Dan MoyleIf you take only one thing away from this article, let it be this:
The cost of bad data to companies around the world is staggering.
Simply the fact that you’ll increase efficiencies and decrease costs should be enough to get your attention.
But there are other benefits to keeping your data clean, especially in regards to your sales and marketing database.
What Exactly is Data Cleaning?
Data cleaning is a process where you go through all of the data within a database like your CRM. Then you either remove or update information that is incomplete, incorrect, improperly formatted, duplicated, or irrelevant. Data cleaning usually involves cleaning up data compiled in one area. For example, cleaning the data in your CRM so you're left with only the most relevant, high-quality data available for your sales team.
How do You Keep Your Data Clean?
Once you’ve cleaned your data, it’s critical that you keep it clean. You wouldn’t clean and organize your house once then leave it alone until you move out someday. Would you?
Keeping your data clean includes standardizing your data entry process (or implementing one in the first place!), validating data accuracy and monitoring errors.
Bad data has a severe effect on everything from customer service, compliance, marketing, ROI, and revenue for all companies.
If you want to ensure all of the data you’ve gathered is useful to you and your company, you need to ensure that having a good data cleaning strategy is a priority.
What are the Benefits to Data Cleaning Services?
So you’re ready to clean up your database and manage all that information a little better. Great! 🙌
Before you go in and start, let’s look at seven benefits to data cleaning services.
1. DIY isn’t Always Best
A do it yourself (DIY) mentality gets a lot of entrepreneurs far in life. It can also derail a successful endeavor quickly. DIY data cleaning could possibly save money, but it can also take a lot of time—you have to investigate the tools, learn the skills and actually do the work.
2. Happier Sales Force
Along the same lines as DIY, this one can create problems. Asking your sales force to work in a database takes them out of their zone of genius—working with opportunities and closing deals. If you ask your sales team to look through a database for consistency in phone numbers, you’re likely to have a mutiny on your hands! Keep your sales force happy and keep them selling!
3. More Efficient Sales Team
Once you’ve unlocked the happy sales force lever, you can move on to efficient sales. Clean data leads to better conversations, more efficient workflows and faster sales. If your sales force spends its time cleaning up data (and grumbling about it, see above) rather than making connections and developing relationships, what happens to you sales? Instead of spending time looking up whether phone numbers are right because they aren’t consistent in your database, or looking up if this Hector Gonzalez is the same as that hector e gonzalez, they can do what they do best: sell.
4. Happier Marketing Team
What creative person wants to spend their time managing a database? How many writers, video creators or visual media specialist look forward to comparing duplicate records and merging contacts? Keep your marketing team happy by keeping them in their zone of genius and creating that stellar content you love.
5. Smarter Marketing Decisions
Happy team = productive team. When your marketing department (even a department of one) can live in its sweet spot, you get a more productive team. You also get better marketing decisions with clean data. If they know more about your prospects, leads and opportunities, they can create a more contextual experience for them.
6. Happier Customers
When you have marketing and sales aligned with your buyer’s journey, your customers feel heard and seen. They’re happier with their interaction. It’s a great cycle to be in as a business. If your automation software sends a birthday greeting 6 months before their birthday, they now feel like just another number and will probably unsubscribe (that literally just happened to me, the writer of the article you’re reading right now). Clean data and happier, more efficient people on your team creating great content will lead to happier customers.
7. More Efficient Communications
This benefit to data cleaning services may live in other benefits you’ve read, but it’s important to bring to the forefront of our conversation. Clean data alone can help you create better messaging. Data cleaning services adds to that by allowing your business to focus on communicating those messages better. And more efficient communications leads to happier people in all areas of your business. When you spend less time fixing errors, you can concentrate on the revenue-driving activities vital to your business growth.
It’s Time to Clean Up Your Act Data
Cleaning your data and keeping it clean can help keep your business running smooth. As you can see from this list, you’ll find a ton of things clean data can do for you and your team.
From managing duplicate records to creating consistency in records, data cleaning services will definitely help your business grow better. Why do it alone? Enlist the help of an expert partner and move forward in your marketing, sales and service strategies.
Cleaning photo by Oliver Hale on Unsplash