THE HIGH COST
OF BAD DATA
SOME THINGS GET BETTER WITH AGE.
YOUR DATA IS NOT ONE OF THEM.
HENRY SCHUCK
Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer
Henry Schuck is a leading entrepreneur in sales intelligence and
lead generation. Having founded IT sales leads intelligence company
DiscoverOrg in 2007 when he was 23, he has led the company on a
rapid growth path.
Under Henry’s leadership, DiscoverOrg built the industry’s most
accurate, highest-quality contact database, not through technology
like webscraping or crowdsourcing but by employing a team of
more than 100 data analysts who continually call into thousands
of IT, marketing and finance departments. DiscoverOrg was
recognized for the quality of its datasets with both a Stevie® and a
CODIE award. It was also named a Leader and ranked Number One
in customer service by G2 Crowd.
THE HIGH COST OF BAD DATA
SOME THINGS GET BETTER WITH AGE. YOUR DATA IS NOT ONE OF THEM.
Table of Contents
What is Bad Data? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
Ignorance is Not Bliss. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6
How Does Good Data Go Bad?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
When Does Good Data Go Bad?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Consider the Source. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
The Real Cost of Bad Data. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14-19
Data Health Check . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
A Better Data Solution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
Dedicated Staff. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24
Sales Intelligence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
So Fresh and So Clean. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
Getting It Together. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
About DiscoverOrg. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
WHAT IS
BAD DATA?
WHAT IS BAD DATA?
Incomplete, inaccurate and empty fields within your database or Customer Relationship
Management (CRM) platform are all forms of Bad Data. No organization is immune to it.
Many are aware that Bad Data exists; however, few realize the high costs involved
with ignoring it. And fewer still take proactive measures to combat and treat the source
or cause of the Bad Data. Which category do you fall into?
COMMON DATA FIELDS THAT ARE
NOTORIOUS FOR HOUSING BAD DATA INCLUDE:
Wrong phone number
Outdated physical address
Wrong title or job function
?! No phone number or no email address
Wrong email address
... Misspelled or incomplete company name
Most companies struggle to keep their data up-to-date and accurate. Missing,
incorrect and stale data wastes time and money. However, keeping data constantly
updated and verified requires a lot of time and resources, causing many companies to turn
a blind eye to the problem that seems too big to address within current staff and budget.
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IGNORANCE IS
NOT BLISS
IGNORANCE IS NOT BLISS
Data quality is too often not considered a critical success factor in prospecting. More often, sales and marketing
professionals tend to focus on the big stuff. They consider outsourcing nurture campaigns or keeping things inhouse; they consider the expertise of the team doing the outreach, and even what technologies are needed to
facilitate and track the performance of their prospecting efforts. They analyze open rates and response times, hours
on the phone, meetings set, opportunities opened. However, the devil is in the details. All of these efforts start with
contact information and (ideally) intel on the targeted prospect. The quality of this data is often overlooked.
EACH YEAR SALES DEPARTMENTS LOSE
APPROXIMATELY 550 HOURS AND $32,000
$
PER REP FROM USING BAD PROSPECT DATA.
Source: LeadJen Study
Good data is an essential element in successful sales campaigns.
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HOW DOES GOOD DATA
GO BAD?
HOW DOES GOOD DATA GO BAD?
Sales data changes often. It is a reflection of the dynamic nature of industries,
organizations, and employees. In order for your sales and marketing efforts to produce
the best results, you need to have the most updated information readily available. Change
is a constant in modern business, which means that your data has to be constantly
updated in order to stay valid… and even useful. How does your data go stale?
PROSPECTS:
• change roles within companies
• leave their current companies
• change phone numbers
• take on additional responsibilities within their current companies
… AND NO ONE UPDATES THE RECORD
IN YOUR DATABASE OR CRM.
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WHEN DOES GOOD DATA
GO BAD?
WHEN DOES GOOD DATA GO BAD?
So, you’ve updated the data. Check. Now, you should be good for a while, right? It is not that simple. Data is in a
constant state of change, like the people and organizations that it represents. How often do these critical contact
data fields change? The answer is, more often than you think.
•
40% of email users change their email address at least once every two years
•
15% change it one or more times per year
•
20% of all postal addresses change every year
•
18% of all telephone numbers change every year
•
21% of all CEOs change every year
•
25-33% of email addresses become outdated every year
•
60% of people change job functions within their organization every year
IN THE NEXT HOUR,
58 BUSINESS ADDRESSES WILL CHANGE,
11 COMPANIES WILL CHANGE THEIR NAMES,
AND 41 NEW BUSINESSES WILL OPEN.
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CONSIDER
THE SOURCE
CONSIDER THE SOURCE
?
?
?
What is worse than good data that has gone stale? Data that was never correct or complete in
the first place. Your CRM or database is only as good as the data that it contains. However,
sales and marketers alike often look to outside resources for contact data – purchased lists or
databases – without considering where the data came from or how it was collected.
Commonly-sourced methods for purchased contact data are subject to a variety of issues that result in poor
data. If you are using commonly sourced data and are not applying a generous dose of effort yourself to verify
the accuracy of the data as well as update and append the data frequently, then your database will never be
accurate and your sales and marketing efforts will miss opportunities.
WHAT ARE SOME OF THE SHORTCOMINGS OF COMMONLY-SOURCED DATA?
• End-user submitted data: Reliance on end-users to submit and update their data depends of
the motivation of those users to actually change their information. This information usually lags
and does not often include updated email addresses or direct dial phone numbers. The utility of
this kind of data is limited.
• Technology-sourced data: Often data providers use webscraping and search technologies to
create and update data from what is available openly on the internet. There are two problems
with this method: 1) There is no way to actually verify that the data is correct; and 2) This does
not provide information beyond what your sales people can gather on their own.
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THE REAL COST
OF BAD DATA
THE REAL COST OF BAD DATA
Bad data can cost companies money in a variety of ways.
Bad contact data can
increase the acquisition
cost by $11 / record.
The soft costs of bad data include the lower satisfaction
rate of employees as they experience less success,
spending a large portion of their time doing background
research or working through call lists that have low
yields. The hard costs include the opportunities that
Source:
http://blog.eloqua.com/the-high-cost-of-bad-data
the organization misses out on because they were not
talking to the right people or reaching out to the right
organizations as these prospects were seeking solutions.
Not to mention, the time wasted! These impacts are
sometimes not visible to organizations until they have
been resolved. Managers may not realize how bad
data has impacted morale until good data is available and they
see the difference in the staff and realize the increase in efficiency.
JUST BECAUSE YOU DON’T KNOW ABOUT LOST SALES
DOES NOT MEAN YOU HAVE NOT MISSED THEM.
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THE REAL COST OF BAD DATA
Sales reps spend 1/3 to 1/2 of their cycles trying to reach contacts that are no longer
at their respective companies or in the same position. Besides the hard dollar costs
associated with this wasted time there is also a significant opportunity cost associated
with the time that could have been spent engaging with good prospects.
Sales calls get routed to vendor hotlines or to gatekeepers
who may not even be aware of the organization’s need
for a solution. These calls almost never get to a decision
maker. Sales reps waste valuable time navigating
corporate switch-boards and operators instead of
being able to contact prospects directly.
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THE REAL COST OF BAD DATA
LeadJen examined 12 lead generation
campaigns across industries representing
over 100,000 connections made by phone
or email. Their study found that conducting a lead
generation program without first investing in cleaning
data wastes 27.3% of each sales rep’s time, or 546
hours on average a year per rep!
Source:
http://Ieadjen.com/data-roi-study-cost-not-vaIidating-data-whitepaper
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THE REAL COST OF BAD DATA
Without proper email marketing practices, marketing emails go to dead records, get
caught in spam traps and honeypots. Email deliverability drops and your organization
ends up on vendor blacklists. Without complete lead records, marketing automation
systems are unable to segment properly, and your emails end up with untargeted
messaging - demolishing open, click-through, and response rates. Without updated
physical addresses, direct mailers get sent to old records, often being returned to sender
– wasting time and money.
MARKETING SHOWS LOWER OPEN,
CLICKED AND CONVERTED RATES AS IT
PROSPECTS TO FALSE OPPORTUNITIES.
DEAD
END
Marketing cannot produce leads that are better than one-off, single point-offailure opportunities - Sales reps call the single contact a few times then close
the opportunity. All because of Bad Data!
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THE REAL COST OF BAD DATA
MarketingSherpa found that every year
25-30% of data becomes inaccurate. They
concluded that lead generation programs
fueled with incorrect data results in a drastic decrease
in marketing effectiveness and sales conversions.
Source:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com
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DATA HEALTH
CHECK
DATA HEALTH CHECK
HOW DO YOU KNOW IF YOUR DATA IS BAD?
DO THIS QUICK 5-POINT DATA HEALTH CHECK TO FIND OUT:
YESNO
1. Do you trust your data?
2. Does your data quality satisfy the needs of your organization?
3. Do you have processes in place to keep your data updated?
4.
Does your data synchronize automatically across the systems and
sources your staff uses?
5.
Does your sales team have updated data so that they can spend
their time selling, not researching?
If you answered NO to even one of the above questions, you should spend some time
reviewing the quality of your data and evaluating the solutions outlined on the following pages.
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THE BETTER DATA
SOLUTION
DEDICATED
STAFF
DEDICATED STAFF
Dedicating a team to manage sales and marketing data is one reliable option for keeping your
data clean. In fact, list and data sourcing were found by The Bridge Group to be the top
2 challenges of over 600 surveyed Technology Sales Executives. They recommend that
“companies hire full-time resources to do nothing but keep contact and account data clean.”
If you were to create a perfect team to update and add to your current prospect database, what would that team
look like? What would the process look like to provide optimal quality data, constantly updated, with reliable
results?
• Start with live, US-based employees
• Call into prospects, verifying contact data, immediately updating inaccuracies in a central database
• Use technology to verify that email addresses are correct
• Identify projects that targets are working on
•
Identify the decision making structure at target accounts to ensure that your reps are
not talking to people who have no purchasing or decision making authority
• Refresh contact data at least once every 90 days
•
Add new hires at target companies to a central database and map those new prospects into the organizational chart
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SALES
INTELLIGENCE
SALES INTELLIGENCE
Most organizations do not have the resources available for a dedicated team to manage contact data. Fortunately,
sales intelligence solutions exist to fill in the gaps and provide insight into your top prospects. However, not all
sales intelligence solutions are created equal. What should you look for in a sales intelligence provider?
Here are 5 steps to help you select a Sales Intelligence Solution:
Assess how they collect data. Where does the data originate? How is the data verified? Is the
source reliable?
Evaluate the accuracy of the data. How is the data verified? Does it come with guarantee? Are you able to
sample the data to verify yourself?
Demo the interface or integration. How easy is it to access the data? How intuitive is the tool to use? Can you filter and search the data to easily find your target audience? Does it integrate with other tools that your team already uses?
Gauge the depth of the intelligence provided. Are the phone numbers direct dials or main line? Does it provide multiple points of entry in the form of a detailed department org chart? Does it provide insight into current spending and initiatives as well as leadership changes?
Survey current users of the solution or research customers’ sentiment online. Does the company earn
high marks from customers on service and satisfaction? Have they proven their value to current users?
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SO FRESH AND
SO CLEAN
SO FRESH AND SO CLEAN
DiscoverOrg takes great measures to ensure the accuracy and reliability of our data.
Using a hands-on approach, our in-house team of researchers spends their days
making hundreds of phone calls into Fortune-ranked, mid-market and SMB companies
gathering and updating contact information and real-time intelligence on these
organizations across North America and Europe. This data is then vetted and verified
to guarantee accuracy. Each element within a profile is refreshed at least every 90
days to ensure that you have the most up-to-date information at your fingertips.
The DiscoverOrg database allows users to perform micro-targeted searches to identify
ideal new prospects as well as update existing contacts at targeted accounts.
DiscoverOrg profiles 400,000 contacts at over 19,000 organizations with 96% accurate
direct dial phone numbers and 98% verified email addresses delivered in seven segmented
and easily searchable datasets.
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GETTING IT
TOGETHER
GETTING IT TOGETHER
In addition, DiscoverOrg maps the Organizational Charts at every profiled organization – providing
multiple points of entry and access to all key decision makers at once. This gives sales reps the
ability to know exactly who they are calling, where that person sits in the decision making structure,
and what the contact’s responsibilities include. Want to go straight to the decision maker? You’ll
know who that is. Or if you think a ground swell approach will work best, you’ll be able to identify
and access the lower-level employees who will influence the decision maker’s purchase.
OUR RESEARCH TEAM SERVES AS AN EXTENSION
OF YOUR SALES AND MARKETING DEPARTMENTS – VIRTUALLY ELIMINATING THE NEED FOR YOUR
TEAM TO TAKE PART IN PROSPECT RESEARCH.
Aside from constantly updating data, our analysts add over 300 Real-Time Triggers daily - including
new hires, executive moves and new spending initiatives. For example, when JPMorgan Chase hires
a new Vice President of Information Security, DiscoverOrg picks that up and adds the information
to the database with a trigger attached so that companies interested in selling into that organization
will be alerted right away.
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ABOUT
DISCOVERORG
ABOUT DISCOVERORG
DiscoverOrg is the leading sales and marketing intelligence
solution used by the top technology vendors, staffing companies
and consultants targeting IT, Finance and Marketing departments of Fortune-ranked, mid-market and SMB
companies in North America and the European Union. Offered in the form of a constantly refreshed database,
DiscoverOrg specializes in mapping out the org charts of more than 19,000 companies, complete with verified
email addresses, direct-dial phone numbers, reporting structure, project updates and technology installed
base. Each of the 400,000-plus decision makers in the DiscoverOrg database is updated and refreshed by the
company’s team of 100-plus in-house researchers at least once every 90 days, enabling customers to reach the
right person at the right company with the right message.
The DiscoverOrg Sales Intelligence platform provides:
• Multiple points of entry: Arm yourself with not just one person’s contact information, but the details
for his boss, his boss’s boss and his colleagues.
• Insight into the current environment: Know which technologies are being used, projects that are in place, new leadership moves – and use that data to craft your message.
• Shorter sales cycles: Get your foot in the door before the competition and contact the right person with the right message and the right time.
TRY US OUT! SHARE WITH US YOUR
TARGETED INDUSTRY AND WE’LL PROVIDE THE
LATEST INTEL GATHERED ON
YOUR IDEAL PROSPECT.
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FOLLOW US
www.DiscoverOrg.com
Tel: 800-914-1220 | [email protected]