When an organization integrates multiple internal database systems and creates a single customer view that includes such sources as accounting, sales, marketing, customer service, and other systems, they begin to gain insights based on their internal business intelligence. Additionally, once an organization starts to benefit from the analysis of their single customer view, this typically leads to a desire to get answers to questions that are not available by only looking at internal database systems. For example, once its been identified which clients have purchased the most products, produced the most revenue, and are the most profitable by integrating internal systems, the next step is to identify the characteristics of these organizations so that other organizations with similar characteristics can be found. What are the revenues, employee sizes, and industries of these best customers? What other organizations have these similar characteristics? Are there other locations or subsidiaries within your existing best customers that can be penetrated?
Appending external marketing data to your single customer view can help find the answers to these follow up questions. General business external marketing data can provide information such as company revenue, number of employees, and industries. The external files can also provide the contact information for follow up and other information such as is the location a headquarter, subsidiary, or branch location of a larger organization or does the organization only have this one location. External files that are specific to an industry may also provide other valuable information such as when a contract is expiring.
Once you have identified the external files that you are going to append to your internal database systems, a data integration software application can help match the external files with internal sources. As an added benefit, external files may also include native intelligence, a numbering schema indicating that two or more records in the external marketing file are part of the same organization. If the data integration application is able to utilize the external file’s native intelligence, then not only can the appended data provide valuable information for the internal records, but it can also help improve the match of the internal data sources. For example, if internal record “A” matches external record “B” and external record “B” matches internal record “C”, then the data integration application can infer that internal record “A” and internal record “C” are also a match based on the use of the external data’s native intelligence.
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