CRM Data Integrity: Case Study and Workbook

Data integrity is the maintenance of data completeness and consistency over its entire life-cycle and usage in any system that stores, processes, or retrieves data.

Case study

Let’s start with the agreed-upon premise that each record in your database is worth around $1 per contact, and contact data degrades at about 40% annually.

Problem

A business I work with within the industrials market has 48k contacts in their CRM system. When I asked “How many of them are active?” the answer I got was “I don’t know.”

Understanding your data is so important. For this client, this is a $48k asset that they have little to no insights into. How many are customers and in what tiers? How many are active vs non-active? When were they last touched? Who needs to follow up with them? How many need to be put into marketing automation nurturing campaigns for prospects? How many need to be deleted? What are good-fits for their business? and many more questions.

It was suggested to just wash the contacts by sending emails and seeing which ones bounce and getting rid of them. That is a folly as each contact/prospect has a contract value potential beyond $1, plus that will greatly reduce your reputation score as you will get a ton of bounces, spam reports and that will decrease the ability to get future emails into inboxes and ultimately only help with 1 datapoint. These contacts were in there in the first place for a reason.

Solution

So what do you do? A data integrity initiative needs to be initiated to work through the data. Data needs to be segmented from the current customer base in CRM. First, we identify your database, size, scope, mapping, etc. We analyze your business to find out who your target customer profiles are. We work with you to build out those profiles and personas with attributes defined for these accounts. Doing this will help you expand your database going forward with lookalike audiences that will have a higher fit for you and ultimately a higher propensity close rate for your sales team.

This is time-intensive work that requires a sound plan and due diligence. Our team appends the data and corrects errors. Is the phone number, email address, job title, company info, etc., correct? We generally strive to get it from 60% decent to 90+% relevant.

Benefits

How valuable is that really to a business? It is pretty huge. The company ended up with more visibility into their overall dataset. They were able to reduce the size of their data by purging dead contacts reducing the fees paid to their CRM provider saving them thousands annually. They got a read on the size and scope of customers that we pooled into separate batches for 1:1 engagement with their professional services and sales teams. We built a lookalike audience profile and added new contacts to their system. We helped them launch a campaign using marketing automation to nurture the balance of the contacts/prospects that uncovered new business.

Their $48k asset is now worth 10X to the business.

If you are looking to launch a data integrity initiative, we can help.

You need a data integrity process. Here are some of the benefits of our Program:

  • Higher Email Campaign Conversion Rates.
  • Improved Reputation Score.
  • Increase in Opens and Click-Through Rates.
  • Better Quality MQLs Marketing Leads.
  • More Leads Passed to Sales for Dispositioning.
  • Increased Pipeline Growth.
  • Ability to Grow Sweet-spot, Good-fit Prospects.
  • Lower Cost of Contacts in CRM.
  • Persona Mapping for Targeting.
  • Total Addressable Market View.
  • ABM Prime Targets Defined.
  • Visibility of Current Customers.
  • Insights into Churn Potential.