What's A Title Worth To You? - Data Sales Science

We collect business cards.

We keep the business titles in our CRMs.

We know the business titles can derive value.

The question persists, how do we monetize business titles?

To me, there are 3 key issues that confound the use and utility of business titles.

1) Title vs. sales process

Between companies people in vastly different roles may have the same role in your sales cycle. For example, a System Administrator at one company and the Infrastructure IT manager can both be the “technical evaluator”.

2) No business title standards

Between companies there is no consistent title format, even when moving vertically from one position to another, a person’s title can change dramatically in the same company. For example a Sales Operations Manager can be promoted to Sr Manager, Sales Ops.

3) Confused titles

Working on the two themes above, the components in the title may be in different orders and certain terms may or may not contracted or expanded.

For example someone who manages IT operations could have the title;

Manager of IT Operations
Information Technology, Operations Manager
Operations IT Manager
Manager of Operation, IT

With all these inconsistencies monetizing business titles is difficult at best. Here is my 4 step process with a dollar value tied to the end result.

Step 1: Normalize all title contractions or expansions

Examples;

Information technology → IT
Ops → Operations

Step 2: Split the titles into their basic components

Parse the titles into 3 basic components;

seniority,
expertise, and
area

A “seniority” component would be a title component that denotes the experience of the individual such as manager, director, VP, or administrator.

An “expertise” component would be the department where someone works such as sales, marketing, network, IT.

Finally an “area” component could be considered the sub-department of the expertise, such as operations, security, infrastructure.

There were other title attributes that I considered using such as seniority prefixes to the seniority component such as “senior manager” or “executive vice-president” but I opted not to go that route for now.

Step 3: Rearrange the titles into a uniform format of seniority, expertise, and area

Step 4: Combine datasets

Our CRM is replete with other data points collected from the company, cross referencing some of those points with the titles of the very first person to whom our sales representatives interacted, unique profiles to target emerged. For example;

Title: Manager of IT Infrastructure
Industry: Healthcare company
Revenue: Midmarket
Location: US East Coast

Further, I ran a query from our database and determine from those prospects what were their key pain points, the average sales price (ASP), and the average days to close.

Combining all these data, this gives me the ability to craft a ‘custom’ message directed to a specific type of person, in a specific industry, of a specific company size, in a specific location.

Querying a contact data provider’ database, such as DiscoverOrg or RainKing, results in a very targeted list.

Conversion rates for cold contacting are normally low, however with the targeted, personal messages, conservatively I could bank on a 3% conversion and come up with a projected revenue for this project.

Note; the numbers are completely fictitious.