Contact data can be one of your business’s most important assets, and here is why!

Contact data allows you to register your leads and contacts. You never know when a lead will be ready to buy from you. It is never too late to start organizing your contacts and potential customers. You will need some basic categories like Customers, Prospects, Lost Customers, Suppliers, Potential Partners, Partners, Influencers, and Inactive Customers. Identifying the right business development data for both inbound and account-based marketing is critical.

This data can be used to create your audiences — specifically, your target accounts and buyer personas. You can acquire data about our prospects through CRM contact fields, form fills, or purchasing lists. The data collection and maintenance strategy is becoming a more and more important factor when aligning marketing and sales to reach all your business goals.The use of an accurate database allows you to think more strategically about your audience and accounts.

When your database hygiene is excellent, it enables your sales, marketing, and customer service teams to create more targeted audience engagement. Accurate and timely data can be used to create models for ideal buyer personas in your current database. Properly segmented data can be used for creating personalized marketing efforts for your audience. With the right marketing strategy, you can build your audience models based on past behaviors. An organized list of your customers, email addresses, phone numbers or mailing addresses makes your business more efficient, robust, and valuable. In order to be valuable, your list has to be primed for activation.

These people should be happy to hear from you regularly. The response these contacts can give you can literally save your business in hard times. Contact with these potential clients cannot be through an intermediary; you need to be able to contact them directly. You need to value your contact list as an asset that will make you money. Every new entry in your contact list increases the value of your business. Companies are acquired all the time because of their list of hard to reach contacts, especially business-to-business (B2B) companies.

Why does a contact list have so much value? Because the ability to reach out to customers and activate a segment of them regularly can make you money consistently.

A contact list also makes an organization more robust. A company that has a contact list primed for future business can survive changes in the business environment.

• What if your products get delisted from a retailer website? This is no problem when you have regular contact with your customers. You can always direct them to another retailer.

• What if you have a cash flow problem and can not make payroll? It’s no problem when you have direct and regular contact with your customers. You can always generate revenue by telling them about a special offer or sale.

• What if you see that your social media posts are receiving far less engagement and distribution? (As many posts are these days.) This is no problem when you have regular contact with your customers. You don’t have to rely on social media anyway.