The consumerization of today’s B2B buying process means clients expect on-demand, digital, and personalized experiences. To answer the call and have a chance to connect with a prospect, sales and marketing leaders need consistent access to the right data. They need analytics and segmentation tools that are capable of helping them make quicker, more confident decisions. With access to quality data, they can also have more relevant conversations and execute more targeted campaigns that will resonate with prospects and, ultimately, accelerate the buyer’s journey.
While that may sound obvious, our “Past, Present, and Future of Data” report found nearly half of business leaders said their data is too siloed to make any sense of it. In fact, they said that their data is often poorly structured, difficult to access, and out of date – making it a significant barrier to success. We also learned that 20% of companies actually lost a customer due to the use of incomplete or inaccurate information.
Data is the Lifeblood of Your Business – Bar None
Data is at the center of every business decision, every marketing campaign, and every sales outreach. If you don’t really know who your target audience is or exactly what their pain points are, you’re going to have a difficult time achieving your objectives. Despite data’s strategic importance, data quality management continues to be one of the most challenging initiatives to make a business case for or to persuade leaders to properly invest in. Too often it is seen as a “cost driver” of the business rather than an essential “growth driver.”
Perhaps one reason for this is that data simply isn’t flashy – it isn’t a wonderfully creative image or potential viral video that you can showcase with ease. Instead, data is more of the secret ingredient that helps enable – or disable – the best marketing campaigns or the most capable teams of hungry sellers.
63% of those surveyed said data helped identify opportunities for revenue growth. As a leader in the sales and marketing space, I’d be all ears if someone in my organization came to me with a relevant business case for a tool or tactic that could help us improve our own performance. This is where our new Data Quality ROI Calculator comes into play.
What Is the Data Quality ROI Calculator and How Does It Work?
We developed this calculator to help you understand and quantify the positive and negative impact that data quality has on your business. If you, like the majority of sales and marketing teams today, struggle to manually deal with data quality management, we want to help you convey its impact to your colleagues and leaders. One cool aspect of our calculator is that it is interactive and has options tailored to three different business areas – marketing operations, marketing, and sales. The hope is that this tool can help you quickly gain a better sense of how bad data is impacting your bottom line.
Just input a few basic metrics that pertain to your department, such as the number of sales reps on your team or how long it takes to fix a bad account record, and you’ll receive a summary report with the direct and indirect costs of poor data quality to your business. Additionally, you will see some of the benefits you could realize from ongoing data quality management.
Once you’ve filled in the primary inputs a specialist from our team would be happy to provide a deeper set of metrics that will give you an even more exact result to share with your leaders. Information is power, and the more you can share, the better chance you have of building a successful case for an investment in data quality.
Turning data into revenue starts with having accurate, clean data. Let’s stand up and say enough is enough – we need to get bad data out of the way of great marketing campaigns and sales efforts. Use the ROI calculator to back up your case and show your leaders the positive impact that quality information can have on your business. And remember, we’re here to help.