Data Quality is Your Sales 2.0 Problem!

You’re only as good as your data; garbage in garbage out – you’ve all heard the mantras on the primacy of data in business. Sales people have long bemoaned the fact that they don’t see the value of their CRM system, and that it turns them into a data entry clerk. It’s no surprise then that when you trawl through the average contact management system or CRM system, the lack of quality data and consistency of data standards is glaringly apparent.

No-one feels the data quality issue more keenly than your marketing department, who respond to your request for a targeted vertical or geographical campaign, but find that the key contacts are wrong or out of date, the quality of the data you bought in doesn’t live up to expectation, or the filter can’t be done because the vertical or geographical field has only been filled in some of the time. So your campaign goes out to a third of the market you were hoping to address.

Data quality has arrived at the top of the in-tray for the CRM providers as well. They know that they can produce the most comprehensive analytical and reporting tools, but if the underlying data is not trustworthy, then sales leaders don’t have the confidence to run their business on what the information is telling them.  

So where does that leave you? Forecasts get done in excel, or on paper, forecast calls and meetings take up valuable selling time, and still, across the industry, around 50% of forecast deals don’t come in during the forecast period. In the last couple weeks we have seen the major CRM providers attempt to address this, with the acquisition of jigsaw by salesforce.com and partnership between Oracle CRM on Demand and zoominfo.  

But will the data providers be able to make enough of an impact on data quality? It depends of course on the quality of their data, and if you’ve ever bought data, you’ll know that the quality, accuracy and currency of their data is not perfect, despite their protestations to the contrary.

In the Sales 2.0 context your reliance on the veracity of the information you act on is even more acute. The selling role is less face-to-face than it was. More of the buying process takes place over the web, and more of the selling role is conducted remotely or using Sales 2.0 resources like social media, so you’re even more reliant on the information being right. 

So I would offer 4 guidelines for making sure you’re selling and running your business off of good data:

1. Set out data entry standards and rules across your sales force
2. Minimize the data entry burden on your sales force.  Better to get fewer datapoints which are accurate than more datapoints which are not
3. Stress to your sales force that the highest earning members of your team have the most accurate information on their prospects and customers, period
4. Strive for buyer-driven objectivity to your information, not sales person-driven subjectivity

You’ll be much more successful if you incent around data quality. When it comes to CRM compliance, the carrot is up to 8 times more effective than the stick according to Aberdeen Group. And what better incentive for data quality than the numbers on the commission check.