10 Questions To Ask Yourself About Your Sales & Marketing Data Quality
Thinking about your underlying data isn’t all that sexy for a marketing or sales executive. A flashy new social campaign or a new sales playbook may be more fun to think about investing in.
But data is your foundation – it drives or enables everything your people do. And it represents a lot of opportunity for you to increase productivity, reduce costs, and deliver ROI.
If you answer yes to one or more of these questions, your data represents an ROI opportunity.
- Do your marketing attempts to measure campaign ROI break mid-stream because sales tracks a different prospect record than marketing does?
- Do you find it hard to trust the results when you run reports?
- Do your inside sales reps or external sales reps know they are losing productivity (their time) due to bad lead or contact level information loaded in key data fields? (info@yourowncompany.com, 999-999-9999, asdf123)?
- Are your sales reps frustrated because they find their contacts are pursued separately by other reps?
- Do you have trouble determining which data source you should spend more money on?
- Do sales managers waste time trying to resolve which rep owns which account?
- Does marketing ever launch introductory campaigns against a lead prospect, only to find sales already has an active pipeline opportunity within the same company?
- Do you have issues with sales reps playing games to try to steal a march on their colleagues, and take ownership of a particular account by “getting there first?”
- Do you find garbage in key data fields (info@yourowncompany.com, 999-999-9999, asdf123)?
- Are sales reps or marketers reluctant to put their lists into the CRM because they fear repercussions, the labor involved, or worry further corrupting the database?
What do you think? Got a problem that you now understand is attributable to poor data hygiene? Time to do something about it; it’s fixable, and it offers real returns.
