What is CRM Data Maintenance and How It Affects B2B Marketing
By Chen Karniel
The quality of your CRM data impacts your entire organization, bottom to top.
Your marketing teams rely on quality data to segment contacts, personalize messaging, and create targeted campaigns.
Your sales teams require accurate data to speak to your prospects’ biggest concerns.
Your customer support team needs accurate data for context in conversations with customers. Finance teams need accurate customer data for forecasting. Even your executive team relies on accurate CRM data for strategic decision-making.
Most organizations know this. Yet, bad data costs U.S. companies as much as $3 trillion per year, and up to 60% of organizations do not calculate the true cost of their bad data.
That signals that there is a lot of room for improvement in data maintenance in many companies. Companies of any size would be impacted by that much inaccurate data in their customer database, although they may be unaware of just how painful the impact may be, with many of the day-to-day issues flying under the radar.
That much “bad” data represents a huge problem for your marketing teams in particular. How do you speak to your customers’ biggest concerns if you can’t be sure that you know exactly who they are and what they care about? You need accurate, reliable data to be confident in your assertions.
Today, companies often lean too heavily on manual work to fix data issues, which can be extremely time-consuming and draining for your teams. Relying on your employees to export data, fix it in Excel using complicated formulas, and import it back into your CRM issue-free is a big ask.
Let’s consider how poor data quality impacts your marketing teams, slowing them down and giving them less creative options when launching new campaigns.
Impact of Data Quality On Your Marketing Efforts
While the impact of poor customer data quality is felt throughout your organization, it has an especially volatile impact on your marketing teams.
Everything that a marketing team does — every strategy employed, campaign launched, messaging delivered, & creative produced — is influenced by customer data. Or at least it should be.
That’s what great marketing teams do — understand their customers deeply and speak directly to them in a way that resonates. You can’t do that if you don’t know them, and you can’t be sure that you know them if you can’t rely on your data.
Let’s look at some of the specific ways that data issues and low-quality data can impact your marketing teams.
Segmentation
A big piece of any marketer’s job is segmentation. Or, the practice of analyzing long lists of customers and breaking them down into smaller lists so that you can more reliably speak to each segment’s concerns.
You wouldn’t market your B2B software product in the same way to both CEOs and Marketing Managers, even though both might be targeted buyer personas for your product. They have different needs and concerns. If you try, the language that you use will never fully resonate with both.
Source:: HubSpot Blog
