Report: Marketing and Sales Professionals to Team Up, Clean Up Data

Although sales and marketing teams have not always worked closely together, new research suggests that they will collaborate frequently in the near future. In addition, this may become the key to more accurate data and analytics.

InsideView recently published its “Unlocking Revenue Performance in the New Normal” eBook, and research suggested that most marketing and sales professionals (54%) believe that marketing and sales operations will merge into one revenue operations team within the next year. About 53% believe that insights into B2B customers will become clearer by focusing on data integrity as well, such as data hygiene, cleanliness and robustness.

In terms of existing data and analytics practices, most marketers and sales professionals (41%) say that they perform manual maintenance based on data governance rules. About 24% do not perform any data maintenance, and 20% use a data cleansing product for ongoing data cleaning. Fifteen percent turn to an offline clean service one to two times per year.

The Consequences of Poorly Maintained Marketing Data

With more accurate data and analytics, marketers can gain better insight into their prospects and customers. However, previous research shows that not all organizations are focused on data accuracy, and many of them are suffering the consequences.

Validity conducted “The State of CRM Data Management” report, and statistics suggested that 27% of marketers believe bad data costs them at least 10% in revenue annually. Almost half of marketers cannot estimate how bad data impacts their organization’s bottom line.

About 92% of respondents said that their CRM and the data in it is “important” or “very important,” highlighting the need for better data hygiene.