Collecting bad or incomplete marketing and sales data is a common issue most of us have been faced with at one point or another. If your data is faulty, how can you be confident your marketing campaigns will drive results? How can you be sure you’re reaching the right people, or delivering the most effective messaging in your content? Inaccurate data can also impact the effectiveness of your demand gen efforts, especially the Sales Team’s capability to track and follow up with qualified leads.
Taking the steps to clean your data and improve your marketing operations process can help you make smarter business decisions. You’ll start to see more revenue generation from marketing, improved lead conversion rates and stronger customer relationships.
Chelsea Sisson, Marketing & Sales Operation Lead at Team Cymru, reviews the importance of collecting clean data for Sales and Marketing teams, effective methods for cleaning up bad data, and strategies to prevent accumulating inaccurate data in the first place.
Tune in to this episode of our Marketing Expert Chat series to start implementing Chelsea’s advice today!
CAROLINE: Hi, today I’m here with Chelsea Sisson. Chelsea is a marketing operations expert. She has spent her entire career in digital marketing. She is incredible when it comes to kind of putting all the pieces of marketing and sales campaigns together and make sure that they work and that they flow and that we get the right information from it. So, Chelsea, thank you so much for being with me today.
CHELSEA: Thank you so much for having me.
CAROLINE: Yeah, so today we’re gonna talk a little bit about marketing operations and specifically we’re gonna talk about bad data. It’s so difficult to have very clean data. So, I think it’s a pretty common problem to start somewhere and inherit bad data. My question for you is how do you go about cleaning this up when this is the situation you’re in?
CHELSEA: Sure, sure, it’s a good question. It’s one that I have encountered I think everywhere that I’ve worked, to be honest. So, it’s a very common problem.
First, I guess before we dive into the, how do you fix it? Why is good data important? And primarily that’s for accurate reporting. For marketing and sales, you have to know what’s working in order to make good investments. What’s closing deals? And if your data is bad or incomplete that’s just not gonna happen, you’re not gonna get the reporting that you need.
So, there’s kind of, I guess three pieces to fixing bad data. So, the first one is about prevention. You have to figure out why the problem has happened and how do you prevent it moving forward. This is always a step that I try to tackle first because if you have bad data coming in, it’s hard to stop the bleeding if you haven’t prevented it. So, some common ones that I’ve dealt with more recently in my career, duplicate leads, contacts, and accounts. Well, how do you prevent that? I’ve seen clients using web to lead forms with Salesforce which does not automatically prevent duplicates. So, moving your forms to your marketing automation platform can help there. Also training with reps, right, just on how you search in Salesforce, how you input data, that’ll help a lot. And then once you figure out the problem and how you’re gonna prevent it, it’s about making backup dates as much as possible.
So, with something like duplicates, that’s easy, you have to merge everything. And I say easy because it’s very time consuming, but that’s basically the process. As you merge, you pick the master records and you go with that. There’re some third-party tools that can help make that faster as well if you have the budget for them.
Then you have problems where it’s not quite that simple. So, attribution, for example, if that’s something that you’re missing in your data, the first step is defining, what is your attribution? What do you want that to look like with stakeholders? And then the second step is trying to backdate that as much as possible. And it’s not as simple as mass merging duplicates there. So, you have to make some judgment calls and do the best you can. But it’s the same general process is prevention, then backup dates, whatever that looks like, sometimes it’s very straight forward, sometimes it’s not. And the last piece which I hinted to with those is training users. So, they understand why it’s important to have good data. And about inputs, here’s some things like inputs on opportunities. The reps are always going to be doing that. There is not a lot that operations can control there. So, there it’s about thinking about how do you tease that information out of them. So A, it’s training, B, it’s forcing it with your tools, validation rules, you can’t close this unless you have this field filled out. And I think that helps get everyone a lot closer to where they need to be with data for reporting.
CAROLINE: All right, well, thank you so much. This is all great, very applicable information that we can all take and start applying today. So, thank you so much for your advice today.
CHELSEA: Thank you.