High quality information is the foundation of high performing businesses. When your contact data is inaccurate, it can negatively impact performance across your entire organization. Ultimately, the potential, and often unforeseen, risks of poor data quality may be higher than you think.
Let’s expose several of them in this article.
Risk to Campaign ROI
One of the more obvious risks of inaccurate contact data is to the success of your marketing campaigns. When you forecast ROI for your campaigns and pipeline, you’re doing so with the whole database in mind. If you have contacts with inaccurate information, your actual results will differ strongly from what you projected. Not only will this usually result in lower than expected performance, but it will also affect other aspects of your business that rely on this data.
Risk to Sales Forecasts
Many sales leaders use contact information from lead gen efforts as a baseline for their sales forecasts. These forecasts include projections like expected lead count and expected lead conversion rate.
They get the sales engine ready to act on those leads as they flow in, but they, too, have made their plans and projections based on the full marketing list. If they expect 20 percent of the list will become a lead, but 10 percent of the list never received the email, the sales team won’t reach their projections or goals either.
Risk to Inventory Management
Operation teams also rely on CRM data and contact counts to create inventory forecasts. If an increase in demand is expected based on a particular contact list or marketing campaign, it may prompt the product team, warehouse, or fulfillment department to add inventory in anticipation of those orders. But if the number of contacts doesn’t match the forecast, yet another team’s numbers are off and money has been wasted getting products ready for sale that wind up on the shelf.
Risk to Sales Team Efficiencies
When accurate contact data isn’t collected for leads – such as during a trade show or when customers enter their information on web lead forms – it creates inefficiencies in lead follow-up. In some cases, typos in data fields make it impossible to connect with prospects at all, let alone in a timely manner.
Risk to Revenue
In the end, all of these risks pose an even greater one: a loss in revenue. Inaccurate data used in any aspect of your organization will result in lower engagement, lower performance, and lower sales. If your CRM is filled with inaccurate contact data, your company is losing money on every outreach initiative.
You also waste money when you send direct mail campaigns, but wind up paying for unnecessary duplicate mailers because your list isn’t clean, or because you miss out on the cost-savings of bulk rates because your data isn’t standardized to take advantage of such lower-cost options. And when you leverage marketing automation systems to send emails, you pay based on the number of emails you send, not on the number received. If you have database bloat from inaccuracies and duplicates in your email lists, that’s valuable spend lost each and every time you send a campaign.
Avoid the Risks of Poor Data Quality
With these risks lingering in the background, it’s important that you identify what’s wrong in your CRM database and address the issues quickly.
The good news is Validity helps you avoid the risk of inaccurate contact data, provides data quality insights, and gives you the solutions you need to prevent the negative business impacts that inaccurate data leads to. Check out our Data Management solutions to learn more about how Validity can elevate your business outcomes.