For businesses, 2016 is the year when data will truly come
of age. We’re shifting toward a society where everything is connected, from the
watches we wear to the appliances in our kitchens. The data everybody generates
has the potential to give us unprecedented insight into the people who are
buying what we sell. For sales teams, it’s a gift.
Can the CRM play a part in the data revolution? How can we
modernize and take advantage? It’s time we made sense of data and put it to
work.
A New Approach to Data
My colleague Steve Webster wrote an interesting blog
about a sales call that he made last year. He’d identified a potential
lead, and reached out to them over the phone. After being passed a secondary
contact, he realized that he’d been talking to the CEO of the company. He
referred to this as his Sliding Doors moment, because in a
perfect world, he would have known that from the data at his fingertips.
Here’s how he feels about the importance of this correct, clean data:
The prospecting process can be transformed when we enhanceand clean our data.
Think of it this way. If a business holds valid data about
potential leads in its CRM, the sales department can shorten the time
needed to get in touch. The CRM can do more than just hold data: It can also
pull in enhancements from other sources.
Enhanced data would include:
- The CEO’s profile from LinkedIn
- His social media feeds
- His geographic location
- Pertinent information about his business
- Blog posts and other publications
Armed with this information, we’d be able to place a more
effective callimmediately. The CRM becomes a living, evolving customer
database. It helps us to speak to the decision maker with certainty, and it
makes that first conversation count.
Filling the Knowledge Gap
Enhancing data is a two-stage process.
Cleaning the Data in the CRM
When CRM data is contaminated, the single customer view is
not maintained and there is no single version of the truth. Marketing is less
effective, reports are incorrect and decisions are based on flawed data.
The first step – getting clean data – is
critical. We know that the data in the CRM is constantly decaying. We’re also
probably going to have some duplicate records, and records that are invalid;
they may fail to save properly. Enhancing all this dirty data is only going to
result in more confusion.
Enriching the CRM Records
Once we have a dataset that’s error free, we can start
bringing additional information in. We need to enrich data with external
feeds to give us a more rounded view of each individual within it. Enhancing
your data will provide you with more correct and complete data.
Clear Benefits
Using enhanced data in your CRM aids results. It gives you context,
which results in better insight. It cuts down on search, which improves ROI.
And it gets you to the right person faster.
The data your business already holds is a priceless asset.
If you want to get to the right person first time, clean, enhanced data could
turbo charge your ROI.
