Steve Woods of Eloqua invited me to write a guest post on his Digital Body Language blog after we’d gone back and forth a bit about contact data management and marketing automation. Over the past six or seven years, I’ve been thumped on the back of the ear with data management issues again and again. It always hurts, and, by the time I’ve realize I’ve got a mess…it’s a heckuva challenge to recover.
In my current job, I’m a full-time customer data management guy. It is not sexy. Like many large companies, we’ve got customer data that is created and managed in a wide range of disparate systems on diverse platforms, each with multiple decades of system evolution. It’s important. It’s painful.
There are some great opportunities in our increasingly electronic and e-based world to make some real headway with data management. In the case of the guest blog post, I focussed on opportunities to use marketing automation tools and your web site to drive improvements in the quality of your customer data. As for how exactly I made the “high quality mattress” analogy? Click on over and check out the post!