Building a B2B database should not be significantly different to a B2C database. Accuracy, data recency, quality assurance procedures and building a database that is fit for purpose (campaigns, reporting, customer insight etc) are all still relevant. With any build, it's vital to get the foundations right and ensure you include flexibility within your database, future-proofing your investment by considering how the requirements of your business may change.

So then, when building B2B databases what are the most important factors to consider?

·Who are your customers? Are your marketing campaigns talking to an individual or a procurement department? In certain purchases, such as choosing a company car, whilst the bill might be paid by a company, the individual still has their own motivations, requirements and crucially, power, to influence or end relationships so you need to identify this relationship and be able to address both customer types in communications.

·Since many companies may have more than one office, ensure that you can identify site, head office and group level distinctions – especially where the different site levels have different parent names. You need to be able to match company records with different contact names together accurately - a company with dozens of medium value contacts is potentially of more value than one large account.

·Consider who will be accessing the database (such as marketers, technical staff or sales people in the field) and include relevant tools to support this, accurate data and security controls, enabling your teams to manage their customer and marketing contacts.

·Recency of data is also key - employees move jobs more frequently than people move house, therefore you need to have ways to keep track of this and make sure the database is as accurate as possible.

·Don’t discount personal demographics, especially in smaller businesses, where procurement can be a personal decision and a more tailored message relevant. Likewise, don’t forget that the names in your B2B database are actually living, breathing people and are just as likely to get annoyed or offended as consumers if you spell their name incorrectly or get their job title wrong, so make sure you get the basics right.

Forget about the data & marketing to start with... initially its all about the stakeholders.

Corporate & departmental buy-in to the project is a must and without this all the efforts will soon be wasted. This includes Finance, IT, Software development, Sales & Marketing. For the marketing database to succeed it is vital that it is seen as the singular location for all things marketing. Shortcuts to avoid it will only serve to accelerate its demise. The most common problem for marketing databases to fail is lack of stakeholder buy-in. You need to ask yourself – have I got full support for this?

If you are satisfied you have the backing, then the next step is to review what data you have already got. Also known as “from the Bottom Up” strategy. This is a detailed investigative process that defines the foundations that can be used. You must be careful not to miss anything out (however insignificant) and compile a full list of ALL data sources - yes “data” does also include paper copies of sales orders & individually held excel sheets!

This research may well raise eyebrows - we recently helped a global client that had over 2,500 differing spreadsheets holding sales contacts data – combined it totalled over 6 million records!

Having identified all sources you will need to review each. You are now moving into a specialist area. My advice is at this stage to bring in a data consultant – they will help with the myriad of questions and queries, and offer advice around best practice in terms of data quality, data protection opt-ins & outs, data relationships (as James Melhuish quite rightly points out, B2B data has multiple relationships with sites, head offices) etc.

What are you trying to achieve?

It’s time to bring in internal IT & Software development to discuss the results of the data consultants reviews and also your nirvana expectations of the marketing database. Decide what you want - is it in-depth analytics?, integration with current sales applications and/or finance applications?, complex segmentation?, campaign selection and tracking capabilities?, etc.

The core to any successful marketing database is data quality and data matching. These are intricate operations and MUST be performed accurately or your marketing database will be inherently flawed. This can be compounded if your data is multi country. A can of worms is opened with differing address formats, naming conventions, accented characters, etc.

Most organisations realise that a marketing database is not something you just throw together. There is a good reason for this, it’s a complex subject and requires ongoing commitment in terms of technology, management and £’s. Getting it wrong or right directly affects the success of marketing and therefore your business.

How far can you go?

Technology developments are the Usain Bolt of business at the moment. In this fast moving environment you need to consider if internally the database can be kept current and up to date; for example in order to keep up with and integrate with developing communication channels such as Twitter, LinkedIN, etc.

Security.

Ensure that the data is held securely, unauthorised access to this data from a 3rd party could potentially be crippling to a business - Look at T-Mobile in the news in the UK recently.

So the question is have you got the skills & resource internally to develop your own system, would it be best to use an off the shelf product or perhaps have one built to your requirements?

Bought in solutions provide pre-tested industry strength services, meaning many months/years of learning are already integrated.

Off-the-shelf marketing database
Typically the cheapest and quickest to roll-out option, however likely to have the least adaptability to your business requirements. You will have a base set of marketing functionality that will perform standard functions.

Bespoke Applications
By far the most tailored and flexible approach to your requirement, with least impact on internal resources as these are now typically hosted externally from your IT systems. Developments mean they can be integrated with current systems, web sites and also include the latest technologies, bespoke to your requirements.

In summary an efficiently built marketing database is a well planned one – the devil really is in the detail. An effectively built marketing database is bespoke to your own requirements/budget and can only be performed if the results of your planning are accurate.

The investment required to build a marketing database is not trivial so the starting point has to be a very clear plan for the database, how it will fit within the existing marketing organisation, the programmes it will support and the changes that will be required in current working and data processes. Actually building the database is almost the last step of what can be a long journey.

An important decision will be whether you decide to build it internally, or whether you choose to outsource it. A linked decision is whether you want to host the database internally, or whether you prefer to outsource the hosting and maintenance to a third party.

The insource / outsource decisions will be heavily influenced by the skills and experience available within your organisation, corporate policy about data security (some organisations simply won’t countenance releasing customer data), business needs and of course, cost.

The reasons to outsource are compelling. A third party can be expected to have skilled, experienced professionals who can guide you through the processes of development and management so that you get the right result, on time and on budget.

The choice of Third Party is critical and you may feel that a formal procurement exercise is essential in selecting the right supplier. Even without that formality you should certainly have all your questions prepared and you should be particularly interested in the track record of your potential suppliers.

Third party providers will often be able to deliver more rapidly than the internal route. However, if you decide to go the internal route you will also need to carefully consider what additional skills you need within your Team.

The good news is that technology has changed enormously over the last 5 years, vastly simplifying the provision of databases. This means that you can normally get 95% of the functionality you require from existing ‘modules’ that fit together to provide a solution for you within 4 months. .

Finally, the data that will populate the system requires careful consideration. Customer data should be in the marketing database and this will normally require processes to integrate, clean and enhance data from other disparate corporate business systems (to create a single customer view). These processes must be repeatable and run regularly in order to keep the data up to date.

Prospect data should be carefully scoped and selected using customer data analysis and blended to represent best coverage of your target markets or “sweetspots”. A combination of different data sets offering coverage and depth of attributes about your sectors usually delivers the best results.