Keeping Up With Moving Customers and Data

Elly Trickett, the Editor-in-Chief of DM News, writes in her article “There’s Life (And Opportunity) Behind Data” about the difficulty of keeping track of consumers as they make life changes and inherently contact information changes. With a new residence but only a cell phone, her usual direct mail fails to reach her but certain vendors plugged into the moving / postal world know how to reach her quickly with messages of services and products relevant to new home owners. Good for the B2C world.

In the B2B world, firms have relationships with firms and it’s usually easy to track moves. But individuals in those firms are another matter. I remember being a wholesaler in the Internet/ISP space and all my buyers were product managers and marketing people with Telcos. After the dot.com implosion, they scattered like the wind. It took years to locate some of them. This was pre-LinkedIn.

Now with business social networking tools, Sales and Marketing can track individuals and make forays into new customer relationships as professionals move positions. But at this time, individuals own the social networking accounts, so if you move and I move, my old company doesn’t necessarily know where you moved to; so I predict that Net-Centric Marketers are going to figure a way to consolidate the business social networking tools that their Sales team uses into CRM tools to keep customer communication channels open and expanding with time, regardless of employee churn.

Salesforce.com already has LinkedIn capability via their AppExchange so a salesperson can search based on name, title, or company, but once the contact is in Salesforce.com there is no API that automatically updates the contact’s whereabouts, or at least alerts the user that a change has been made to one of his or her contact information. Seems to be to be a relatively easy fix in this day and age… Marc Benioff, is true integration to address this challenge in the product roadmap?