The True Cost of Bad CRM Data

by | Mar 4, 2021 | Customer Relationship Management | 0 comments

According to IBM, bad data costs US businesses $3 trillion every year. Bad data breaks sales forecasts and undermines your plans for growth. Sales reps spend time chasing out-of-date contacts and leads can’t be properly prioritized, since their firmographics and demographics are unknown or inaccurate. Every time your business acts (or spends) based on inaccurate information, you take a step in the wrong direction. Some wrong turns can be easily corrected, while others quickly compound in severity. If your growth strategies are built on inaccurate data, you’re costing your business money, morale, and manpower.

Is Your Contact List Up To Date?

At the start of 2020, the turnover rate in medicine was at an all-time high according to FOND.CO: “Since 2014, the average hospital has turned over 87.8% of its entire workforce, and the data suggests this trend will only increase in the coming years.” Nearly half (42.3%) hospitals surveyed for the 2019 National Healthcare Retention Report anticipated an increase in their labor force, and the combination of high turnover and high growth creates a lot of new faces in hospitals and medical offices. Add a pandemic and the problem compounds! What does that mean for you as you try to sell your medical device or service? It means your CRM data is likely filled with junk.

What Is Bad Data? 

“Bad” data in your CRM doesn’t just refer to “wrong” data. It also encompasses missing, out-of-date, and incomplete data. The typical B2B MedTech buyer’s group averages seven decision-makers or influencers per company. Let’s say you have five perfect companies identified as great fits for your new line of products—are all 35 contacts engaged in some way? 

Example: For one of those companies, you only had the phone number and email address of the office manager whom the lead physician trusts to bring on new software to make the practice run more efficiently. You had a great conversation last month before she went on vacation, but you just followed up to find out she actually left for a position at another company before you could expand your conversation to more of the buyer’s group. How much time just became wasted because your data on the target company wasn’t comprehensive enough? That “immediately addressable market” of leads on which you built your sales forecast is built on shaky data.
Tip: Take steps to engage with and gather information on all of the buyer’s group! 80% of buying decisions involve a VP at some stage, but only 10% of CRM opportunities include an engaged VP.

Your Time Is Money

Think about how much time you spend on various weekly tasks. Internal meetings, lead outreach, data entry, sales meetings: all that effort takes time, time for which you pay your sales representatives to do work other than selling your products. How much of that effort is built on your correct understanding of a particular lead and your point of contact at that company?

In a recent article by Adam Thorp, CEO at JMA, he cites research firms Gartner and Experian Data Quality:

CRM departments without sophisticated data management tools result in a 25% reduction in potential revenue. Similarly, a survey by Experian Data Quality found that inaccurate data had a direct impact on the bottom line for 88% of responding companies, with the average company losing 12% of its revenue because of it.

Thorp also cites a metric—time—that easily converts to cost, referring to research by Source LeadJen Inc.: “Each year sales departments lose approximately 550 hours or 27.3% of seller time per rep annually from using bad prospect data.”  How much would your organization benefit from 550 better-spent hours per sales rep?

Fight Back Against Bad Data

Effective marketing and sales campaigns built from data in your CRM require complete, accurate, and valid data. This means you must regularly maintain your CRM. Enter contact data and communications promptly. Make sure everyone on an email chain or meeting makes it into your CRM and gets tied to that company’s profile. Your CRM likely has an email feature to allow you to write your prospects within the CRM and have it automatically tracked there. 

You also need to schedule time to purge duplicate records. When reviewing company accounts in your CRM, note what sales or marketing collateral they engaged with or gravitated towards on your calls or clicked on in your emails. Introhive shares six easy steps to follow when building good CRM habits. 

 

Good Data Is a Competitive Advantage

Combating bad data takes time, effort, skill, and transparency. Building good data habits internally reduces the cost of fixing bad data, and investing in the right CRM for your company arms your sales and marketing teams with the weapons needed to convert leads.

However, you can take it a step further. There are partners in your industry who have better and broader access to current, accurate data than you do. The ability to partner with data providers and relationship enablers can open important doors for your company. They invest significantly in acquiring and enriching large amounts of data and in mapping buyer behavior and industry trends to provide their partners with actionable insights. The right data partner will give you more intel than just a name, phone, and email address. Data partners can provide buying history, treatment profiles, psychographic data, and key motivators for your prospects. Before you’ve even said hello, you’ll have the intel to know what resonates with the prospect and can start building more meaningful relationships with that contact and their company.

Chronicle Health built the world’s largest database on the US healthcare economy and combined it with first-party buyer insights to understand the needs of healthcare professionals. Get data-driven insights to enable better relationships between buyer and supplier.