How Data Quality Improves Sales Team Efficiency

Growth.

It’s pretty amazing stuff. And let’s face it, we are completely addicted to it in the office. Market share growth, revenue growth, sales growth…I can almost hear Oprah saying “you want growth, you want growth, you all want growth!”

But growing a business is a challenging task even in normal times when we aren’t shrouded in a global pandemic. Regardless of the metric or strategy, it still all boils down to sales. . The teams tasked with growing sales play a pivotal role in business development by creating more value for customers and adapting product offers to meet potential consumers’ needs.

“Caveat Venditor” — the modern-day sales rule meaning ‘let the seller beware.’

Today buyers have access to all the information about products and services they require, making the sellers’ job more responsible. They have to research each potential prospect and come up with useful solutions according to the buyers’ needs and pains.

Data-driven personalization helps salespeople engage with prospects on a more advanced level. Customers are expecting relevant and tailored messages that sellers could create by analyzing the target’s data. Data accuracy and consistency are crucial in preparing for meetings with potential clients.

The main question that many organizations ask today is how to optimize sales processes fast without losing too many resources. Improving data quality can be one of such easy wins.

According to dnb, 41% of companies claim that inconsistent data across CRMs, Marketing Automation Systems, and other technological tools is their main challenge. Delpha has come up with three ways of how data quality can boost sales efficiency.

1. No time losses / shorten the sales cycle

As reported by Forbes, over 68% of sales reps spend the majority of their time on non-selling activities, like email or info gathering tasks. Interestingly enough, most of the reps do not follow an outlined time schedule. SalesForce posits that Salespeople spend over 50% of their time coping with everyday data quality tasks.

Even when using innovative CRM tools, it is natural that employees input incomplete phone numbers, do not recognize duplicate emails, and fall for unqualified contacts. Plus, the sales cycle becomes longer due to wrong tasks prioritizing since sales teams deal with out-of-date opportunities’ information.

Good quality data helps to not waste time on additional research and prospecting. Moreover, it assists in clearing out the time schedule for the top priorities tasks.

2. Saved costs

In the next 24 hours, there is a high chance that most of the companies will change their addresses, names, and contact information. Salespeople who work with their leads will have to remove inaccurate data and spend around $1 to prevent a duplicate, $10 to fix it, and about $100 to store it if left unprocessed.

The more complex a database becomes, the larger the consequences and costs can develop. Data quality management will help to increase about 15% of revenue.

Employee engagement also impacts productivity costs. According to Gallup, unengaged employees may cost a company $3,400 for every $10,000 of salary. Organizations should provide their salespeople helpful tools to optimize processes and suggest the next best actions to prevent that from happening.

3. Effective decision-making

High-performing salespeople are 1.5 times more likely to base anticipations on data-driven insights. While underperforming sales teams are 1.7 times more likely to base their forecasts on intuition.

Automated tasks help optimize the sales process by not wasting employees’ time on extra analysis. Moreover, by instantly looking at informative insights, sales teams may suggest recommendations and forecasts faster. Thus, good data quality provides a clearer vision of how to act next and leads to better decisions.

Overall, accurate and consistent data increases sales efficiency and business growth because it saves money, time, and energy. Companies that address data issues and build data quality strategies produce higher revenue by raising their sales teams’ productivity and reducing costs of data cleaning and maintenance.

One of the ways to improve data is to install an in-app CRM assistant powered by AI. The human augmentation solution will raise employees’ abilities and increase sales effectiveness by elevating data quality.