Head in the Cloud? Three ways to evaluate cloud connectors.

There seems to be a plugin or a cloud connector to do just about anything. Match data, clean data, import data, export data, add data to the data you already have, brew an espresso… OK, maybe not brew an espresso, but most certainly everything else.

In fact, they all sound so great and they cost so little, why not just get them all? As we just read, getting them all could definitely create some conflicts in your database and, while each serve a particular purpose, their purposes might not match your purposes! So, how do you go about selecting the plugins and cloud connectors best suited to your purposes? Let’s look at three ways you can evaluate the best approach to implementing one or more that will solve – not exacerbate – your problems.

Mind the Gap
Your selection of plugins or cloud connectors should be initiated by functional gaps in your lead management process. If you don’t know of any functional gaps, you have either a) the world’s one and only perfect lead management process or, b) not performed a lead management (or lead lifecycle) analysis. There are a few questions you need to answer when mapping your lead management process, and these will guide you to understanding the gaps (usually informational gaps) in your process.

·       Do I completely understand my Total Addressable Market (TAM)?

·       Do I understand all the buyer types and their individual buyers’ journeys?

·       Do I have all the information I need to properly segment my audience?

·       Do I have all the information I need to mechanically score my contacts?

·       Do I have all the information I need to properly route leads where they need to go?

If you don’t’ have complete answers and the data to support those answers, you have discovered your gaps.

Identify your options

If you have an information gap in your lead management process, chances are good others have similar challenges. Where challenges exist, bright people have often identified solutions to those challenges and create cool solutions. Many of these solutions are in the form of cloud connectors and plugins you can easily install in your MAP or CRM platform.

Do some research and identify a list of solutions and the companies who created them. Then use social media to perform some initial discovery about how well your peers have fared using them. Go beyond feature/function comparison to see how well the overall solution performs in real world application. Check for the company’s responsiveness in dealing with installation and service calls. Make sure the solution can meet your speed requirements, especially if you have lead timing SLAs with your Telequal or Sales teams (cloud connectors can be slow). Make a list of requirements and make sure the solution can meet those – or surpass them!

Pilot your solution

Many of your potential solutions will offer some kind of free trial or evaluation period. If not, ask the sales rep to allow for one. Within a thirty-day test period, you will have identified whether or not the proposed solution is a solution or just another headache. Create a small test group of contacts in your MAP representative of the information gaps you commonly experience.

A good way to do that is to take a cut of your data with a fairly random factor, such as one thousand contacts with first names beginning with the latter “J.” Create copies of these contacts, substituting test email addresses and names, such as First1, Last1 and test1@ACMEtestcontacts.com. If you can store these in a Contact Group or similar method of isolation, it makes it easy to delete these contacts after your pilot.

Change the conversation.

This methodology works for virtually all plugin and cloud connector solutions you may want to deploy. By aligning the solutions to the problems, vetting vendors and piloting your solutions, you will get where you need to go without creating additional problems along the way.

Notes:

You need to first understand your process gaps.

Systematically vet potential solution providers.

Pilot your solutions.

Next, we want to understand one of the specific issues you need to avoid. Many plugins and cloud connectors have to balance the need to create solutions with broad appeal to offset the inexpensive cost of cloud-based solutions. This can often translate into a bit of a one-size-fits-all structure that creates unnecessary system overhead: Head in the Cloud? The one time “MORE” is really not.