Marketing Data Definitions: Answering Key Questions

For marketing to have a clean and useful database that links to other corporate data assets, consistent definitions must be established. A good starting point is determining how the company defines the account hierarchy and the terms “customer” and “prospect”. No standard definition can fit every company’s needs; however, the same decision process can be applied to reach the necessary consensus.

Building a high-quality marketing database might seem about as likely as winning the lottery in some B2B organizations. But just as these slogans suggest, the marketing organization has to take an active role in building the asset if there’s to be any chance of success. In the report “Linking Marketing Data To Corporate Data Management,” we described elements that must be understood across the organization to support data quality and consistency. In this report, we outline questions to answer when creating definitions for those data elements.