There’s little doubt that data is a key asset to your business. Data is the first place leaders look to when envisioning go-to market expansion, analyzing sales effectiveness, or diving deeper into client satisfaction and retention. As a result, to ensure effective plans and strategies are made, businesses go to great lengths to ensure that their data is accurate, complete, and loaded with helpful information.
However, many organizations are depend on their marketing, sales and business development teams to control the quality of data in their CRM, marketing automation, and other systems. In theory, this is a sound strategy. The people with the most knowledge should be responsible for managing the upkeep of information. Right?
While this may work for some organizations in the short run, overtime it is not a sustainable practice. Teams have a hard time keeping up with the rate of data decay in today’s digital business climate, and on average 30% of your data annually will become obsolete. Consider the velocity and diversity of channels for communication today (email, text, phone, LinkedIn, Slack) and the speed at which information changes for both people and companies, it’s no surprise that data your people – the keepers of data – struggle to keep information up-to-date.
In order to keep pace, this article breaks down 3 ways your company can leverage data enrichment technology to offset the burden and cost of mundane data management, reduce human error and increase data accuracy for sales, marketing and business development teams.
- Collect More Data from Your Own Business Systems
- Increase Data Accuracy and Completeness of Information in CRM
- Save Hours of Time Each Week For Every User of CRM
1. Collect More Data from Your Own Business Systems
To make better informed business decisions, leaders and managers need clean data at the ready in a digestible format that is easily shareable with key stakeholders. That may seem like a straightforward statement but it is easier said than done.
Your organization is sitting on a wealth of data, but it isn’t always in a digestible format to discern insights or information to guide decision making. Data enrichment not only enhances the raw data you currently have collected, but it also gathers a more complete and accurate data set.
For example, Introhive data enrichment services and email signature scraper technology help firms identify and automate the collection of three times as many contacts that live in their email server that don’t live in the CRM. No longer is technology reliant on users to add and update information and automation is a simple and cost effective way to find missing contacts across your business ecosystem.
By pairing those two services together, your CRM contact records will also contain more publicly available intelligence for sales and marketing including social media profile data, mutual connections, shared relationships and more. With more details in your database, your sales, marketing, or business development teams will have a more complete picture of their contacts and accounts without having to do anything extra to get it.
2. Increase Data Accuracy and Completeness of Information in CRM
Data decays at an incredible rate. In fact, of all the contacts you have in your CRM, research from Gartner has shown that 30% of them will become inaccurate or out of date within a year. A recent Salesforce goes even further claiming upwards of 70% can become obsolete. So, how do you keep those contact records clean and accurate, protecting your insights against data decay?
Data enrichment not only helps you increase volume of contacts but it can automatically analyze your active database of contacts to analyze inaccuracies in your data like duplicates, wrong emails, incorrect business titles, job changes and more. For example, Introhive analyzes CRM data and benchmarks that data against a number of other data sources (e.g. email signatures, industry list providers, social media) for inaccuracies, misspellings, out-of-date information, and duplicates so that you don’t have to.
The system then prompts either the end user or your organization’s data steward to alert them of the discrepancy, and voilà data can be refreshed in CRM with the click of a button.
With the incorrect data identified, data enrichment can cleanse your database of bad or misleading information without needing your team to manually update, remove, or re-enter contacts over the course of the year eliminating the threat of data decay.
3. Save Hours of Time Each Week For Every User of CRM
CRM users spend an average of 5.5 hours each week logging activities, entering contacts, and updating records in the CRM system. And when you consider the amount of time they spend scouring contact and account records for valuable relationship insights to leverage in their client meetings, that time commitment rises.
Source: The Headaches of CRM Data Entry
As a fully automated solution, data enrichment services spare your team from having to spend hours each week inside of the CRM manually keeping information clean. Instead, they are free to invest more time engaging customers to develop deeper relationships, which in turn will lead to more revenue for the business.
Assuming that your employees earn $50 an hour – a very conservative estimate for most professional services firms – freeing up this time saves your organization an average of $13,200 per year per CRM user.
Data enrichment services is something that your organization can’t afford to ignore.
Improve Your CRM Data
Data is the foundation for making thoughtful and strategic business decisions. It’s the first place you look for patterns, insights, and trends that can help you make the right decision for your business.
But if you’re relying on mundane, manual work to keep your data accurate, you’re opening your database up to human error and greater data decay as your team can’t keep up with the rate at which information changes. Use data enrichment instead to make sure that your database is more accurate, complete and up-to-date for sales, marketing and business development teams.
Ready to take your data to the next level? Learn more about Introhive’s data enrichment services by requesting a demo.