If there is anyone that knows about the importance of clean company data, it is our Key Account Executive and Team Lead, Victor Ivarsson. With experience in both Business Intelligence and now in charge of helping our largest clients grow, he has received his fair share of questions regarding customer data and how to best enrich it.
In this blog post, he lays out the foundation for how clean company data will lay the foundation for being able to build a revenue engine.
Sales and marketing tools are often just filled with endless amounts of data. This tends to create huge problems down the line and directly affects the bottom line. Cleaning your data in plain text means two things; getting rid of duplicates and applying a DUNS-number in order to track the company using it’s IP.
The issue
Bad and outdated data in your CRM & Marketing Automation tool is a lingering headache we’re all accustomed to. Think of your data as the gas that runs your car while the sales and marketing tools represent the engine, and lastly, your chassis is the organization itself. With contaminated gas, your engine simply won’t perform at a level at which it’s expected and will eventually fail. The same thing goes for poor or incorrect data as it will hurt your business more than it could ever help.
What is clean data?
Clean data is not rocket science. It simply means having updated company and contact information in your CRM and Marketing Automation system(s). This means having the correct address and keeping invoicing, contact, and financial info tied to the company. If any of the above proves sub-par, you’re target segments simply will not be accurate, causing you to spend time, money and resources on little to no conversion.
What are the direct pitfalls tied to this?
Account-based marketing with lackluster data is like throwing a frisbee to a blind dog. You can change the frisbee as many times as you want but the blind dog won’t catch it. You might even change dogs, yet the results remain unimpressive. In plain text, aggressively marketing to a wider audience with no regard for exposing the right content to the right.
Company data is vital to any team leader or hungry sales and marketing person. Why? Well, data defines our market – where we’re successful, and where we’re not. Someone once said that “information is power” rendering one who sits on bad information powerless. Listen to what the information is telling you and act on it.
Do you feel hit?
- Sales will waste time chasing the wrong prospect
- Marketing will overspend on wide and undirected target groups
- Finance will waste his/her talents away on editing invoices, creating unnecessary lead time
- Poor cash flow
The benefits
Now that you’ve escaped the pitfalls above and cleaned your lackluster data, you will have the opportunity to harvest good quality information in order to shorten sales cycles, deliver the right message to the right person, and streamline invoicing. Use Bisnode, for example, to find and retrieve new companies to expand your market share.