What is bad data?

The sales and marketing efforts at any company are mostly based on the data they have in their CRM. If a company has a list of 50,000 names, most of its outreach efforts – emails, cold calls, event invitations, etc., would be based around those people. Bad data means that the data in the CRM is either consistent, redundant, incorrect, or incomplete which ultimately takes a toll on the effectiveness of the outreach efforts.

So if you have 50,000 emails in your CRM but say 5% of them are redundant, 6% incorrect, 10% outdated, and 15% incomplete, your sales and marketing campaigns are running at only 64% efficiency.

To make matters worse, data isn’t eternal- people switch jobs, job titles change, companies upsize/downside, and more. By some estimates, data in your CRM decay at around 70% every year. To continue with our earlier example, if you are running at 64% efficiency at this moment, it would be reduced to a mere 20% in a year!

With that out of the way, the next question is – how exactly bad data hurts B2B companies? The answer is pretty simple – loss of productivity. As explained earlier, if a sales and marketing campaign runs at just 60% efficiency, that means 40%  of the efforts yield no result which is a huge leakage of productivity and by extension, revenues. It is estimated that the average company loses around 12% of its revenue due to bad data.

What’s next?

While the obvious answer to this problem is to clean data, the process is more complicated than it may initially seem. On the surface, you can assess the sources of data, audit the existing data in your CRM, and try to fill the missing gaps. The deeper problem, as mentioned before, is that of data decay. Even if you take extensive measures to ensure 100% accuracy of your database, it would start decaying from the very next moment. While you can theoretically, assign time and resources to periodically cleanse and update your data, the cost it would incur is simply disproportional.

The only practical solution is to outsource the whole process- instead of collecting data and then be bogged down with its maintenance, its far more efficient to simply subscribe to a reliable data platform like SalesIntel who would provide all the data you need and would be responsible for its upkeep for a fraction of cost that you would have to spend otherwise handling the process yourself.