As a sales as a service (SaaS) provider, we’ve sold hundreds of products and services across many different industries. We’re brought in to tend to the particular needs of a given business, whether it be pipeline generation, sales management, or other aspects of business development strategy. Each client has its unique needs, but almost all have one issue in common: poor database health.
CRM and database management are critical to success. Data is the basis of all business development strategy – if you have garbage data, you’ll have garbage results. While a cluttered and seemingly disorganized desk may be a sign of genius, a disorganized database is a sure sign of sales calamity.
What Bad Data Can Do
Bad data is more destructive than you may think. Beyond slowing down outreach and frustrating your team, bad data has other, more harmful consequences.
- Verifying records costs $1, scrubbing and cleansing old records costs $10, and it will cost you $100 if you do nothing1
- Bad data costs U.S. businesses a total of over $600 billion per year2
- And it costs companies over $180,000 per year on average3
- Up to 40% of businesses fail due to bad data2
- Organizations with dirty data lose out on up to a 70% revenue increase2
Beyond these telling stats, bad data can also hurt your reputation by sending an email using the wrong name, title, or company. Or worse, sending to inaccurate addresses over and over can put you on a domain’s blacklist.
How to Stop Bad Data
If you’re thinking, “We started with good data, so we’re ok,” you should check again. High-quality data can quickly go bad unmonitored. Sources show B2B data decays at a rate of over 70% per year4. That decay is a result of the 58 address changes, 11 name changes, and 41 newly opened businesses that happen hourly5. To keep yourself safe, you need to put a data clean-up and monitoring system into practice.
- Audit your data. Look for duplicates, email bounces, and blank info.
- Cleanse (or append) bad data. Fill in those blanks, rid yourself of double entries, and get yourself as clean a database as possible for your baseline.
- Segment and tag data. Your data becomes vastly more effective once it’s segmented. Add in tags by different outreach groups such as by location, industry, or lost customers.
- Integrate your systems. Your database should be either contained in or linked to your CRM and synced with your marketing automation systems. Both of these tools continually gain new data and need to be connected to keep your database updated.
- Update your data regularly. New data should be added daily from your CRM and marketing automation, but you also need to scan for data decay regularly. There are many services out there to scan for bad emails, outdated phone numbers, and other prospect changes.
- Designate a data team. The less hands you have working in your data, the better. Have a small group of individuals assigned to be the keeper of your database, making additions and staying on top of regular clean-up.
When to Call in the Professionals
Most of our clients have the ability and means to cleanse and organize their databases, but they lack the time or adequate staff resources to commit to making it happen. That’s where we come in to fill in the gaps.
We’re proud to be there for our clients in their time of need, providing the deep clean they need to re-set their databases to a healthy baseline. And, we focus on training development teams on how to maintain databases and provide the tools they need to do it on their own.
Find out more about how NuGrowth SaaS can get your database clean and organized. Contact us here or at 614.304.3922 to get your fresh start today.
Sources
1https://blog.zoominfo.com/data-decay-is-your-b2b-database-full-of-rotten-apples-infographic/
2https://blog.zoominfo.com/the-effect-of-dirty-data-on-roi/
3http://lemonly.com/work/the-cost-of-bad-data
4https://biznology.com/2015/02/b2b-data-decay-list-rental-buyer-beware/
5http://www.reachforce.com/blog/6-quick-dirty-data-stats/
Author: Sarah Deak
Sarah is a veteran copywriter and content strategist with NuGrowth Solutions. She likes to look for the unexpected angle and uses her background in education, business development, and marketing to create interesting and informative pieces to equip readers with actionable data.
Sarah Deak is a veteran copywriter and content strategist with NuGrowth Solutions. She likes to look for the unexpected angle and uses her background in education, business development, and marketing to create interesting and informative pieces to equip readers with actionable data