An optimized database is the key to high-performance business actions. An estimated 30% of data become obsolete every year: Changes in email address, postal address, telephone number, etc. Your file is deteriorating. Your salespeople waste time verifying and updating information. This impacts your sales. How can you maintain the quality of your data? Through improvement planning, database analysis, database normalization, database cleaning, and data collection preparation.
Data enrichment planning is the first step to prevent time and revenue loss due to a poor-quality database.
Ask yourself these questions:
Answering these questions will help you determine the ideal pace for your company, and you avoid accumulating unnecessary data. Depending on your needs, it may be useful to hire a person who will be in charge of improving your database. This will allow your sales force to focus on prospection and sales.
Analyzing your data enables you to assess not only their quality but also their suitability for your company. Do not rush into cleaning and enriching your database.
First, examine your file as it is now. Analyze the following elements:
If your data are more than one year old, there is a good chance that part of them is obsolete. Is information entered manually? Human errors are more frequent that you think.
Poor quality data generate costs for your company. Think of the time salespeople spend searching for or verifying information instead of canvassing. If you improve your database, you allow them to focus on prospection and sales.
Following this analysis, it is time for database standardization and database cleaning. During your analysis, you may have discovered duplicates, wrongly encoded information, incomplete or useless entries, etc.
Perform a thorough cleanup:
Sanitizing your database will improve your efficiency. Your sales force has all the information they need to contact existing and potential customers. For your employees, this means less wasted time, and for your company it means more sales, hence a better turnover.
Are your data validated, standardized, and updated? That is great, but to increase sales, don’t just use your current contact base. Expand it by collecting new customer data and enriching existing entries if necessary. When analyzing your file, you may have noticed that crucial data was missing.
Implement actions to collect information on your leads and customers, using:
To maintain the quality of your data, it is important that you analyze, standardize, and clean your database periodically. Determine a frequency depending on your needs, your resources, and your goals. Continuously enrich your file by completing current data and obtaining new information.