By Steve Palm – General Manager, MDR
In the education sales and marketing industry, we’re seeing a significant rise in the use of sales acceleration tools, CRMs, marketing automation platforms, and, more recently, the connectivity of those systems to Customer Data Platforms (CDPs). Maintaining consistent and current information across your business is crucial to enable this connectivity.
Even with all of the tools and systems available to sales and marketing teams, the majority still struggle to access the right data at the time they need to take an action. According to recent Dun & Bradstreet research, 75% can’t find the right contacts at companies matching their target profile, and 40% believe they don’t have the right account intelligence. Siloed systems and a lack of sales and marketing alignment are to blame.
What is a Customer Data Platform?
Customer Data Platforms help companies personalize digital experiences to increase the efficiency of their sales and marketing teams. They do this by connecting data across all internal and external sources, creating a single view of the customer journey, and centralizing audience creation and measurement across all channels.
CDPs are essential for powering modern Account-Based Marketing (ABM) and Account-Based Sales (ABS) campaigns. Many companies in the education industry are adopting an ABM and sales enablement approach to accelerate their businesses. As I have covered in a previous post, ABM requires accurate and up-to-date data and analytics. Not just up-to-date customer demographic data, but also behavioral data aggregated across a variety of touch points.
CDPs allow you to collect and structure real-time data into individual, centralized customer profiles, increasing the speed at which companies can access insights and market intelligence and integrate their efforts throughout the enterprise. When companies use a CDP along with a CRM system to align sales and marketing, they are better positioned to motivate their targets to buy and accelerate their sales success.
Leveraging the Power of MDR Innovation
As a division of Dun & Bradstreet, MDR is positioned to help customers dramatically accelerate access to K-12 sales and marketing intelligence and provide a single source of truth. Similar to the Dun & Bradstreet D-U-N-S number, a unique identifier assigned to every business entity, the MDR PID number allows customers using MDR data to establish linkage between systems at the account level. The PID is a vital tool for any education marketer and sales department to navigate the 250,000 education institutions and 7 million+ educators in the U.S. education market.
You may have heard the news of D&B’s acquisition of Lattice Engines and its best-in-class CDP solution. Lattice provides sellers and marketers with a platform that helps unify customer data, prioritize account segments with AI-powered analytics, and activate omnichannel campaigns to drive ABM strategies.
We’re excited about the potential to increase our ability to serve our customers by using analytics to identify new opportunities more efficiently. If you’re not familiar with Lattice, you can learn more here. Access to the Lattice Engines platform will further accelerate the ways that companies can leverage analytics on their customers and prospects to fast-track new business development and grow their existing business.
At MDR, we continue to invest in bringing new technology innovations to our customers. Two of our newest innovations, MDR AcceleratedData and MDR CloudSync, leverage this approach to deliver fast access to actionable new teacher data. MDR AcceleratedData speeds the collection, compilation and quality control of teacher data, providing customers with the opportunity to connect earlier in the school year and ahead of other companies marketing and selling to schools.
MDR CloudSync allows companies to quickly and easily integrate MDR data into their platforms to keep their database fresh and current. With this cloud-based tool, companies can use MDR’s unique identifiers to update existing records and identify new, refreshing data much more frequently.
Things are moving very fast here at MDR. Almost at the speed of light!
Want to learn more about how MDR can help you reach targeted education customers? Contact us at mdrinfo@dnb.com.
Steve Palm is the general manager of MDR. An education and marketing industry veteran, Palm brings more than 20 years of experience in strategy, business expansion and innovation.
