Having good data, often called clean or sellable data, is mission critical to a sales organization. This must be on your priority list!
Just like humans need healthy blood flowing through our bodies to stay alive, sales organizations need healthy data flowing through their processes and systems to stay alive.
When I refer to the term sales data, I am referring to data elements that are used by a sales organization to manage and drive business. These include company contact information, order history information, product attributes, pricing tables etc.
On the operations side, data drives almost everything from setting quotas, to designing sales territories, to reporting on results. Business critical decisions are made based on data. On the front line sales side, good data can help propel and increase sales productivity, while bad data can cause morale problems and halt sales output. Also, if sales or revenue data is suspect, then sales reps and managers will not be paid correctly.
If you are in charge of a sales operations team, continually cleansing and enhancing data should be on your top priority list. If you are in charge of a team who reports and analyzes data, then it’s your responsibility to ensure queries are set up correctly and spreadsheet formulas are correct.
Mark Goloboy, Director of Global Data Governance for Monster.com recently shared, “ Poor data quality is a symptom of other issues. Organizations must focus on upstream data quality and correct business process and systems issues to succeed. Inconsistent information is the reason why many sales initiatives fail. One bad lead can cause a rep to ignore a whole program.”
Fellow bloggers Ardath Albee and Adam Blitzer both wrote great posts on this subject.. Ardath’s post “Lift Revenues 70% By Cleaning Up Dirty B2B Data” focuses on the benefits of clean data. Adam’s post “Top 5 Ways to Keep Your B2B Web Lead Data Clean” focuses on how to do this.
Additional reading on this blog: For a further discussion of clean data, you may want to read our post on how to address the challenge of Getting Accurate and Timely Data into your CRM System.
Maintaining clean data should be a team effort between sales, sales operations, marketing and technology. All three groups are leveraging the data for department specific and company wide activities and data cleansing efforts should be in synch.
How clean is your data????
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I agreed with this article. A good data is very crucial for sales & marketing people.
They need good data to launch their sales & marketing campaigns like email campaigns, direct mails, fax campaigns and etc.
We are now understand that data is knowledge and it is the key to every success stories in sales & marketing.
Most large companies, they will engage data cleansing services, this because, an experience IT Manager, is aware that a well design system can only find 50% of dirty data.
The rest is considered as acceptable losses.
Data needs to be clean and treated to achieve successful business.
sophia[Click to quote this in your comment]
Great point. In addition, you don’t need to stop at cleansing your ops data. Each document which is produced by your company should have at least a yearly review. And the list doesn’t even need top stop at documents, this holds true for processes, lists and most anything else.
-Michael
Michael[Click to quote this in your comment]