Data augments human aptitude by enabling rational decision-making. Now, as someone who is from the sales or marketing background, you don’t need me to say how significant data can be for all your efforts.
For your marketing and sales campaigns to be successful, just having a behemoth of data at your disposal is not going to help you convert.
There’s more to it.
50% of B2B firms are not confident in the quality of their data.
Data hygiene is critical to sales and marketing success. If you fail to run a health check on it, it will result in unqualified leads, personalization efforts with no direction, wrong insights from analytics, and more.
Sales and marketing in the present day are moving towards hyper-personalization. B2B sellers are targeting B2B buyers based on several data points like geography, online activity, the size of the company, industry vertical, job titles, etc.
Be it B2C or B2B sales leads, to make conversions through campaign efforts on multiple mediums, you need to personalize your messaging. For you to customize your efforts and bring congruence between your campaigns and the target segment, data quality for sales and marketing is important.
When this data fails the quality test, and when used to implement goals it results in:
- Poor user experience
- Hinders the optimization of the lead funnel
- Negatively impact campaign performance
- Reduces reliability of insights from analytics
- A huge loss in brand reputation
Types of data quality issues
Before we go ahead and see the reasons, repercussions, and solutions for data quality issues let’s see the various types or forms in which they could arise:
- Data duplicates A scenario of multiple copies of the same record that could potentially impact the analytics and insights drawn from them. A solution to this issue would be the process of data deduplication.
- Inconsistent formats When data is stored in varying formats in the database, it lacks uniformity and makes it difficult to segment campaign efforts.
- Obsolete data The data that is no more accurate and is outdated is obsolete data. Using this information is a waste of effort and resources.
- Incomplete data When the information lacks certain critical variables that could be an important data point to plan a sales or marketing activity. Ex: Having the name, company name, and geography. But, if there is no designation it becomes difficult to pick the right tone and context.
- Inaccessible data When there is no right tools and systems to store data like the CRM, crucial information gets lost and when it trickles down to the other levels, data inaccessibility is a questionable issue.
- System upgrades When the data management system has upgraded, there is a possibility to lose some information. Lack of back-up efforts results in loss of efforts and delayed campaign activities.
The repercussions of not fixing data quality issues
When the right measures are not taken to put your data through the fitness test, the following could happen as a result of poor data quality:
Campaigns with no direction
Be it social media campaigns, ABM activities, cold calling, email campaigns or pretty much any sales or marketing effort – contact data enrichment is necessary. If the data in your database is not accurate, it only means your efforts are directed towards a dead-end. When you leverage the contact information, you may want to ensure the health of the data against various criteria including accuracy, recency, completeness, and account for any change of information.
Inability to personalize content and messaging
As already discussed, marketing and sales are moving towards the era of personalized content. To accomplish a customer-centric narration and increase the chances of engagement, the practice of personalization is done backed by data. But, there are chances of this going wrong when the data for sales and marketing is not enriched and the wrong information reaches the wrong target. This does not only cost a possible sale but also hurts your reputation.
Gaining inaccurate insights from analytics
Marketers and sales personnel have the digital dexterity that is required to perform analytics with the data they have. And make meaningful decisions based upon that. But, if the analytics show inaccurate numbers, the insights are drawn would be error-prone. So, how do you dig deep into the root cause of the problem? This happens due to bad data – data that is not refreshed, obsolete, inaccurate or incomplete.
Unqualified leads from the wrong target
If at any point in time you feel in the dark about an unqualified lead, there are certain steps you can take. In addition to examining the other reasons, do take a look at your data. The reason behind this could be because you’re directing your efforts towards something that you believe is true and accurate. But in the real sense, it is not. Data enrichment will help you execute successful marketing and sales campaigns
Equating data quality with ROI: formulas to swear-by
|
Data Quality + Efficient management = Improved ROI |
The quality of data in your CRM and efficient management ensures that you have a great ROI. Because the single and comprehensive view ensures streamlining of processes.
|
Breadth of data + Cleansing = Depth of Insight |
The breadth of data here refers to owning several data points. Along with periodic update gives you a deep dive into the insight through comprehensive analytics.
Where to begin?
As for the data deluge is concerned, it is quite overwhelming to understand how to take the next step.
First, assess the health of your data, if you conclude that it needs to be cleansed, then you have to go ahead with the process of data cleansing. The next scenario will be when you think you don’t have a rich database. Then you must take the next step of building a repository of contact information. It should have the kind of data and data points you require.
Something different from these two would be when you have fresh, up-to-date, and a wealthy database. However if you are not able to perform analytics and gather insights, you’ll need assistance from data analytics experts.
