Today we are joined by Elliot Lowe, Marketo Champion Alum and data master.  He knows it all when it comes to data and analytics.  Watch now as Elliot takes us behind-the scenes:

Interview Highlights

• Talk a little bit about your experiences with data and what you are seeing today in the marketplace. “As you know, data issues have gone back to the dark ages, but they are only getting worse because the amounts of data we are able to capture and the points of sources of that data just exploded and they are getting worse not better.  So, you need a proactive and intelligent system for dealing with that.  And not only a pit at making sure that you have accurate data, but making sure that you haven’t duplicated data, which is like the worst thing you can have.  Not just email duplicates, but duplicates that maybe are fuzzy duplicates.”

An Example: “Like maybe somebody that has different parts of their email address,  same corporate domain, but maybe it’s “Elliot.lowe” versus “elowe.” And you wind up spamming these people, deleting their lead scores and worse, you start marketing to them possibly two different ways, because maybe one of those is in your database as a customer and the other you don’t know he is a customer and you are treating him like a prospect.  So, it’s a real challenge.”

• What challenges do you see with some of the companies that you work with? What can we do about it? “What can we do about it, that’s the key.  A lot of it comes from Salesforce. Obviously, not to bad mouth sales people, but that’s not their primary objective, it’s getting people in their database.  You know there are tools that you can get that will help prevent that on the Salesforce side, and that’s a big, big win if you can do that.”“But on the Marketo side, there are some newer tools that help to enforce data standards and reduce duplicates in Marketo in conjunction with Salesforce.  And a lot people actually, and I have experienced this myself with prior companies where they might have a customer license database that they import data into and into Salesforce which creates mammoth duplicates.”  

So, you need to be proactive about the data coming into your database, not just like sales guys entering it into records or list imports from a trade show.  But you might have a customer licensing system that is sucking in all sorts of garbage.  And you need to get in front of that.” – Elliot Lowe

•  Is data going to get worse or is it going to get better 5 years from now? How are organizations going to be dealing with this problem? “Like I said, the data is not going to necessarily link from the many disparate sources that you have no control over going to get any better but, the way that we approach that data will be much better.”  

“There will be data repositories, central systems of record that you can use in all your different systems that utilize that data to validate that the record that you have is current, up-to-date and is not a duplicate.

“And that will happen in real time as well.  It will be much more prolific, much faster and it may even leverage some things like artificial intelligence to improve the matching and find that you are updating the right records, and that you are identifying the right duplicates and resolving those.” – Elliot Lowe

• If you were to go ahead and get on to American Idol, what would be the one song that you would sing? “Since I am not going to be on American Idol anytime soon, I will still give you an answer.  It will probably be a Billy Joel tune, probably something snazzy like ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire.’”

We learned a lot about data today, and we learned that Elliot will definitely belt out some Billy Joel if he ever makes it on American Idol.  See you next time on RevEngine Marketing.

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