant customers and prospects. Learn more about the ways D&B can support your marketing initiatives at www.dnb.com/connectors

D&B (NYSE:DNB) is the world’s leading provider of commercial information and insight on businesses, enabling companies for 173 years. D&B’s global commercial database contains more than 240 million business records and provides customers quality business information—solutions that customers rely on to make critical business decisions. For more information, visit www.dnb.com.

A few final thoughts as you prepare to get back to the business at hand.

– Embrace what’s next – Embrace globalization and the big data transformation and write your own company’s chapter.

– Build your Roadmap – Get help from those that invest the time to understand your business process and the challenges you want to solve.

– Curate the Data – Understand the data sets that are valuable to your business – those that bring transparency and foresight to your business relationships.

– Leverage your transactional data assets – Call Center data and other sentiment data available in your own business can provide very unique and powerful insights.

Worksheet – Benchmark your organizationAssess where your organization stands on the continuum to unlocking the value of big data and get customized recommendations for accelerating your organization’s success. The chart below is a good way to see how your company compares with ideal benchmarks at leading companies.

Company Name:

Industry:

DATA DIMENSIONS

IDEAL BENCHMARK

DEFINITION YOUR BENCHMARK

RANKING: OPPORTUNITY OR OPTIMIZED?

At our organization….

We are data-driven 100% Your assessment of how well your organization leverages data

Data consistency Enterprise-wide How consistent your data is across your organization

Data latency Updated Daily How often data is refreshed

Access to data Real-time Company-wide access to updated data

Data Governance strategy Yes Our company has a Data Governance Strategy in place

Entity Matching Yes Single view of the Customer without duplicates

Marketing Deliverability Rate 90-100% Percentage of emails that reach intended recipients

Marketing Response Rate (B2B) 3-4% Percentage of emails without a significant offer that generate a response

Acquisition Rates 2-3% For every customer you lose, you replace with a new customer

Customer Retention Rates >90% Data is helping you retain customers

Data helps us reduce DSO 2-3 days You collect accounts receivable faster, reducing Days Sales (or Billed) Outstanding

BUSI

NES

S IM

PACT

ABOUT DUN & BRADSTREET

Dun & Bradstreet (NYSE: DNB) grows the most valuable relationships in business. By uncovering truth and meaning from data, we connect customers with the prospects, suppliers, clients and partners that matter most, and have since 1841. Nearly ninety percent of the Fortune 500, and companies of every size around the world, rely on our data, insights and analytics. For more about Dun & Bradstreet, visit DNB.com.

© Dun & Bradstreet, Inc. 2015. All rights reserved. (DB-4106 3/15) www.dnb.com

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