With the exponential growth of automation in organization architecture and processes, data quality becomes the key differentiator behind a successful sales strategy. The accuracy and quality of CRM data become pivotal for the sales team, be it for creating customer personas or generating revenue – the success of your sales strategies depends on data quality.
It is no surprise that sales leaders are striving to gain the most out of CRM data. But, without continuous maintenance of data, it can decay and become 'bad data' which can create multiple hindrances in the effective plan of action/ sales strategies. The bad data in your CRM refers to the 'wrong data’ which indicates missing, outdated, and incomplete data points.
Statistics show that customer data decays at a rapid rate of 30% and costs the average business 15% to 25% of revenue annually therefore, it is essential to cleanse and enrich your data sets in CRM. In fact, according to IBM, bad data costs US businesses $3 trillion every year. This mind-boggling factor is why data quality improvement should be every organization's primary concern.
Given that number, poor data can easily cripple your sales productivity, forecasting, and ultimately your business growth and revenue. On the other hand, high-quality data empowers sales reps to make decisions that will positively impact the success of an organization, improve its practices, and increase profits.
If bad data isn't detected and fixed on time, it can create many hurdles for your sales team. It will hinder the outbound sales process and waste a lot of time and effort. As a result, it will cause operational inefficiencies and unnecessary costs, and also impact your customer experience.
This blog will uncover how bad data affects businesses and why we should enrich it.
The Impact of Bad Data
CRM is a valuable asset for your sales team as it can help improve sales strategies in order to increase ROI. However, having bad data can be highly detrimental to your CRM system as it comes with serious drawbacks that directly impact sales professionals such as dead leads, bad decision-making, low productivity, revenue loss, and many hidden risks that initially, you may not even see.
According to Gartner's research, 60% of businesses don’t know the actual impact of bad data. This signifies that a majority of businesses lack fundamental knowledge of how the quality of the data affects their business outcomes. More notably, the research firm found that the average financial impact of poor data quality on organizations costs them anywhere between $10 to $14 million annually. Simply put, bad data is detrimental to business.
Therefore, if organizations do not sort obsolete data and continue to neglect their data enrichment process, it will highly affect their business development.
Why Should We Enrich Bad Data in CRM?
Maintaining high-quality data health remains a challenge for many organizations, which results in significant customer losses, sales deficits, and high employee turnover. Erroneous CRM data has several repercussions on the sales department that ultimately leads to a negative impact on the entire business.
There are various significant risks associated with bad data which entail sales leaders to clean and enrich the CRM database regularly which include-
1. Loss of Revenue
Bad data inevitably leads to poor decision-making that can have a direct impact right across the organization which results in lost revenue. According to the Gartner report, the decay rate of data is estimated to be 70.3% per year and organizations lose $13.3 Million yearly on average due to poor data. Yet, many sales professionals continue to undervalue the impact of bad data on their organization’s ROI.
To reduce costs, you must find an effective data cleansing solution that will help you to elevate the data quality and accuracy.
2. Poor Customer Relationship Management
Customer relationships hold a significant value in any organization and low-quality data can highly impact the target audience base. Bad data entail wrong names, undelivered messages, contact or gender mix-ups, duplicate communications, and more. So, if your CRM data contains inaccuracies, your sales team might be basing buyer personas on false information, which may lead to confusion and miscommunication on follow-up calls. As a result, it can have disastrous consequences for the entire sales team, such as deterring prospects, bad customer experience, and poor brand reputation. According to PwC's Future of Customer Experience report, 32% of customers will leave a brand after just one bad experience. Therefore, it is essential to keep your CRM data optimized.
3. Low Morale Among Your Sales Reps
Investing time and effort into the wrong prospect can be frustrating for sales representatives when relying on inaccurate data points. As sales team uses CRM data for prospecting, forecasting sales, and pipeline management, and also to determine how they will engage and manage prospects and customers. But inaccurate data skew reports and makes it difficult for sales reps to make informed decisions and take the appropriate actions during the buying stage. This inevitably jeopardizes deals leading to frustration and bringing down the morale of the sales team.
4. Poor Target Marketing
Time is an invaluable resource in the sales team and they rely on CRM data for their sales campaigns. So, having bad data can cause missed opportunities or dead-end leads and it will slow down the sales pipeline in turn dismaying the sales team. Without accurate data, your marketing communications won't reach their targets, wasting time, energy, and resources. Poor data leads to incorrect forecasting and bad decisions negatively affecting sales productivity and profitability. According to Gartner’s report, 40% of all business initiatives fail to achieve their targeted benefits due to poor data quality. On the other hand, optimized CRM data can help the sales team to create better firmographic information for lead generation enrichment, sales cycle analysis, B2B sales, etc.
Cleanse and Enrich Your CRM to Eliminate Bad Data Risks
The cost of Bad Data may be high, but it can easily be alleviated with better data enrichment practices. Being data-driven is about finding the key component that can help your organization operate efficiently. The purpose is to enrich your CRM data by identifying and mapping the organizations under relevant industries that can be used for structured marketing and sales campaigns.
Therefore, a planned approach to CRM data reduces difficulties for organizations while ensuring end-users acquire the data they need to retain crucial prospects and increase revenue. We focus on enriching CRM data in a way that can increase revenue and sales by implementing the most pertinent business-specific strategy.
