Is Poor Data Hygiene Holding Back Your Business?
As mass digitization steadily redefines the corporate landscape, data-driven insights continue to play a key role in helping to streamline processes and optimize company growth. An invaluable resource that organizations rely on to make quality and informed decisions, this information is critical to the overall success of companies large and small. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for businesses to neglect the importance of data management, which can result in a range of losses — missed opportunities, oversight of risks, and slower time-to-decision.
Dirty Data
Any data that lacks consistency or accuracy qualifies as dirty data. Whether from human error or as the result of faulty equipment, there are numerous reasons why data may contain discrepancies. Perhaps information was being extracted from multiple sources with conflicting naming conventions. Maybe duplicate entries were submitted through multiple channels, or data was improperly transmitted from one device to another. In some cases, it’s empty data fields, incorrect or out-of-range values, or poor data input field practices.
Whatever the reason, poor data hygiene can impact business departments who depend on this information.
Marketing & Sales
Sales and marketing teams are particularly at risk of being affected by stale data. From prospecting leads to sending marketing emails, it's critical that these teams have the correct information to nurture the sales cycle and to manage existing relationships effectively.
Sale Pipeline
The pipeline is an important tool that helps companies manage the sales cycle and determine incoming revenue. Comprising prospect and existing client information, it indicates how close a salesperson is to closing, renewing, or uplifting a deal.
To develop a solid pipeline, all prospect contact information needs to be accurate and up to date. With an estimated 40% of all leads containing bad data, inconsistencies can cost hours, if not days of wasted time and energy spent prospecting dead leads. Based on the input, there are several reasons why pipelines may consist of stale or dirty, inconsistent data. Maybe multiple sales representatives added the same contact without communicating with each other, or contact information is out of date. Or maybe you’re using multiple CRMs or other tools that feature conflicting data.
Whatever the reason, you can’t nurture leads with dirty data, which is why these discrepancies go beyond affecting just one sale and can instead impact the company’s overall forecasting and revenue growth.
Marketing Campaigns
Beyond wasting your sales reps’ time, stale or incomplete data can also hinder marketing efforts.
For example, in a segmented marketing campaign, accurate and up-to-date customer and prospect data ensures the correct individuals are receiving relevant marketing content that will effectively drive results. Incorrect data may result in a middle-aged female receiving messaging intended for a 30-year-old man. This doesn’t just drive potential customers away and diminish the chance of a sale (“clearly this company doesn’t understand me or my problems!”) but these types of mistakes can have far-reaching effects when it comes to how your brand is perceived.
Business Innovation
Lack of data hygiene can also stunt business innovation. At Prime 8 Consulting, we use data to analyze consumer engagement, develop products, and execute conversion-driven marketing campaigns. If the right teams don’t have access to the right data, it’s harder to spot trends, opportunities for optimization, or derive insights that can be turned into competitive advantages.
Data is the foundation of any modern and reasonably mature company. This data can be used to create incredible products and experiences, but without the right information, opportunities are never uncovered, trends are never seen, and ideas might veer off-track.
Data Clean-Up
There’s a simple and effective solution to help correct these errors and create one central location that organizations can refer to for correct information: data maintenance. Data hygiene management gives your team an opportunity to remove duplicates and update information, as well as clean up data across various channels and touch-points. Cleaning up stale data benefits more than just a single department, it extends to the entire organization who relies on up-to-data and healthy information databases.
Aggregate Data Across All Points of Entry
Performing an efficient audit requires pulling information across all points of entry. As it's likely your organization inputs data from multiple sources, this will be a good opportunity to compare against existing material as you aggregate information into one Single Source of Truth (SST).
Single Source of Truth
A Single Source of Truth (SST) provides teams with the power to not only control their data, but properly understand it. Clean up information, dispose of duplicates, and add any enrichment data to make your SST even more valuable than it was to begin with.
Hosting information in one centralized location for teams to access makes it not only easier to retrieve information, but more effective in helping to manage the quality of it.
Establish Efficient Data Input Processes
Albeit necessary, cleaning up data is a tedious effort that costs time and money. To eliminate the need for frequent clean-ups, it can help to implement company-wide practices that set the standard for data collection, entry and maintenance.
Establishing internal processes for employees to follow will help reduce human error and keep your organization’s data base healthy. Support these practices with standard maintenance processes that allows teams to not only zero in on dirty data but identify potential sources of entry so they can develop solutions to stop it.
Final Thoughts
Remember, quality information allows us to make quality decisions. As a data-driven environment, we rely on these insights to help fuel innovation, manage processes, and connect with our customers. By prioritizing data hygiene and creating a SST for teams to access, organizations can reduce errors, increase revenue, and boost their overall growth.
At Prime 8 Consulting, we strive to help our clients get the most out of data. We’ll help you implement robust solutions that target and use the right data to take the guesswork out of the equation. Reach out to bi@prime8consulting.com to explore how we can help.
