Email Signature Extraction Project Uncovers 5,431 Buried Customer Contacts

Over the past six weeks, we’ve been wrapped up in a E-mail Signature Extraction (ESE) and E-mail Metrics project for a client of ours. We’d like to share the insightful findings with you in this blog post. As you’ll see, the results clearly indicate that companies need to take advantage of their email data because there are hidden gems in the form of buried customer and prospect contact info and actionable intelligence derived from email communication patterns & content. It’s truly remarkable to see the amount of valuable intelligence that’s extracted from these email communications.

Email Signature Extraction (ESE) Project Objectives

This was a standard enterprise Microsoft Exchange email database containing 517,394 emails from 127 .pst files. First, we ran our E-mail Signature Extraction application to extract email signatures from the 127 .pst files. These email signatures highlighted connections, such as customers and prospects that were not documented in their salesforce.com CRM system. Secondly, we searched and found instances of “sales concepts”. Some of the sales concepts included references to proposals, contracts, RFPs, statements of work, quotes, negotiations, projects, initiatives, etc. In situations where the sales rep recently departed the company, this helped the sales managers quickly pinpoint the emails that might have contained sales opportunities, saving them the time it would take to comb through thousands of emails.

Email Signature Extraction (ESE) Project Results

At the end of the six-week project, we fulfilled our initial objectives. After running the E-mail Signature Extraction application, we retrieved 35,580 email signatures (5,431 unique). As we suspected, the vast majority of these contacts were not in the company’s salesforce.com CRM system. We delivered the newly found contact information to sales operations in an Excel spreadsheet. They were incredibly grateful to have this newly found valuable contact info.

Our E-mail Metrics for Sales solution also delivered as promised. There were many findings of “Sales Concepts”, keywords and phrases throughout their email communications, with each instance or finding representing one email. The table below is just a sampling of the significant occurrences detected. All of the emails were tagged & flagged with Sales Concepts so that the sales managers could evaluate the results on an individual rep-by-rep basis. And, in some cases the sales rep had left the company, so it made it much easier to review the most important top 10 or 15 emails that contained sales opportunities that otherwise might have been lost in the shuffle.

Significance of Findings

The findings of this Email Signature Extraction (ESE) and Email Metrics project benefitted the sales, marketing, and sales operations departments. The sales department now has a moreupdated and complete salesforce.com CRM system. The sales reps don’t have to do mundane data entry. Sales managers have accurate & up-to-date records of the customers and prospects that their sales reps are communicating with – all 5,431! Sales leadership can share these insights across the sales force to effectively guide rookies and underperformers. And last but not least, the marketing department now has new customer and prospect contact info for their Marketo marketing automation system.

“I’m amazed to see that there were so many undocumented contacts uncovered from our emails. With salesforce.com not updated as frequently as it should be, we would have been missing a significant number of customer contacts. Thanks to the databahn team for making this easy and painless.” Quote from our client.

What’s In Your Email?

Our client benefitted greatly from the Email Signature Extraction (ESE) and Email Metric solution – and you can too! You saw how much valuable content was buried in their email database. Without databahn, they never would have been able to benefit from this contact information and actionable insights. Likewise, you don’t know what hidden gems are in your email database. What contacts are you missing from your CRM System? Without tapping into your email communications, you’ll be left in the dark.

Download the databahn Guide on Extracting Value from B2B Emails to learn more.