Simplifying Data Management
Joe Santos, a member of the Dun & Bradstreet Data Advisory Team, has more than 20 years’ experience in various data strategy and management roles at leading companies. He’s certainly faced his share of challenges helping leading companies make sense of their data.
“There’s no such thing as perfect data,” reflects Joe. “A big part of my career in data management has been to help operational teams navigate their data while maintaining the data integrity throughout their organization.
“Unfortunately, most companies don’t recognize they have a data problem until it has a choke-hold on them. And with limited resources there’s a strong temptation to patch together manual solutions to solve specific problems. It’s an inefficient way to get things done, and it puts a strain on the data team’s resources. It sheds light that data management, as a discipline, cannot function without platform and governance support.”
Regardless of category or vertical, companies need to use their data and technology at scale to find new ways to engage with customers, partners, vendors and suppliers. Data is arguably their most valuable competitive asset to improve decision making, increase revenue, decrease costs, and advance operational processes.
Power to the People
B2B sales and marketing teams struggle with the constant influx of data, and maintaining a clean, current view of accounts, whether prospects, customers, suppliers, is critical. How many times have you heard: “Is this customer the same as this customer? Are they related? Is one owned by the other? How come I don’t know more about this account?”
In 2019, 37% of global data and analytics decision makers ranked "sourcing, gathering, managing, and governing the data as it grows" as one of their firm's biggest challenges when using systems of insight, according to Forrester.1
According to Dun & Bradstreet’s recent 7th Annual B2B Sales and Marketing Data Report there is nearly universal recognition of the strategic importance of data quality that is driving increased investments. In fact, 73% of respondents report increasing investment.
However the reality is that with the influx of data businesses are experiencing, made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic, even the most experienced data management practitioners are challenged to keep up with the demands in their organization.
Relying on traditional methods and departments such as IT to acquire and manage data has proved cumbersome and short-sighted in today’s business climate. While many applications and disciplines traditionally under IT control have become democratized, that is, decentralized from IT’s clutch and put into the users’ hands, this hasn’t been the case with data management functions. However, business leaders can no longer rely on traditional methods to acquire and manage data. The time for self-service data governance is here.
A Data Transformation
Chris Lucas, Leader for Data Management Solutions at Dun & Bradstreet, sees democratizing data management as the future. “Democratization of deployment coupled with common governance and standards is the new recipe for success to effectively manage customer data. More people throughout the business will be empowered to act on that standard.” With the launch of D&B Connect from Dun & Bradstreet, putting the power of data into the users’ hands has become a reality.
D&B Connect is a new self-service data stewardship platform that enables users to intuitively connect and transform their data with Dun & Bradstreet data and insights. This gives the business even more trustworthy data about their customers, prospects, suppliers, and other key relationships. An easy-to-use portal, the business user can instantly access, benchmark, enrich, and monitor their data against the Dun & Bradstreet® Data Cloud, made up of 360+ million business records across 120-million hierarchy relationships, for a 360-degree view of their most important business relationships.
D&B Connect also provides a centralized hub to manage data quality in critical systems, including customer relationship management systems (CRMs), marketing automation platforms (MAPs), data lakes, and customer data platforms (CDPs).
5 Steps on the Road to Data Mastery
With a simple drag-and-drop visual experience, D&B Connect can reduce data management tasks from weeks to hours and enable businesses to work with data in new, collaborative ways.
- Set up a project and invite team members to join
- Upload a data file – up to 50M records
- Visualize and assess data health: identify data gaps, discrepancies, and duplicates
- Enrich data with more than 2,500 insights and create custom layouts to append to your customer data
- Maintain a solid data foundation across master data management, data lakes, CRM and CDPs
Lucas notes, “With D&B Connect, sales and marketing teams can get back to work doing what they do best: using their data to sell more, sell faster, create stronger relationships and grow their business! Afterall, that’s what sales and marketing is really about.”
Request a free trial and put the power of data in your hands!
See how D&B Connect can simplify data management and hear from Forrester speaker, Michele Goetz, about managing data for business growth. Watch the webinar:
1 Forrester Analytics Global Business Technographics® Data and Analytics Survey, 2019.