How do people maintain contact hygiene?

  • 31 December 2019
  • 5 replies
  • 240 views

Userlevel 6
Badge +4

Happy New Year, everyone! I would be really curious how other organizations keep up primary contact hygiene, in particular with tech touch models. As we work to automate more fully our SMB and long tail models, we struggle with having the most up to date contacts. I’d love any information/ideas/that you can share.

 


5 replies

Userlevel 6
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We use Journey Orchestrator to send a report of contacts we have on record for the customer via email to the main contacts for the account. It’s designed to send an in-line tabular report if they have fewer than 20 contacts and a Share 360 view if they have more than 20 (two variants). It is primarily sent to tech-touch model several months before the renewal process and prompts them to reply if they have updates. From this Program, we typically have about 60% open rate and a 20-30% response rate. For higher touch models, there is a CTA for the CSM to connect with the account and review contacts. We’ve enabled all CSMs to be able to use C360 to download a spreadsheet of contacts or use Share 360 for one-off sends during routine check-ins or customer initiated requests.

We also periodically use the bounce log from Advanced Outreach (Programs) to remove contacts from accounts that have hard bounced and have no other recent activity logged (e.g. Cases, logged Tasks or Timeline Activity, Email opens from Gainsight or Marketo, etc.). That is a manual process -- typically a task we have new hires do to become more familiar with our CRM and contact records.

Userlevel 6
Badge +4

This is brilliant. Thanks for sharing, @john_apple !

Userlevel 6
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At Gainsight, it is up to the CSM to handle contact hygiene. Knowing that if I do not maintain that contact hygiene and keep them up to date, it will start impacting my customer's engagement score (how often do we engage with key stakeholders, NPS score(non-existent contacts/contacts who have left rarely answer NPS questions 😉 ), I am incentivized to maintain these list of key stakeholders.

Userlevel 4
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@meenal_shukla thanks for starting this conversation! I am wondering which roles you’ve identified as Key Stakeholders? 

We’re working through this but thinking 

  1. Decision Maker/Economic Buyer/Exec Sponsor
  2. Primary Contact/Program Manager
  3. Product Point of Contact (Power User) 
Userlevel 6
Badge +4

We approach the key stakeholders like a sales org because, really in SAAS, we are making a new sale every year by earning the right to be the solution of choice as the customer renew. What will your buying center look like? Your buying center post sales should typically have the same structure as a new sale would have:

  1. Exec sponsor (C level, whose org the budget is coming from)
  2. Adoption champion 
  3. Key execs who report up to the exec sponsor
  4. CIO/COO organization who are typically involved as a key decision maker particularly in high tech and enterprise cos.
  5. Procurement 

When identifying a key stakeholder, remember it is not just one person, but an entire buying center who will be involved with and consequently having one Decision Maker versus multiple will reduce your chances to renew if this decision maker leaves.

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