Bad Data Now Illegal in CA

There’s a new law in California that mandates that health plans maintain accurate provider directories. It’s a serious piece of legislation; health plans are even empowered to withhold reimbursements from physicians and other healthcare providers if they don’t cooperate in providing current data to the health plans.

Why has it come to this?  The reasons help illustrate some of the challenges in maintaining commercial databases today.

You would think that health plans would know a lot about the physicians in their plans, at the minimum where they are located because they are regularly sending checks out to them.  But as those of us who have dealt with physician databases well know, it just isn’t that easy.

For starters, many physicians like to receive checks at a location other than their offices. Post office boxes are still common. Some physicians have management companies located in separate offices collect funds for them. And of course, payments now are increasingly electronic – account to account with no address needed. All of this makes it hard to simply using billing information as the basis for a plan directory.

Physicians are also increasingly part of group practices. And these group practices often have multiple office locations. Physicians in these practices move around from location to location, making it difficult for physicians to provide a single physical address. The group practices themselves are often radically decentralized, so there really is no main office even for the group. Some groups cross county and state lines. Some groups have separate administrative offices. And then there are the doctors who work out of hospitals … this is just the tip of the iceberg, but you get the idea.

But the biggest problem of all is the industry’s failing. Physicians see a plan directory as one more administrative burden; health plans see an annoying cost center. The reality is that these plan directories are a prime marketing tool for both groups. Different surveys confirm that some stunning percentage of patients select their physician from these directories. Health plans market themselves on the quality and breadth of their networks. The first question of anyone contemplating a switch to a new plan is, “is my doctor in your network?”

By not understanding and leveraging the fact that health plan directories are a primary discovery tool and a great marketing vehicle, we end up in the sorry situation where government has to legislate accuracy when instead all those involved should be insisting on it themselves.

The best databases are those where the listed individuals or organizations see real benefit in participation. If this is true in your case, promote it like crazy. It’s too big an opportunity to miss.

Behavioral Leads Plus Deep Data Equal Sales Nirvana

Commercial data products have long been successfully used for sales prospecting purposes. Indeed, this is the single most common use of commercial data. At the same time, we’ve seen a rapid rise in the availability and popularity of behavioral sales leads.

A behavioral sales lead is created when an individual takes one or more actions that are associated with pre-purchase research. If I look at information about three different types of fork lifts in a 30-day timeframe, I think we’d all agree that I am very likely in the market for a fork lift very soon. This creates a very timely and thus very valuable sales lead. It is increasingly easy to set yourself up to track who is looking at what types of content on your website and how often. These high torque sales leads have proven to be a very lucrative business for lots of B2B websites.

But do these powerful sales leads render commercial databases less valuable or perhaps even irrelevant as sales prospecting tools? After all, a commercial database generally will only tell you that a business exists, not if it is actively in the market for a specific product. My view is that we will increasingly see a blending of behavioral sales leads and databases. The main reason for this is that databases need to be more actionable, and sales leads need more context.

The most progressive companies involved with sales leads are already moving in this direction. It’s great that they can tell an advertiser that Joe Smith of Acme Group may be a good prospect for a fork lift. But that information in turn generates a host of additional questions – the context needed to fully evaluate and properly respond to the sales lead. For example, is Acme Group big enough to afford one of my new fork lifts? Does Acme Group already own fork lifts, and if so, what brands? What business is Acme Group in? Who are other executives at Acme Group who may be involved in the purchase decision? That’s why these progressive website owners are increasingly licensing commercial data products to overlay some of this information on their sales leads.

But commercial data providers have not been standing still. Consider EDA, a Randall Reilly company. It knows virtually every company that owns a fork lift, along with lots of deep detail about those fork lifts -- right down to their serial numbers. Even more importantly, EDA knows when those fork lifts were acquired, and thus can estimate when companies will want to replace them. This is extremely valuable sales intelligence.

You can see where I am going. Take the individual-level intelligence of the sales lead, and merge it with the company-level intelligence of the data provider, and you create sales magic. You can now identify companies that ought to be in the market based on objective knowledge and confirm this with behavioral activity of people who work at those companies. You not only get two-level confirmation as to the strength of the sales opportunity, you have the needed context (deep company information) to make an intelligent sales approach. Even better, you can see if multiple people at the same company are doing pre-purchase research on fork lifts – a way to surface and target the hitherto invisible influencers who play a role in larger B2B purchase decisions. And of course you yield the absolute gold standard in sales lead quality, because you have multiple independent signals telling you this company is ready to buy.

The Great e-Book Conspiracy

It’s a standard plotline for a whole category of potboiler novels: a shadowy, global group of evil corporations conspire to bend the marketplace in such a way that it delivers them massive profits (and sometimes global domination as well).

Imagine my surprise then in reading a recent article that suggests that not only is such a conspiracy real and operating as we speak, but it is operating in the world of book publishing. Yes, the people who publish conspiracy novels are engaged in a conspiracy themselves!

Here’s the diabolical plan: newly freed to set the price of e-books, publishers are pricing them purposely high to discourage their sale. This in turn will push consumers to reject the e-book format. With nobody buying e-books, the e-book sellers will go out of business, and the publishers will have achieved their objective. And what might this objective be, you ask? Well, to force consumers to buy books in print again! According to this article, print books have better economics than e-books, so by destroying e-books, the glory days of book publishing will return.

Now there are more than a few prominent blogs read by publishing professionals that are relentless in promoting the belief that a resurgence in print books and magazines is right around the corner. There are no shortage of people in the publishing industry that want to believe. The fact that these blogs derive their advertising support largely from printing companies is itself telling. But to take it to the level of a plan where the major book publishers are collaborating on a plan to crush digital distribution in favor of print is odd, worrisome and not just a little sad.

And that’s just one more reason, by the way, that the data business is such a good business. There’s no longing for print among data publishers because the print format always constrained data. Remember the days of the print giants such as Sweet’s and Thomas Register? Even publishing their 30-volume print products with tens of thousands of pages, these publishers were only scratching the surface of what they might have published. Even the advent of CD-ROM did little for these publishers, who were forced to publish in inconvenient multi-disc sets. Online is the natural home for data. When you’re online, your economics improve, size doesn’t matter and you can update your content faster and more efficiently than ever before.

Best of all, there’s no need to create print-centric global conspiracies, though there’s probably a great novel in there somewhere…

Ad Blocking in Perspective

There has been tremendous anxiety in the media world around Apple’s move to allow ad blocking software on iPhones and iPads. After all, eliminate ads from mobile devices, and you take a big bite out most publishers’ ad revenue. Publishers are describing this move by Apple in near-Apocalyptic terms. But let’s get a grip.

First, we need to be clear that this ad blocking capability applies to the mobile web, not to apps. In that respect, this move by Apple is really just a big kick in the pants to build an app and get your audience onto it as quickly as possible.

Second, this move makes a lot more sense when you consider what’s driving it. Apple doesn’t make money from mobile search advertising; Google does. Apple doesn’t like Google for a variety of reasons, hence this aggressive move cuts into Google’s main source of revenue. We’re all just collateral damage in this war of the titans. But this perspective also helps you understand why apps are (and will likely remain) protected from ad blocking technology. The Apple ecosystem depends on apps, and Apple makes a lot of money from apps. Apple is not really against all mobile advertising; it’s against mobile advertising that benefits Google.

Third, some of these new mobile ad blockers will reportedly strip out some content as well as advertising (not text, but some things such as bloated masthead graphics). Indeed, the new breed of ad blockers are really less focused on eliminating advertising than improving the mobile user experience by speeding up page loads as much as possible.

Fourth, once again, publishers are feeling the pain of a self-inflicted wound. By junking up their websites (and by extension their mobile websites) with all manner of trackers, ad networks, auto-play video, re-targeting ads, overlays, and perhaps most ironic of all, ads to get the user to download the publishers own app, we’ve junked up the mobile experience quite thoroughly. When was the last time you recall having a satisfactory (as in fast and easy) mobile web session?

I certainly agree that a lot of people are using ad blocking software out of a sense of entitlement – they truly believe they should have limitless access to content without fee and ad-free. Of course that’s another self-inflicted wound (a topic I’ve discussed many times over the years). But the more important reason that users are flocking to ad blocking software is that it actually improves their online experiences. That’s a sad statement, but the resolution of the problem is firmly under our control.

Big Data: The Power of Plug and Play

InsideSales.com recently announced the launch of a new service called The Predictive Cloud that provides API access to its powerful predictive engine. InsideSales made its name, not surprisingly, by adding predictive capabilities to sales prospects. By aggregating very granular prospect data from its customer base (over 100 billion sales interactions), InsideSales can not only predict who is a top sales prospect, but even what day of the week is best to make contact. The Predictive Cloud throws this impressive analytical and predictive capability open to anyone who wants to use it, even if they want to use it to predict their own top prospects, though what really excites InsideSales is the belief that other companies with lots of data will find non-sales applications for its predictive engine, such as logistics, marketing and even human resources.

While The Predictive Cloud has obvious applicability to many commercial data products, it’s representative of an important trend: the ability for data providers to tap into cloud-based plug-and-play datasets and analytical tools to enhance their own products. It’s a hugely positive development for data companies, because these new tools and datasets allow us to access Big Data in a useful and powerful way without having to become Big Data experts. Similarly, we can now start to tap into analytical toolkits without the expense and complexity or having to build them … or even run them.

I’ve been saying it for several years now: Big Data doesn’t imperil commercial data producers, most of which produce what can be called “Little Data.” Indeed, Big Data can be used to enhance Little Data and make it deeper and more powerful. The analytic tools and capabilities that have come out of the rush to Big Data can also now be profitably employed by Little Data producers as well.

There’s a lot going on out there, but everything I see still tells me that those who control a valuable dataset are still in the driver’s seat, especially if they take full advantage of these plug-and-play opportunities to make their datasets smarter, deeper and ever more useful to their customers.