This blog was updated on July 18th, 2018.
Is Data Quality Affecting Your Sales?
“71% of marketers cite maintaining high quality data as a major challenge.” -MarketingProfs
The reason that number is so high is because the consequences of bad data are immediately evident, and because few marketers know the right way to deal with it. While quality data is one of the most important things for sales and marketing teams it doesn’t have to be a huge concern if the right teams and processes are in place to handle it.
“[Incorrect data] can do anything from waste money to annoy, and possibly lose, customers.” -Rick Cook, Journalist for CRMsearch
First, let’s look at the downside of having bad data quality.
Waste Money
One of the simplest ways to see how much your data is costing your sales team is to track the man hours. Time spent correcting or clarifying incorrect data by a sales team is wasted money. The sales team’s time should be spent contacting quality leads, not scrubbing lists.
Lose Customers
A customer or lead who is contacted with bad data will lose faith in the company. Quality data allows your team to use intelligent data points to win over your customers and qualified leads. If they are using bad data in these communications it will have the opposite effect.
An opportunity lost because of even the smallest mistake in your data may be a lost customer.
Effect Campaigns
When putting together a new campaign it is extremely important to be able to make decisions based on accurate data. Many times marketers have planned to use a list only to find out that, due to poor data quality, the list wasn’t as big as they had thought. Duplicate records and missing information aren’t useful to your marketing efforts.
So it’s clear that data quality is extremely important to a business. Over two-thirds of marketers have come across one of these issues in the past. The key to overcoming this challenge is to put processes into place and understand that maintaining quality data is an ongoing process.
One of the many benefits of a well-defined teleprospecting process is continuously gathering data on your leads and monitoring how prospects interact with your organization. It also helps identify errors in your lead data before they get to the sales team.
These points should get you started creating systems to maintain your companies data quality.
