If your business can’t trust your internal data, you’re losing money — and a lot of it.
Bad data — whether it’s incomplete, inaccurate, or simply missing — costs companies 12% of their revenue. And it costs organizations an average $12.9 million every year.
Think about all of the information your revenue team is storing and tracking:
- Demographic data of your customers and prospects (such as names, titles, locations, email addresses)
- Historical data about previous opportunities and deals
- Records of the engagements and interactions your teams have with your audience
- Reporting information on campaign performance, pipeline numbers, and revenue forecasts
Your entire business is reliant on your ability to process and store information. It’s no wonder that companies face huge losses when they don’t maintain their data correctly.
That 12% loss of revenue is a scary number, but it also represents a huge opportunity for your company.
The good news is that cleaning up your data is not a multi-year project. With the right technology and processes, you can start cleaning up your data quickly.
How Dirty Data Hurts Your Teams
The different constituents within your revenue team have different relationships with data, but they all rely on it to make their engines run. Here are some examples of how bad data can hurt their efforts.
Marketing
Data is the lifeblood of your marketing team. Marketers can only build effective campaigns if their data is accurate and up-to-date. Unfortunately, most marketers are very mistrustful of their internal data. “A mere 33% of marketers feel they can rely on their CRM data to make decisions,” Forbes reported.
Data inaccuracies can pile up fast:
- People change jobs
- Companies reorganize
- Purchased lists contain contradicting information
- Tools structure data sets differently
Have you ever received an email that starts “Hi John,” when your name isn’t John at all? How likely are you to give that company your business? That email goes straight to the trash because that company has shown they don’t know who you are or what you care about. You’re just a generic line in their (inaccurate) database.
Marketers are also affected by bad data in their attempts to deliver personalized experiences, create content that speaks to individual use cases, and understand who their target audience is.
Give a marketer a clean database and watch the wheels start turning as they begin pumping out personalized campaigns built on dynamic segments.
Operations
Many operations roles are devoted solely to ingesting, optimizing, and organizing data from different sources.
When the source for all of their work is incorrect, missing, or stored incorrectly, it brings any ops role to a screeching halt. Gone are the beautiful charts and graphs highlighting your team’s performance this quarter; say goodbye to smooth integrations and wide-spread tech adoption.
When your data is bad, your operations team now has to devote absurd amounts of their time in your CRM comparing lists, de-duplicating information, and becoming a data custodian. Didn’t you hire them to help streamline your revenue operations, not spend hours clicking the Delete button over and over again?
Sales
Without accurate data, your sales team will be spinning their wheels wasting precious time and resources that could be spent elsewhere.
How does an inside seller prioritize their next outreach when they have no clue what accounts are worth targeting? How can an account executive game plan for an upsell/renewal call when they’re in the dark about the company’s performance and new org chart?
How much time will be wasted in a day if every third phone number they call is incorrect? Each instance may seem insignificant. But sales teams working with inaccurate data suffer a death by 1,000 cuts.
Clean data makes it easier for sellers to identify the accounts that are in-market, the right fit for your business, and the right contacts to speak with.
6sense Helps You Trust Your Data Again
When you leverage the right technology, data hygiene happens automatically behind the scenes and you can get back to focusing on the most important part of your job — driving revenue.
6sense makes bad data a thing of the past by acting as the central nervous system for all of your crucial data sources. 6sense becomes your central hub for information from other platforms like:
- CRM
- Marketing Automation
- Analytics
- Market Intelligence
- RevOps
- Buyer Experience
When all of the data from those sources is housed in one central location, it becomes easier for your teams to access job-specific data and know that it’s reliable.
6sense doesn’t just act as a central repository for this information, either. It goes beyond that and actually helps improve the data being synced.
While standard contact data providers can give you general contact information like name, title, and email address, 6sense goes even further and supplies you with:
- Technographic data
- Firmographic information
- Buying team predictions
- Buying signals that were previously anonymous
6sense is able to become your trusted data hub by combining millions of third-party data points with your first party data to ensure your information is always correct and up-to-date. There’s no more need for manual processes like list uploads that can easily lead to duplicates and incorrect or outdated data.
Conclusion
When your data isn’t accurate, it hurts your business. Marketing, sales, and operations need trustworthy data to do their job correctly. The best way you can ensure you’re giving them the right information is to use a technology that will act as an unimpeachable source-of-truth, keep your data clean, and enhance the information you collect.
