Crisp, clean data. It doesn’t sound very exciting, but its impact on a company is monumental.
To start, clean data has a major impact on marketing and reporting. By actively cleaning and maintaining quality data, you enable your organization to track leads more efficiently, report on ROI numbers accurately, and retarget with more success. You are able to trust that your email campaigns will be effective and reach your target audience, avoiding potential blacklists and other traps.
Not only does accurate data increase productivity, but it also improves the relationship between marketing and sales. Clean data helps ensure leads are routed to the correct teams and lead distribution issues are easily avoided. This increases trust between sales and marketing, which enables your sales team to grow with your marketing strategy and gives them more visibility into how your brand is reaching the market. It also empowers sales to focus on selling and worry less about qualifying leads.
All this sounds good in theory but how can you implement it efficiently with all your other marketing responsibilities? Luckily, there are a variety of tools available to help manage and clean your data that I have used to streamline the process.
First off, I use CRMfusion for data manipulation and uploading for our Salesforce instance. This tool is critical for mass lead and account uploads, deduplication, mass ownership reassignment, and quick data management. You can leverage these particular tools to introduce new data, search and eliminate dirty data, and prevent duplicate account and lead creation.
Another great data tool that should be in your arsenal is an online lead database of some type. There are hundreds of services that provide this at a variety of prices, but you must be cautious as some are significantly better than others. These tools allow you to find and append email and other contact information as well as source new leads accurately. I personally use ZoomInfo and find they are one of the best out there. When searching for a service, be sure to look for how they source their information, how frequently they update their database, and what types of markets they serve best. I tend to stay away from list purchases and use tools like this to source new accounts and leads more accurately.
You should also employ a data cleansing and management service. A variety of data firms offer data cleansing services where they will clean your entire CRM database for a fee, usually cost per item updated. The one I have used and believe is one of the best out there for B2B is InsideView. They offer a data append service where any and all information they find on your current accounts is added and cleansed. They will also manage your data on whatever frequency you choose so you can have peace of mind that your data is not outdated.
The importance of clean data in today’s marketing landscape is paramount as it is constantly changing and information is scattered everywhere.
Tom Kmett is a Marketing Operations Specialist at Connectivity.
