#but i miss him because he’s offshore for unknown periods of time

[4ngel-f4ngzz]

the recovering codependency in me whenever he leaves for work and my brain is deadset on perceiving it as abandonment when its literally him going to work

[jillmckenzie1]

No Beach For You

The Beach House is streaming on Shudder.

We’re in a period of change. Six months ago, most of us didn’t think we’d be where we are now. Six months from now, the smart money says that life will be just as unpredictable. Is it because of the pandemic? Partially, yet there’s more to it than that. After decades of neglect, people are rising up against systemic racism. Our economy is in flux. Our President is a driver of change, though not in the way he thinks or wants.

The way we view movies is changing, as well. I don’t just mean the continued closure of theaters and the improbable resurrection of drive-ins. In the old days, you expected bickering and unfunny jokes throughout the majority of a rom-com before the couple abruptly declared their love for each other. You expected a cop on the edge to lose his wife/best friend/second cousin twice removed and swear bloody vengeance against legions of goons.

Horror movies had the worst expectations of all. You expected a nubile young woman to be stalked by either a silent maniac or a cackling loon. There would be plentiful blood, no brains, and bargain-basement production values. To put it bluntly, it sucked to be a horror fan. Things change, though.

21st-century horror taps into our anxieties toward the unknown, and it does so with intelligence and sophistication. You’ll still see the occasional dopey slasher film, and you’ll also see gems such as The Babadook, which showed the ambivalence of parenthood, and The Witch, which brought a hoary folk tale to alarming life. The debut feature of writer/director Jeffrey A. Brown is The Beach House. It’s clever, unsettling, and the introduction of a major new voice in American horror.

Some things can’t be fixed, though it’s not for lack of trying. Emily (Liana Liberato) and Randall (Noah Le Gros) don’t know their relationship is over, not consciously, anyway. She’s on her way up as a bright college student with an eye toward an astrobiology major. He’s on his way down as a college dropout with vague statements about finding himself and learning what life is all about.*

Their relationship is on life support, strained by a lack of communication and some world-class selfishness on the part of Randall. In the grand tradition of clueless men, Randall thinks he can repair the damage with a grandiose gesture. His father has money and owns a beach house. Considering it’s the off-season, they’ll have the place all to themselves.

Only not really! Emily discovers pill bottles in the bathroom cabinet and groceries in the fridge. Either a) they’re being stalked by an extremely homey homicidal maniac or b) there’s been a miscommunication. It’s B, and we’re introduced to Jane (Maryann Nagel) and Mitch (Jake Weber). They’re friends of Randall’s father, and they were under the impression that they would have the place all to themselves.

For Emily, this is not ideal, as we can surmise she wanted the solitude to either repair her relationship or end it. We can also surmise that Randall has a way of bullshitting people to avoid conflict. That’s a real big bummer since a strange fog rolls in from offshore and the water supply seems to be contaminated. The two couples are alone, frightened, and have no idea what’s coming for them.

Director Jeffrey A. Brown was originally a location scout, and he’s more aware than most that the right place can make all the difference when making a film. His budget was…well, let’s go with modest. He didn’t let that stop him, and by utilizing the locations available along with tight cinematography and gnarly practical effects, he’s made a film that never feels cheap. Running at a hair under 90 minutes, Brown utilizes his time efficiently. We get to know our protagonists, get a whiff of the threat, and then we’re off to the races. Some people will say that Brown’s next film deserves a real budget. Maybe, but I wonder how much he really needs it.

Brown is the screenwriter, and he’s said, “I wanted to take what I felt was missing from horror movies and inject that into the script and production plan. My concerns about the onset of an environmental apocalypse provided a vehicle for the horror, while an interest in evolutionary science became the microbial fuel of the story.” He’s 90 percent of the way there, and the script does fine work showing us who the characters are, the details of the couples’ relationships, and how despite the generational differences, they’re more alike than they might think. The horror aspects are a slow burn. Once things get going, the good news is that the escalation feels organic. The story begins with a feeling of foreboding, that something is off somewhere. The (slightly) bad news is that once things get going, the question of Emily and Randall’s relationship is sidelined for a pure focus on survival. And while I understand that reality would likely play out like this, there are too many moments where characters scream each other’s names.

The cast does professional work, but the film rests firmly on the shoulders of Liana Liberato as Emily. I thoroughly enjoy films with characters like this. Emily isn’t a hardened badass or a barely-hanging-on trauma survivor. She’s a normal person; one who’s intelligent and resourceful. Liberato’s performance always feels honest and natural, even when she’s running in fear or dealing with a serious problem involving her foot.

The Beach House is not your average horror movie…or maybe it is. The film was made in 2019, and while Jeffrey A. Brown couldn’t have known what 2020 would bring, his debut would presciently tackle themes of isolation, paranoia, and environmental upheaval. Horror has moved beyond creature features and slashers. It’s a genre with something to say, and we ignore its messages at our peril.

    *Spoiler alert – most likely a job involving fries and a nametag.

from Blog https://ondenver.com/no-beach-for-you/

[kingmindint]

Interview: Halsey Minor on Innovating in the Blockchain World [Part 2]

Interview: Halsey Minor on Innovating in the Blockchain World [Part 2]

Interview: Halsey Minor on Innovating in the Blockchain World [Part 2]

Halsey Minor is a world-renowned entrepreneur most popularly known for founding CNET co-founding Salesforce.com, Uphold, and Minor Ventures. He is also the Founder of LivePlanet, an end-to-end capture, distribution, and monetization system for immersive video, and VideoCoin, a distributed computing project that aims on storing, encoding, and streaming video at an affordable, efficient, and sustainable rate.

This is the second part of a two-part interview – here’s the first part of Halsey Minor and VideoCoin if you missed it. The following interview primarily focuses innovation and entrepreneurship with new technologies, problems with the current banking system, regulation, the global landscape, and how the cryptocurrency industry contrasts with the nascent Internet industry in the mid to late 90s.

VideoCoin home page.

Editor’s note: Getting the chance to interview Halsey Minor was awesome, and we made sure to ask a variety of questions that allowed him to shed light on different aspects of the cryptocurrency world from his unique series of high-level experiences. Questions highlighted in italics and bold were shortened to save readers from our interviewer’s (my) rambling.

  Alex: You’ve been very close to the core of the development of Internet infrastructure. Essentially, you’ve seen the rise of the Internet, you’ve seen the rise of social media and you’ve seen the impact that’s had on society. What’s your opinion on the rise of blockchain within the context of those developments?

Halsey: When I was doing CNET and Jerry Yang was doing Yahoo, all we were doing was taking these databases and sort of unlocking them and basically giving them away for free. It was like simple stuff like the weather. I get weather on Yahoo so when flew to New York, I knew what the temperature was. That was an evolution because it allowed you to know how to pack, which sounds like a stupid, silly thing. But what I think is so powerful about the blockchain is for the first time, it allows the ability to share information and money at the same time. There are so many times that in the early days of the Internet, you’d go into a room and you’re negotiating to do something. Like for instance, us giving our content to Yahoo, and its sense of meaning both sides would look to the other and say, well, you’re the one paying. You’d say to Yahoo, we’re getting your content, you’re paying.

CNET review of “web telephones” in 1996. via web.archive.org

And they’re like, no, we’re making your brand more ubiquitous, you’re paying us. And so, the whole issue around paying was really problematic on a whole bunch of levels. Primarily, just because it was hard to do. How do you actually pay people? And the thing that made Bitcoin really make people stand up and take notice is the fact that it’s country-less and I know people say this all the time, but if you think about it, it’s the first time being able to pay people everywhere without having to move money through the banking system.

Obviously, being able to move it between two people quickly, that’s great. But the fact that it’s borderless, that has opened the door to applications like ours that could never exist if we had to use the traditional system for moving money. We rely on two basic things, the ability to gather information about each server, its capacity and what’s done and bundle that information with money. And so, at this very, very high level, you’ve got something that you just think about it that way. The Internet was unleashing information and this time we’re leasing information and money and God only knows how far that’s going to take us.

Just borderless money attached to a certain service or product. Just the higher level of efficiency that comes through using blockchain for anything is, it’s actually pretty crazy to think about. It’s a very exciting journey to follow. What would you like people who have read and/or listened this interview leave with?

I think this industry is going to go through, and already has, these incredible ups and downs and the Internet had been, not quite to the same degree. Since I started doing this, when I first started doing this, Bitcoin was Silk Road. They were the same and it was kind of hard to say, well, I’m doing something Bitcoin thing because Silk Road defined what Bitcoin does. I think that, like we said, no matter what the SEC says, no matter what the Chinese say, this is a real innovation and one of the reasons that you see people taking advantage of what’s happening is because there is something so fundamentally important happening that you’re always going to have people show up who try to take advantage of people’s willingness to invest.

Silk Road Founder Ross Ulbricht sentenced to life in prison. Image via Quartz.

It happened on the Internet and when the Internet melted down in 2000, nine trillion dollars were lost. But it picked itself up very quickly and you had huge numbers of companies that came through. Like Amazon, they’ve gone on to become the most valuable companies in the world and a lot of ideas that failed in the 90’s later succeeded in the 2000’s.

So, I think my experiences of having been through both of these is that the overinvestment is important because the most important thing is to have all ideas funded so the good ideas will make it. I tell people it would’ve been great if people would only fund the good ideas, so people would lose money on the bad ideas. But nobody really knows what the good ideas and the bad ideas are sometimes until they’re tried.

And so we really need periods like this where people will take high-risk capital and invest in businesses whose future is really sort of unknown. That doesn’t mean people shouldn’t be very smart about how they invest. But fundamentally having something that’s going on is the most efficient way of moving society forward faster. It’s a good thing and I’m all for the SEC coming in and taking out the people who are committing fraud, but it’s also very good for capital to keep flowing because, like I said, that’s how you move society further faster.

It’s crazy to think about how you could have first mover advantage without even having product market fit and it’s because no one really knows where these projects are headed. Something like Crypto Kitties, for example, might seem silly, but then you’re just like, wait, they’re one of the first digital beanie baby collection things out there and that could be a billion-dollar industry and it’s global.

Exactly. Beanie Babies became Beanie Babies because of eBay. Silly things can become billion-dollar ideas. Time Warner, I think, made $3,000,000,000 on Beanie Babies. Everybody should have laughed at that business plan.

Beanie Babies

You see all the wacky aspects of the startup world just bundled into a global ecosystem. But then you’ve got even crazier things but they’re on the blockchain and they’re global. It multiplies your potential user base by huge multiples.

I had to grow CNET at the pace of the Internet. And so, when I launched CNET, there were 300,000 people on the Internet. When I launched in ’95 through 2000 when I left, the pace of my growth was defined by the pace of the growth on the Internet. Now, you’ve got 2.7 to 3 billion people that if some app catches on, it can explode into 500,000,000 users, virtually overnight.

Think about all the people who play the lottery. That’s actually run by the government. You take your ticket and you can be very successful. Governments provide this service to people. I personally think people are much better off not putting their money into the lottery but trying to figure out what the good companies are because people can make a lot more money than even going in the lottery.

Ideas like Beanie Babies, on the face, and may seem completely ridiculous but it was the technology of eBay that allowed that to happen. My great hope is that the SEC does not come in, that they stick to people who are bad guys. And although I think they’re driving innovation offshore, that they really don’t harm innovation by harming people who are legitimately trying to build services that legitimately do important things. It’s going to be a test here the next couple months on how that sort of plays out.

The global landscape is super interesting too because you have Russia, China, and the United States where they’re all either trying to undermine or prevent the undermining of the US dollar through cryptocurrency. The bet there is just like wait, let’s see this play out before either completely banning or fully endorsing blockchain.

But I think the inflection point of just like, wow, the cryptocurrency market made that much noise last year and it’s still a very teeny, teeny, tiny fraction of what it could be like. The market cap of Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Twitter is eight times what the market cap of the entire cryptocurrency industry is right now.

Agreed. Bank of America hold more money in capital, by a lot, then the entire cryptocurrencies. I was thinking that this morning. The SEC is rapidly hiring people to go after people in crypto who are ripping people off. I’m all for doing that but do you know how much fraud is going on within the fundamental banking system? If you’re going to hire a bunch of people, you should point them at where the real fraud is going on. We’re seeing a lot of the same things emerge again in home loans where they’re, again, selling these high-risk home loans. It looks a lot like 2006, 2007.

During the nineties when the Internet bubble happened, the investment banks were making so much money. They were taking out companies with no revenue, that had no right going public. They would get a $500,000,000 valuation and Goldman Sachs would make 30% because they get 6% of whatever it was. And then there was M&A. I bought a company for $750,000,000. I bought another company for $600,000,000. All of this crazy money was all going through the traditional banking system. Nobody said anything about this. And by the way, there were a lot of companies that were flat-out fraudulent, but the SEC wasn’t ramping up to do whatever.

The big problem is that all of [the current ICO model and cryptocurrency fundraising model] is not going through broker dealers, investment banks are not getting anything, but the entire size of the crypto ecosystem, it’s minuscule. There was a there was a mistake that Bank of America made. They wanted to give a dividend to the shareholders and they needed to have what’s called tier one capital and they needed to have enough capital that they could give some of it away to their to their shareholders. They had to give the government the amount of capital they had, and they made a $250-billion-dollar mistake. That was a mistake. The number that we’re talking about right now in crypto, what is it? It’s Bill Gates’s and Jeff Bezos’ net worth? Is that we’re really talking about in terms of the size of the industry?

When you’re looking at 2008 and what they were doing with collateralized debt obligations in the housing market

-Yep.

the government did literally nothing punish anyone in charge of doing that.

-None, zero.

There multiple generations that saw 2008. They saw exactly what happened and they have like the sense of like, OK, the government clearly isn’t going to stop this. So, if they even attempt to go after the cryptocurrency industry, that’s just showing where their heads are really at.

I’m just curious to see how people’s ideologies evolve with a cryptocurrency world because you’ve got this mix of the anarchists’ crowd, the libertarian crowd, the “we’re trying to change the world by innovating and using this technology” crowd, etc. I don’t really foresee a clash with the government in a way that the government can shut down something that’s global and decentralized.

I think it’s as hard to shut down crypto as it is to shut down the Internet. I’ve said specifically to people on a number of occasions that I’m all for them going after bad actors in crypto and putting them in jail. But, I would appreciate if they would start by putting the bad actors who brought the world to its knees because of the fraud that went on the banking industry. As soon as you put all those guys in jail, then I’m absolutely 100% OK with you coming around and finding the guy who took $15,000,000 and ran off with it when we had financial institutions that burn $4,000,000,000,000 of our cash, incinerated it because they created fraud that allowed them to be paid outrageous amounts of money on effectively false profits. Since the beginning, people had been right about being cynical about these government institutions.

There is an absolute crime that has been allowed to go on and that is that banks in this country collect $36 to $37 billion dollars in bounced check fees. Think about how big of a company that is. If this happens anywhere else in the world, the cost will be 25 cents to process a bounced check. They charge you $35 and 20% of bounced checks come from what’s called reverse processing. If you write $100 check and then five $1 checks and you have $100 in your account? They will first take the $100 check and process it so now you have no money and then they’ll take the next five $1 checks and they’ll charge you $35 each. They’ve actually set up their system to maximize the amount of money that they can get out of the people on bounced checks.

The thing is you’ve got people who are incredibly busy. It’s hard to manage your checkbook. There’s never been a bank that sat around and said hey, how do we make sure that people know what their balances are so they don’t bounce checks? They do everything to make sure you can bounce your check. Forget about crypto, just figure out how to get the 35 billion back that all comes out of the pockets of people who fundamentally are at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum. It’s ridiculous, but this is why this movement has such force behind it.

It’s just people that are just beyond frustrated to the point of just being bored and cynical of how transparent it is that people with a lot of money in the United States, especially the banking industry, are capable of influencing political decisions in their favor. and then just continues to rip off the general public $35 at a time.

2009/2010, all of the financial institutions were living off of government money because the government had to bail all of them out. In 2009, half of all of the money going to lobbyists was from banks. They took money from the government, recirculated it, hired lobbyists, all of the people who had anything to do with banking, with senators or congressmen, they were all snatched out and turned into financial industry lobbyists. It goes on and on.

Besides the inflection point for many things, for technology, for human evolution, but also how people are viewing power also. I remember seeing Zhang Shouchang, a physics professor at Stanford, talk about how money is actually a storage of energy. With that in mind, energy helps facilitate momentum and innovation. The ability to exchange energy across the world nearly instantly at any time is going to be the future very interesting. That’s kind of what’s really fascinating about the growth of the crypto world, for me at least.

Well, we’re going to find out very soon how all this is going to play out. I’m hoping for some enlightenment.

The post Interview: Halsey Minor on Innovating in the Blockchain World [Part 2] appeared first on CoinCentral.

  source: https://coincentral.com/halsey-minor-videocoin-part-2/

Post source: Interview: Halsey Minor on Innovating in the Blockchain World [Part 2]

Source

The post Interview: Halsey Minor on Innovating in the Blockchain World [Part 2] appeared first on Bitcoin Geek.

via Kingmind Interview: Halsey Minor on Innovating in the Blockchain World [Part 2]

[martechadvisor-blog]

What a Paratrooper Taught Me About Data Quality and Revenue Growth

In the same way temperature variations change air density to cause a paratrooper to descend more quickly or slowly, data quality can either increase or decrease drag for sales and marketing teams. DiscoverOrg Director of Product Marketing, Justin Withers discusses the impact of bad data and how to maximize data quality

When I was in sixth grade, my father—an engineer, businessman, and physics teacher—helped me design an experiment for a school project.  Central to the experiment was a paratrooper. Not a real one, but one of those plastic ones you can get out of those little vending machines. We conducted our first test at our neighborhood Costco, where we somehow managed to get access to one of their giant industrial freezers (you know…where they keep the bags of those delicious cream puffs). Once inside, we commenced our experiment by repeatedly dropping the paratrooper in the frigid air, each time clocking how long it took for it to fall to the ground. After we felt we had enough data, we repeated the test at a nearby fitness club sauna.

Here’s what I learned. It turns out that paratroopers fall slower in cold air. Why? Well, sparing you the details of the Ideal Gas Law, cold air is denser. In other words, more air molecules funnel into the parachute, slowing its fall. By contrast, higher temperatures result in less air density and reduce drag on the paratrooper accelerating his fall.

So, what does this have to do with sales, marketing, and data quality? Just like lower temperature increased resistance and slowed down our paratrooper, low data quality increases drag on sales and marketing teams and inhibits new customer acquisition and revenue growth.

This idea is also supported by the findings of DiscoverOrg’s recent (and more scientific) survey of Sales and Marketing leaders.

Surprise! The Top Growth Inhibitor is…Bad Data?

In our 2017 Growth Drivers Survey, we asked 200 sales and marketing leaders to identify the top factors accelerating growth and the top factors inhibiting growth.

Response options for growth inhibitors included the following:

High competition

Lack of adequate capital and investment in growth

Lack of alignment between sales and marketing

Lack of high quality account and contact data, information, and intelligence

Lack of product innovation

Lack of vision and leadership

Marketing team and execution

Poor adoption and use of technology and systems

Poor market conditions

Poor pricing strategy (over-pricing, underpricing, not charging for all the value provided)

Sales team and execution

Weakness of product and services

Response options for growth accelerators were similar, but opposite (i.e. Low Competition, Strong financial backing and investment in growth, etc.)

While few respondents credited data as a growth accelerator, “Lack of high quality account and contact data, information, and intelligence” was identified as the top growth inhibitor at high growth companies. In other words, the fastest growing companies could have grown even faster if they had access to high quality data and intelligence about their target accounts and contacts. Low growth companies also grappled with the same problem, citing it the third highest inhibitor behind the uncontrollable external factor of “High Competition” and narrowly behind “Poor adoption and use of technology and systems.” Lack of high quality data was a drag for over half of survey respondent organizations.

The Chilling Facts About Data Quality

Just as low temperatures increase air density and drag, low data quality increases drag for sales and marketing teams. Every piece of bad data in your system…every bad email, phone number, title, misleading trigger, incorrect field, is like an additional air molecule slowing down Sales and Marketing.

Bad data can be the single point of failure in an otherwise successful marketing campaign or prospecting effort. Every marketer who has purchased a list and every sales rep who has used it for prospecting can rightly complain about the quality of list purchases. Using bad data is demoralizing. It erodes productivity and confidence, breeds discouragement, and causes teams to question their approach. What’s worse—when teams are dialing bad phone numbers, pinging bad email addresses, segmenting lists on blank or bad field values they may jump to false conclusions about the failure of a particular campaign or approach when really the problem lies in the data used.

Bad Data is Not the Only Problem

Equally problematic to bad data is the lack of data. Many organizations have no line of sight to accounts or contacts in their addressable target market. Those identifying “lack of high quality data, information and intelligence” don’t just experience the problems associated with bad data; they miss out on opportunities happening all around them.

Every day, potential buyers fly under your sales and marketing radar because you have no way to detect them. Maybe you don’t have a web page with the right content, so a potential prospect lands on a competitor site instead. Or, perhaps an unknown prospect has a problem they need to solve, but they don’t know what to do about it and you don’t even know they exist. Perhaps one of your SDRs calls down a purchased list all day long and doesn’t get to the hot prospects buried on line 137 and 232 who are actively evaluating solutions like yours. No matter how large or small your marketing budget, it’s impossible to capture all buyer signals with your lead gen programs, but there are sales intelligence platforms and predictive intelligence tools that do just that.

Filling in the Gaps

Some companies set out to fill data gaps by hiring temps, interns, or researchers to profile companies, survey customers, and dig up new prospects. Others contract with agencies domestically or offshore to cull the web for prospect accounts and build lists. One problem with these programs is that they are typically not executed at the scale, quality, or duration needed to support the demands of the business. If they are operated at the right scale, they typically do so for only a short period. Eventually, the contract or budget runs out and the program ends. Within a few short months, any actionable intelligence gathered becomes irrelevant and it is never revisited or refreshed. After all, most companies are not in the business of research.

Lessons Learned the Hard Way

Several years ago, I worked as a Demand Generation Manager for a tech company that sold four different SaaS technologies. One day, our Chief Revenue Officer walked over to my cubicle and explained that we were having difficulty meeting our cross-selling goals because each of our products had a different buyer and our buyers weren’t talking to each other. Another problem—despite having contacts at every target account, we didn’t have the right contacts to sell into our installed base. He asked me if I could source the contacts we needed at our target accounts.

Naturally, I asked him to pay for it, and he agreed. He allocated $10,000 from his sales budget and I reached out to a team I thought could handle the work. A key aspect of their efforts would be phone validating each contact. My point-of-contact at the agency assured me it would be no problem and it would only take a couple weeks to get the data we needed.

Two weeks went by, then four weeks, then six weeks. Our CRO was pinging me constantly about the progress and I was seeing meager results. The pressure was eating me alive. Finally, the agency came back to me and said, “Sorry Justin, we did our best, but our team was only able to get 180 contacts. We only used up $1800 of the budget, so the balance is yours.”

I learned two painful lessons that day: (1) I learned just how hard it is to develop and execute account-based sales and marketing without the right data, and (2) I learned just how hard it can be to get that data.

An Alternate Route

Given the cost and difficulty of organizing and operating ongoing data and intelligence gathering programs, most companies opt to acquire lists from data providers. This approach requires less investment and significantly less work, but can come at the cost of accuracy and depth which can show up is an opportunity cost down the road.

Many data providers crowdsource data from unverified sources, or scrape data from the web. While these approaches are effective for collecting large amounts of data quickly, they often lack validation and maintenance. In one word—accuracy. Besides being unverified and lacking the accuracy that instills confidence and maximizes productivity and results, purchased lists typically do not include any sort of timely, contextual, or actionable intelligence. This, most useful form of intelligence is most often gathered through thoughtful, persistent, primary research methods including phone interviews, email correspondence, surveys, and questionnaires.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if you had several hundred researchers at your disposal to run a data and intelligence research program in perpetuity? They could search for and add new good-fit accounts and contacts and keep your database fresh by maintaining records and feeding timely, relevant and actionable intelligence to Sales and Marketing. Well, you can. It’s called Sales Intelligence!

Crank up the Heat: Tips for Turning Up Data Quality to Accelerate Sales and Marketing

Our survey revealed that marketing teams considered “Strong” or “Very Strong” at “managing data quality” experienced 50% higher growth rates than the median company.

In closing, here are a few tips for cranking up the quality of your data and ensuring the least path of resistance for sales and marketing teams to compete, win, and drive revenue growth:

Keep bad data out of your systems, don’t flood the CRM with leads hoping that you’ll be able to qualify what’s good and filter out what’s not. If you put bad data in your system it will be used and the results will be discouraging to you and everyone who interacts with it.

Source high quality data that is accurate, verified, and maintained. Partner with a Sales and Marketing Intelligence provider that emphasizes data accuracy and can provide you access to powerful search and segmentation tools, direct dial phone numbers, verified email addresses, organizational charts, actionable intelligence such as leadership changes and upcoming purchase initiatives, and practical predictive intelligence that helps you identify buyer intent ahead of the competition. Finally, invest in a solution that integrates seamlessly with your existing systems and workflow.

Use technology to dedupe leads and append data on form submissions. Every field you add to a landing page form reduces the conversion rate. Smart forms offer a way to gather fewer datapoints and still pull all necessary segmentation fields in on the backend.

Continuously cleanse and update data fields to combat data entry errors and data decay. Or, partner with a data provider that offers this as a service.

Use data validation rules in your CRM and other systems to standardize data values entered by users. Examples include statuses, industries, countries, states, etc.

This article was first appeared on MarTech Advisor