Building the Minimum Viable Record
"Everything Starts Out Looking Like a Toy" #83
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Hi, I’m Greg 👋! I publish this newsletter on finding data products and interesting data observations with the goal of finding patterns and future product insights. (Also, it’s fun.) If you need a background on how we got here, check out What is Data Operations?
This week’s toy: Sharkle, a guide to Internet weirdness that sends you to a new link every time you refresh it. Today, it sent me to Papatap, which is a silly soundboard. Edition (next) of this newsletter is here - it’s March 7, 2022.
The Big Idea
A short long-form essay about data things
⚙️ Building the Minimum Viable Record
A “perfect record” in a customer relationship management – or in any database, really – is a unicorn. Companies often talk about a “golden record” as an aspirational goal. This is an end state where you would be able to know everything about a customer. For long-term customers, you can probably get there over time, as you continue to have interactions with that team.
But what about the first time you encounter a prospect? To reach the kind of selling motion where you will eventually build a great relationship with a customer, you need to consider a few things:
Where does the information for a new lead come from? (For example: does the information come from the lead themselves, or is it supplied by third-party enrichment platforms using an email as a key for a lookup?)
When you receive information about a lead, where does it go in your system? I don’t mean exactly where you store it, and am referring more to the customer journey that you are building and the experience for the customer. How does it feel to deal with your company?
How long should all of this take? When someone contacts you, how long should it be before they hear from you? And in which channel should that happen?
The process of gathering and processing information from leads gets tricky when you realize that you are combining information from multiple systems.
For example, take this Greg Meyer guy (yes, this is supposed to be me). People who know me will know this record at Zoominfo is the result of many people named “Greg Meyer” who have been combined inadvertently. The result is a “lowest common denominator” version of a contact that has incorrect information for a number of Greg Meyer contacts.
What’s the lesson to take from Zoominfo’s record of me? It’s that you shouldn’t rely solely on 3rd party systems for contact enrichment. (And in my case, even telling Zoominfo directly that the information was wrong was not sufficient.)
You need to establish a heuristic for building a “Minimum Viable Record” to apply to records in your systems before they go anywhere. Without reaching this minimum standard, you may as well write “Hello {{first.name}}” instead of trying to get the finer details correct about a prospect.
What is a “Minimum Viable Record”?
A Minimum Viable Record contains all of the basic attributes necessary for engagement in your system. For a Lead record, this might mean:
First name
Last name
Email
Title
Company
Phone number
Country
And at another company, the information might be as slim as “email”. The point is to define the minimum set of fields necessary to progress the prospect in your customer journey. When a lead doesn’t meet the minimum viable criteria, it must be fixed.
Fixing this entails enriching the information through services, doing research, or placing this record in a “holding area” of sorts until it can be better qualified. Examples of this include adding an email to a marketing nurture sequence instead of doing direct sales outreach.
Minimum viable records also have other qualities in addition to the minimum number of fields. They are accurate: the information in the record is validated to be correct by 1 or more outside sources (the best being the prospect). Minimum viable records are also consistent: they have the same sort of data in expected fields, in the format those fields expect.
These records are also subject to data integrity: they are consistent across fields and across objects. My best example of this is the comparison of a city/state combination with a city/state/zip combination in the United States. “Bellingham, MA” and “Bellingham, WA” are both valid combinations of cities and states. However, “Bellingham, MA 98225” is invalid, as the 98225 zip code refers to the city in Washington state.
Prerequisites for engagement
Why am I telling you this? Building records in any database – and especially for leads in the sales engagement process – requires that you set a minimum standard for the records you want sellers to use. Reaching out with sub-par data is not going to be a great experience for the rep or for the prospect. I can tell you that as a pattern matcher, once I get a poor match that repeats itself it’s a good signal that a company reaching out to me has subscribed to the same bad data set.
(Hint: I’m not the Greg Meyer who manages the data center effort for Salesforce, even though my name is Greg Meyer and I used to work for Salesforce.)
What’s the takeaway? Building a better sales engagement process starts with creating a Minimum Viable Record for any sort of records you want sellers to use. You and your prospects will appreciate the response you get.
Links for Reading and Sharing
These are links that caught my 👀
1/ Quad jumps are hard - I didn’t watch that much of the Winter Olympics, but one of the things that stuck with me was watching the figure skating and snowboarding events. Athletes in those categories are doing athletic feats with their bodies that seemed impossible a few years ago. Take for example: the Quad Jump and why it’s so hard.
2/ Getting to renewable energy - One of the key items to come out of the last week of horrible news from Ukraine is that hydrocarbon dependency is still driving national policy. Without oil demand, Russia would not be able to make the same demands on its neighbors. Renewable energy is growing fast and getting cheaper.
3/ Why we buy - Perhaps related to the amount of hydrocarbon-based purchases we make, something like 6 out of 10 purchases at Ikea are impulse purchases. If we really want to change policy (and our own behavior) to better the planet, we are not only working against behavioral cues, but also against the retailers that are trying to sell us lots of stuff. All the time.
What to do next
Hit reply if you’ve got links to share, data stories, or want to say hello.
I’m grateful you read this far. Thank you. If you found this useful, consider sharing with a friend.
Want more essays? Read on Data Operations or other writings at gregmeyer.com.
The next big thing always starts out being dismissed as a “toy.” - Chris Dixon