We all know this story. Salesperson X logs into Salesforce. Notices a new lead assigned to her. Picks up the phone to call and speak with this lead and hears, “You have the wrong number” or “That person doesn’t work here anymore” or “The number you have reached is not in service”. The example could go on and on. It happens every day to every salesperson.
Marketers have it rough too. They pull a list of everyone who matches a particular segment that they would like to target, develop their email content, press send and then they look at the activity report. A huge number of undeliverable email addresses, hard bounces, soft bounces, and more. Performance rates plummet. Before you know it, both parties are pointing at each other playing the blame game for who caused the problem, who is this culprit for all of this bad data?
I’ve spoken with enough companies about their data issues to know that this is a universal problem. Everyone has the same difficulties with unreliable contact data. For most organizations, this simply goes back to not having enough safeguards in place to stop this data from entering their systems and not enough validation checks along the way.
Bad Data Checkpoint
Within the CRM, having a real-time data check put in place can be one of the biggest solutions in stopping inaccurate contact data from making it into your system. In a discussion with a customer recently, they described this as a “Bad Data Checkpoint”. In real-time, before you even save your Salesforce record, you can easily validate that all of the contact data for a lead, contact, or account is accurate. You can put this service in place for when data enters your CRM, whether the data makes it into the system from a salesperson typing it in or from a marketing campaign upload. For your marketing, sales, and even your customer service teams, this means that they can rely on the data so that they can confidently connect with your customers and prospects.
On-Going Maintenance
Cleaning the data as it enters your system today, is a huge help. Your team will instantly notice the difference. The contact data that they rely on, whether it’s the phone number, email address, or even postal address, will now be accurate; however, this only fixes the issue today.
MarketingSherpa estimates that contact data degrades at a rate of about 30% per year. This means that the data that you have in your Salesforce instance is likely to only be 70% reliable in the months to come. This makes sense. Think about how many people in your company change jobs every year. If they are in one of your vendor’s CRMs, their email address and phone number are now no longer going to reach that former employee. In order to overcome this, it’s an industry best practice to re-validate your data every quarter to ensure that you stay in front of this data degradation issue.
Learn More
By following both sides of this equation, the real-time validation and the on-going cleanse of your database, you’ll be able to have confidence in your contact data. Last year, in BlueWolf’s The State of Salesforce annual report, the second largest issue identified by respondents was bad data. To learn how you can quickly and easily clean your bad Salesforce CRM contact data, please check out our upcoming webinar on Wednesday, November 18.
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