Valentine’s Day is almost here again and many people are scrambling to think of the right gifts and experiences for the people they care about, both at work and in their personal lives. Valentine’s Day would not be complete without Cupid, the most recognized symbol of love. It’s said that if Cupid shoots his arrow of love and hits you, that you will fall helplessly and madly in love! Now that’s a tall order, even for us experienced marketers!

Imagine if Cupid shot an arrow at the Demand Gen and Marketing Ops teams and made them fall (even more) in love with their inside sales team, who often go underappreciated the rest of the year.

So, data-driven marketers, here are a few campy and useful tips on data-related Valentine’s Day gift ideas to show some appreciation for the folks who meld those MQLs into opportunities and make us all look good.

  1. Give Them Quality Gifts Leads

You probably wouldn’t give the love of your life cheap, dime-store chocolates in a heart-shaped box or a red rose wrapped in cellophane from a gas station, would you? That would show you’ve put absolutely no thought into it. Yet most demand gen teams send inside sales any old lead that scores over a 100, even when a lead has an obviously bad name like “Asdf Asdf” or “Mickey Mouse.” Show that you put some thought into the leads you hand over. At the very least, match up your leads against a list of dubious names, like this free one from the Marketing Open Data Project, or build your own list of potentially invalid names over lunch with your team–that can be a fun exercise in and of itself.

  1. Shop Around for the Best Gifts

If you’re not sure how well a gift is going to go over, what do you do? You buy more than one to increase the likelihood that one of them will hit the mark. You also shop at more than one store to increase the likelihood of finding the perfect gift. For your inside team, the same rings true for data. Inside sales and demand gen teams consume a lot of data–everyone needs direct dial, demographic, and firmographic data to do a reasonable job with lead scoring and segmentation. Because in some markets the match rates with data providers can be as low as 20%, you need to shop around for your data, and sign on with multiple data providers so your inside team will get what it wants and won’t be disappointed.

  1. Make Sure Everyone Gets the Right Gift

For those of you who “play the field” (we won’t judge, much) you know that giving someone a gift that was intended for someone else inevitably has disastrous consequences. The same can be said for lead routing. If you route leads by anything other than basic geography, such as by named account, product interest, partner involvement, it’s time to stop the lead assignment pinball and clean and enrich your leads so that you can send those leads to the right person the first time.

  1. Give Them Heatmaps—They’re Still Hot

There are heatmaps for website visitors, and those are nice, like a box of chocolates, but if you really want to impress, sit down with your inside team and discuss those heatmaps reflecting where your lead gen programs have provided good coverage of target accounts, by buyer persona. If you see some gaps, step in with some very targeted programs for those accounts, and add a healthy dose of retargeting.

So as you start thinking about Valentine’s Day, think about everybody that’s important in your life at work and at home. For those all-important inside reps, give them gifts that will let them know you appreciate what they do and help them do their jobs better.

If you’d like to learn about data orchestration platforms that can help with everything even, register for a demo.