Where Marketing Data Live

When it comes to marketing data, we have an embarrassment of riches. With the tools and systems available to us today, we can gather more information about our prospects than ever before. But here’s the problem: our data — our so-called “riches” — are all over the place; it’s as if they’re tied up in different currencies, stored in different accounts, and managed by different banks, none of whom really want you to control what you own. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Customer relationship management systems were originally designed to solve one piece of this problem: to centralize customer data. But it wasn’t long before people realized that the way the CRM did that could be applied to so much more than just existing customers. CRM really aught to stand for “contacts, relationships, and marketing,” because it has become the single best place to store and manage all your data related to those three things.

We’ve thought a lot about how firms that broker expertise can build their businesses on the right CRM (spoiler alert: it’s Salesforce) and we’ve created many resources to help them better understand why and how to do just that. Here are a few places to start:

• White Paper: The Great Inversion: How Digital Marketing Has Matured Beyond the Website
• Webinar: Beyond the Website: How three agencies successfully embraced the new rules of digital marketing
• Article: Learning to Love Salesforce
• Article: Gaining and Sustaining Salesforce User Buy-in
• Article: Decoding the Salesforce Database: Frequently Asked Questions

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