Guest blogger - April S. Brown

A database of prospects is useless unless you can make it speak. Sing. Serenade. So how will you illicit these dulcet tones from a spreadsheet? The fact is, without data we can’t do marketing and without good data, we can’t do good marketing. The ability to leverage relevant data is vital to developing targeted relationships with prospects and cultivating these relationships over time.

According to Sirius decisions in December 2008, "Best practice organizations can actually realize 70% more revenue based on data quality." Too often, data management within a company is either relegated to the IT dungeon or simply put on the 'too hard' pile and considered too tedious and cumbersome to deal with. Time goes by and data goes bad.

What does bad data mean? Incomplete, junk, duplicates, decayed contact data, plus a whole host of other exotic permutations that can make databases so crooked that one despairs they can ever be straightened out.

This is the first in a series of guest posts on data management. April S. Brown has more than 15 years experience in diverse executive marketing roles. As a former CMO, Marketing Strategist and Creative Director, April has led business and consumer direct and interactive marketing initiatives for some of the world’s most respected companies, including Nautilus, Inc ., Nike, BHP (Australia), Publicis and others.