How Bad Data Is Stunting Your Growth

Bad dataYour sales organization is killing it. There is obvious room for improvement, but the company is growing by more than 100 percent each year.

Everyone knows the data is dirty, but because the team is doing so well, it’s not top of mind. There is revenue to be made and data can be a priority for another day.

Sound familiar?

Hundreds of SaaS companies from Silicon Slopes to Silicon Valley are seeing this impressive spike, but ignoring the issue of bad data stunts your potential for growth.

The cost of bad data

Success and volume mean collection of lots of data, which can provide greater lift if utilized effectively.

But your big data technology is only as good as your data.

Siphoning through bad data will waste significant time and money.

Sirius Decisions claims that $100 is lost per bad record. According to MarketingProfs, $32,000 and 550 hours are lost per year per rep in companies that have significant data integrity issues.

Rep productivity

A vital part of the design phase in our Momentum business process overhaul includes sales rep interviews to understand the process, pain and trajectory of the organization.

Personally, I never end an interview without having asked the rep’s specific pain points. At least 75 percent of the time that answer includes bad data and, according to Fast Company, employees are 12 percent less productive when they are not happy at work.

We might not be able to make them happy by giving them free lunch every day, but we can certainly do something about the frustration of bad data.

Benefits of data scrubbing

We can’t ignore bad data. One of our customers proved this quickly in a data-scrubbing test run. They hired an offshore lead-scrubbing team, and the pilot team also spent time after business hours scrubbing.

With this approach, a pilot team in San Francisco was ready to dial during business hours with clean records. In the three-week trial, this team saw a 33 percent lift in demos over the baseline and an 18 percent lift in stage two opportunities.

According to MarketingProfs, bad data with an inside sales team of 100 can cost a company $3.2 million in one year.

So instead of stunting growth and ignoring the data, let’s keep our focus on the revenue. That means keeping some of our focus on the issue of bad data.

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Image credit: Montillon.a

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