“Marketing staffers sometimes try to have salespeople help them profile customers. ‘After all,’ they think, ‘the salespeople know their customers better than anyone else, so why shouldn’t they fill in their demographics or firmographics?'” notes Bill Singleton, president of Algonquin, IL-based database marketing consultancy Singleton Marketing. But they forget that no one can serve two masters at the same time. Salespeople are paid for selling, not demographic profiling, just as marketing staffers are paid for planning, promoting and tracking but not for pushing products.
Trying to get sales to help with marketing’s tasks will soon show you that anything that gets between a salesperson and closing a sale will be blown past. Ask a busy rep to fill in the favorite magazine of her customers, and the answers are likely to be whatever her favorite magazine is, even though her customers range from Bangor to Beverly Hills. “I asked a sales rep why he didn’t fill in any profiling information after I had sent out a request,” reports Singleton. “He told me that he made and took 130 calls a day and that he could either do what he was paid to do or he could help me.”
Neither marketing staffers nor salespeople should be relied on to be completely objective and thorough about customer profiling, Singleton continues. Marketing staffers have their own projects and deadlines to worry about. They are not necessarily trained in sampling, data collection, verification, and comparison of sources. They should not be asked to serve more than their own boss because either their own work or the work you are asking them to do will suffer.
“Firms that make their money calling companies, processing census data, sorting through White and Yellow Pages, and verifying their information are objective and reliable,” Singleton says. “They realize that you can get samples of their and their competitors’ data and compare them and expect explanations for any differences. Firms like those are better sources of demographic and firmographic information than your internal marketing or sales staffs. You can engage these firms apart from your list buying and merge/purge processing. Or you can test a cooperative database that has this information included. That way you can use the overlay data to enhance your list selections and can also have the information overlaid on your customer file and sent back to you to include in your internal database. But whether you get the profiling separately or as part of your overall list and data processing strategy, you should not try to get it from a sales or marketing staffer that already has one master to serve: the work he will get paid to perform.”