Level 10

Question

Normalizing Job Titles vs. eliminating them

Forum|Forum|9 years ago
March 28, 2017
5 replies
12125 views

Hello Community,

Though I'd get your feedback on this. I was curious how you guys are choosing to manage job titles. When we have job titles like "CFO" and "Chief Financial Officer", both will have the Job Role of "C-Level" and the Job Function of "Finance" because they are the same exact role despite minor differences in the job title. What is the best course of action to ensure a clean and normalized database?

- normalize both job titles and spell out the initials to "Chief Financial Officer"

- don't rely on job title altogether and only look at a lead's Job Role (hierarchy) and Job Function (department)

- just keep them the way they are

I'm thinking that there is so much variation in job title, that marketers may choose to only want to know a lead's role (hierarchy) and function (department) to determine if they are a good lead to market to.

Feedback is appreciated.

Thanks.

Marketo

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Darrell_Alfons2

Level 10

Good post Devraj!

We do the same, C-Level, Director-Level, Manager-Level, and Staff. Would be curious to see what others have as well.

Devraj, are you doing anything else with title/level besides scoring and personalizing content?

Devraj_GrewalAuthor

Level 10

Darrell,

Many processes are dependent on a lead's job role and job function and we "mine" the job title to determine them. But since there are so many variations in job title, just seems that maybe we should only be looking at the role and function to begin with.

Dan_Stevens_

Level 10

We, too, use "job roles" and "functional roles" for our segmentation and targeting purposes. We have weekly batch campaigns that normalize any new/modified job title into the appropriate job/function (while leaving "job title" intact - there's no benefit at all to delete it as it serves as yet another valuable data point/attribute within the lead record):

A sample smart list looks like this:

On most of our forms, we don't even capture job title anymore - but rather a standardized/finite list of job/functional roles:

Contact Us | Avanade

Ed_King

Level 2

Devraj,

Many of our customers uset our product for job title segmentation, and here is what we see people prefer in general, and we do this ourselves as well:

1. Leave the job title along as is. Sale people often tell you don't change people's job titles just to normalize them. People like to be addressed by their actual job title, not some normalized job title. For example, if a person's job title is "Director of Growth Hacking", they would prefer you call them that, and not "Director of Marketing"

2. Use job function and job Level segmentation to drive automation and analytics.

3. More customers are now going deeper with job sub-function, for example, if the job title is "VP of Demand Generation", then level - Executive, function = Marketing, and sub-function = Demand Generation.

I hope this helps.

Ed King

Allen_Pogorzel1

Level 2

We've posted the underlying data sets to classify Job Functions/Sub-Functions and Job Levels based on Job Titles on www.marketingopendata.org. They're free to download, share, and build on.

Grégoire_Miche2

Level 10

Hi Devraj,

Indeed, the creativity with regards to job titles is limitless But they are a key component to targeting and also to demographic scoring.

So we use a combination of 3 fields:

- Functional role (drop list that contains values related to the function)

- Hierarchy level. (Drop list. values are CxO, VP/Director, Manager, Staff)

- Job title (free text)

These 3 fields are in the CRM and in Marketo.

Depending on the form, we will either ask for the job title or for the functional role. Sometimes, both will be on the same form with dynamic profiling. We do not prompt for the Hierarchy level as we get to much wrong / inconsistent information. Instead, we derive it from the job title with data management smart campaigns, that we revised regularly to accommodate for new creative titles

-Greg