You Ask, We Answer: How To Get The Business to Embrace Data Management Without a Fight

Customers often wonder why some organizations are able to get budget approval for their data management initiatives quickly, while others struggle to get funding. While they know there is a business need, they struggle to get buy-in, leading to a lengthy debate where the decision in some cases is to do nothing. So how are some organizations able to communicate the business value of data management successfully, allowing them to move forward quickly and start realizing that
business value?

Well, here’s your answer.

When selling the business on the need for a Master Data Management solution, the most successful customers did NOT call it an MDM project or use any technical language to describe the solution. Instead, they focused on communicating the business solution in business terms. For example, instead of pitching a solution as an “MDM solution for the Customer domain”, associate the solution with some underlying initiative, for example, a “Unified Customer Experience” project.

Okay. Give it a business oriented name. That’s easy. What else?

Next, you need to understand the audience you are selling to internally.

For example, if you are positioning the solution to sales, you’ll want to focus on how the solution will help sales. So how could data management do that?

1. Providing a complete central view of an account – using matching to group duplicate records within and across applications, reps can connect the dots and view the complete history of an account, and determine what they have and have NOT purchased. With more accurate information, they will be prepared, and can more accurately identify upsell opportunities.
2. Improving the quality of the data – your sales team can better identify the accounts they should be focusing on. With accurate contact and address information, enriched with financial and credit information, sales reps better identify the accounts to focus their efforts on, and have a single set of accurate contact and address information.
3. Supporting Data Driven Marketing – by connecting the dots for your customer data across the enterprise, marketing will have better information to feed digital marketing efforts. The end result being an increase in the volume and quality of leads generated by marketing, which will ultimately enable sales to
   win more business.

So calling on customers, with an accurate view of customer data and what other products may be a good fit for them, leads to a sales person getting through the entire sales cycle that much faster: more revenue to more customers more quickly.

Do you see the difference, now? 

It’s changing the focus:

FROM positioning MDM as a technology solution with technical capabilities such as matching, data quality, and workflow…

TO selling them a Unified Customer Experience that gives them clean, trusted data with a 360 view of the customer to enable sales.