You’re making business decisions on the basis of either best assumptions or, much worse, completely incorrect data if your CRM doesn’t contain enough prospect and client information. It is no longer acceptable in today’s market to lead your company by instinct or intuition. Sure, those are significant, but you need a data-driven approach to ensure that you’re giving your company the most suitable advice possible. Inaccurate CRM information has a variety of negative effects, including a lack of contact and company segmentation, incorrect sales forecasts, and poor hand-offs between marketing and sales.
Irrelevance of CRM Data for Identifying Target Customers
Creating buyer personas or ideal customer profiles, semi-fictional representations of people or businesses you’ll target, is an early step in developing a marketing plan. Combine your CRM’s data (e.g., job title, company size, tech stack) with anecdotal information from your team’s interactions with customers (such as pain points, typical interaction types, and preferred communication mediums). The conclusions you reach will not be a real reflection of your target market if your CRM contains faulty or incomplete information.
The key ingredient of inbound marketing is custom-built, targeted and engaging content that is designed to attract qualified leads to your site. You’ll waste time and money creating messaging that doesn’t apply to your target customers’ interests or requirements if you made incorrect assumptions when developing target customer profiles. When you’re spending time generating the content, it’s easy to get carried away and forget about your goals. As a result, your material won’t attract the traffic or engagement you desire, or your staff will waste time engaging with prospects who aren’t qualified.
Difficulties Segmenting Contact Data
Once you’ve gotten leads to your site and added them to your CRM, personalisation may help you develop those relationships. You lose the capacity to implement customised lead nurturing strategies if your CRM has incorrect or incomplete information. According to Neil Patel, 72 percent of customers say they only engage with customised messages, and the majority of them expect companies to comprehend their specific requirements. However, highly personalised advertising demands up-to-date, complete, and accurate contact information.
Personalisation can provide significant advantages, and getting it wrong might result in irreversible damage. Assume you’re looking for a house in Denver and have been working with a local realtor who has several offices throughout the city. If you receive listings for houses in Portland, you may get the impression that the realtor doesn’t really understand or care about your requirements. Personalisation is an extremely potent tool for marketers, but poor use of it can be devastating.
Inability to Create Segmented Sales Forecasts
Improving forecasting accuracy is always a top priority for any sales leader. A lack of data clarity and accuracy is frequently an impediment to this process. Maintaining accurate data structures is essential in being able to segment current clients by industry, product, or service they’ve purchased, among other things. You may examine typical KPIs like customer lifetime value, closing percentage, and average deal size for each segment you’ve established if you have the proper data in place.
Once you’ve got access to up-to-date, correct consumer information, you may use them in a forward-looking way to create comprehensive forecasting rather than relying only on your salespeople’s projections. If you know the typical deal size by category, you can base your expectations on a more accurate method than relying on a company-wide average.
Miscommunication Among Teams
Inter-team handoffs can be challenging at the best of times. As a result of establishing a connection with an incumbent rep, prospects or clients don’t want to start over with a new one. Furthermore, internal misunderstandings might result in a botched handoff that leads to negative client experiences. In the cases where prospects receive an email with incorrect customization or are inaccessible due to bad contact information, poor data management can be deadly to your customer connections. In fact, a 2017 research found that 33% of customers would consider switching providers after just one bad experience.
You’ve got dirty data. Now what?
Take a long, deep breath; you’re not alone. Every company you see will have at least some of the problems described above. Data clarity and honesty are ongoing issues that businesses must address, plan for, and enhance.
Building data integrity isn’t easy, and it can’t be resolved with a snap of the fingers. It necessitates a practical approach that includes appropriate tools and resources. Your team can improve their CRM with new information for current contacts and a continuous flow of clean, actionable contact information for new prospects by aligning HubSpot’s data structuring capabilities with ZoomInfo’s data.
