Amongst the countless number of potential sales leads businesses receive daily, it is estimated that at least 40% of those leads are incomplete, duplicates, or invalid. In addition, even accurate leads may not meet marketers’ criteria. Sales teams often complain about not getting enough quality leads from their marketing team and with this dilemma in mind, it is pertinent that businesses improve the quality of leads they collect to drive impactful campaigns that keep sales calendars full to promote revenue generation.
Data deduplication reduces the occurrence of duplicates. It is the process that eliminates duplicate data entries, which can significantly reduce storage capacity requirements.
As marketing and sales efforts shift to become increasingly data-driven, marketers need to find innovative methods of making lead quality a top priority. A substantial number of leads can be generated, which most times end up as duplicates as a result of improper formatting, inaccuracies in spelling, and double data capture. As more data about that customer is collected, only one of the two leads gets updated. Sales reps or marketers may inadvertently add new data to each lead profile, causing the two leads to diverge farther from one another over time. This can have a significant negative consequence on the performance of a business's sales team, which they cannot afford.
Deduplication doesn’t only apply to leads, but also CRM platforms. Depending on the business, hundreds of new customers are added to the customer relationship management system each month. Adding so many new customers and transferring data frequently, increases the chances of data duplication to occur. With each new data transfer, these redundant data sets grow in scale and can cause issues with the customer relationship. To improve the efficiency of your customer relationships organizing the system to reduce these duplications becomes more and more important. Automating this process can also save the business money and you can use skilled employees for other important tasks. The effects of duplication have a substantial impact long-term.
Duplicate data is a big problem for all business departments, but its effects are most felt at a sales level. Here are 5 key areas in which data deduplication may improve efficiency. leads affect sales and marketing teams:
A single customer view is critical, and its benefits reverberate throughout your organization as a whole. Most businesses aim to track every interaction that they have with their customers throughout their journey with the company to gain a clear view of each customer.
A lack of a single customer view is probably the most detrimental aspect of duplicate data. Duplicate leads may receive updates separately, resulting in an incomplete picture of the customer. Most consumers will only engage with offers if they have been personalized, therefore, marketing teams use data collected from previous interactions with a customer to offer them the best products and services suited for their needs. A lack of a clear view of the customer reduces how effectively a business's marketing and sales teams can engage with their customers.
In addition to having a clear view of a customer, having accurate data is just as critical for your sales and marketing teams. Both teams need to be able to reliably access information about a customer.
If duplicate CRM data is a problem for sales reps and marketers, they start doubting the quality of leads they receive and end up frequently double-checking their databases before they engage with a prospect. Not only does this waste time, but it can wear on their performance over time.
This is particularly true for sales reps who receive commissions. The fewer sales calls that they can make, the less money they will earn.
A business's brand reputation is incredibly valuable and is something that all businesses never want to lose control of. However, with the explosion of the internet and social media, a business's reputation is the first thing to be negatively affected when customers have a bad sales experience. Sales reps that engage with a duplicate lead that has not been updated, are unable to identify if the lead has been contacted or what the outcome of previous interactions was. This can result in sales reps repeatedly calling or emailing a customer who is not interested in what the business has to offer, or contacting a customer to ask for information that has already been obtained by another sales rep. This negative interaction with customers can come off as unprofessional and cause frustration.
Customers today are quick to write negative reviews online when they have a bad experience with a company. In addition to leaving critical reviews, customers also vent their dissatisfaction on social media to their friends, family, colleagues, and the entire world to see, ruining a business's reputation.
When your sales and marketing teams have been impacted by the negative effects of duplicate data, sales reps and marketers will take it upon themselves to attempt to fix the issue. While this may seem like a good idea, using complicated Excel formulas to identify, merge, or delete duplicate records is not only complicated, but time-consuming as well — and often only identifies a portion of the duplicate data in a dataset.
In a database filled with thousands of different leads, it can take teams weeks to manually deduplicate leads. Even then, sales reps and marketers cannot be certain that they identified and fixed every duplicate lead in the process, or mistakenly delete a good lead. Further, the duplicates almost always need to be manually consolidated.
Most businesses strive to “become more data-driven” and to leverage more data to drive their decision-making processes. However, it is difficult to have faith that the right decisions are being made if businesses cannot even trust the quality of their own data. If a business’s forecasted sales reports and lead conversion rates are based on data filled with duplicate leads and other errors, sales and marketing managers will never truly be certain that their reports and decisions aren’t tainted by inaccurate data.
When sales reps and marketers are unable to effectively manage lead and customer data, it can become challenging to take advantage of whatever data they have on a potential customer and successfully lead the customer through the sales funnel. In order to overcome these challenges sales and marketing teams must work together to consolidate and effectively manage data to make sure it is free of duplicates.
Syantic allows businesses to integrate data from multiple disparate platforms used by marketing and sales teams. By consolidating data between systems, businesses will create a single source of truth for their data, thereby limiting the occurrence of duplicate data. Having duplicate and error-free data about a customer in a central integrated database environment, allows businesses to transition from a generic platform with messages meant to work for everyone, to targeted and personalized messages that deliver the Right Data, to the Right Person, at the Right Time.
Synatic’s Nimble, Simple, and Powerful Hybrid Integration Platform (HIP) can perform analysis on data and ensure that duplicate data is identified before it enters a business's CRM. In addition to this, Synatic can automate the process of extracting and cleansing data from Excel files or external databases and cleansing it, making it error and duplicate-free without the manual process. This proactive approach towards duplicate data management empowers sales teams to save money that would have been spent on data deduplication software, as well as save technical staff time performing tedious data deduplication activities.
Improved data integration means transparent data sharing between marketing and sales teams, opening the door for increased collaboration, and reducing pitfalls of duplicate leads. Most importantly, it will radically reduce wasted time and money and allow you to build that vital single view of your customer. If you’re searching for a way to improve data quality and evade the drawbacks of duplicate data, contact Synatic today.
Get the right data, to the right person, at the right time.
