5 Key Benefits of Improving CRM Data Quality

Great CRM data quality provides huge competitive advantages over competitors neglecting their CRM.

Data is a crucial hurdle for today’s innovations. Artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, and account-based marketing need data to succeed.

Companies that can’t fix their data problems will begin falling behind. If you don’t have a solution, now is the time to start.

Why should you take action on your CRM’s data quality today and before competitors? These 5 insights break it down.

Account-Based Marketing Requires Data Integrity

Account-based marketing (ABM) is here. Leaders like Sangram Vajre, John Barrows, and Matt Heinz see ABM as the future.

Yet, one roadblock for new ABM adopters is the demand for accurate and up-to-date data. Lack of data quality makes it difficult to plan and manage an ABM strategy.

Without the right foundation, your team becomes reactive to new data needs. Sooner or later, they must make up the difference in quality to make ABM work.

This inefficiency decreases the performance of ABM and makes it difficult to improve.

Now compare an ABM strategy with the right data investment. A recent MarTech article put cleaning CRM data as the first step to AVM.

Be proactive and data-driven in ABM. It decrease the time, money, and effort needed to put strategy in place. In addition, it creates a smarter foundation for a successful strategy.

Bad Data Makes it Hard to Sell

Great sales performance needs an effective sales process. Because CRMs is key in sales, data quality can make a difference in improving performance.

It’s difficult to create a repeatable sales process with poor CRM data quality. It can lead to longer sales cycles, lost business, and a decrease in performance.

In fact, a study by Gartner found that neglecting your CRM can decrease revenue by 25%.

To create winning sales performance, your team needs easy access to well-curated customer data. This creates an environment where reps can spend their time more efficiently.

For competing reps, those without a solution for their CRM data will start at a disadvantage.

Data Decay in CRMs Can Create Exponential Problems

Because business data becomes out-of-date over time, today’s CRM data would be obsolete in as little as 3 – 5 years. In fact, companies lose 20% or more of their data per year to this data decay.

This loss occurs because data points will change over time. Employees change jobs. Companies go out of business. New email patterns emerge.

Data decay can quickly become a big problem if it’s not addressed. Yet, many companies ignore it, allowing their CRM to decay and become obsolete.

This does more than just hurt sales performance. Eventually, data decay creates unusable data that can halt your efforts. From there, leadership must clean the data buy new data altogether to fix the CRM.

Great CRM data quality mitigates data decay in an inexpensive way by being proactive.

CRM Data Quality Dictates Analysis & Forecasting Accuracy

Modern CRMs offer capabilities that greatly improve reporting, analysis, and forecasting.

Despite these breakthroughs, CRM data quality determines forecasting accuracy.

Bad data creates limited visibility and skewed conclusions. Even the best tools provide misguided insights with the wrong data.

With the right intel, you unlock better forecasting accuracy. This puts your company in a good position to improve and be ahead of the game.

Well-Curated CRMs Decrease Overall Data Costs

Business data is the oil behind generating revenue. It’s crucial to find cost-effective solutions for collecting, storing, and curating CRM data.

The quality of your CRM data dictates the costs of maintaining it. This is because data costs rise due to age, volume, and how it’s managed.

Without a good starting point, you’ll be fighting an uphill battle.

The solution to this issue is a data management process. A study by Aberdeen Group found proper data management reduced storage costs by 7% and management costs by 5%. For reps, the report saw employees decrease the time spent searching for data by 79%.

We Need to Evolve

Data is currency in the business world. The competitors with the best data will have huge competitive advantages over incumbents. Companies need to invest in keeping their CRM up-to-date if they want to evolve with the industry.