Data quality and data access plague analytics – especially in sales and marketing. Let’s face it, whether your role is sales operations or marketing analyst, your data is constantly questioned at best, or simply wrong at worst. Does this sound familiar?
Manual data input, duplicate entries, typos, invalid email and phone numbers, disparate systems, etc., require you to spend a painful amount of time in spreadsheets manually cleaning, blending and enriching your data. You are forced to pull data from sales, marketing and financial applications – in a variety of formats – into a spreadsheet to prepare it before you can produce data visualizations and analytics in tools like IBM Watson Analytics or Tableau. Simply accessing these datasets can be a challenge – and time consuming if you need to request data from IT or other departments.
And the obstacles don’t end there. Once you have access to the data you need, there are common mistakes and challenges that even the savviest Excel power-users face that wreak havoc on sales and marketing analytics timeliness and accuracy, such as data stratification, formula errors, formatting issues, process errors and expectation setting.
De-duping for Data Quality
For those using a sales platform like Salesforce.com, the database is a critical resource. It’s used for tracking sales, managing outbound marketing, identifying types of customers and pinpointing titles. But many of these databases are full of duplicate data fields that don’t accurately reflect the customer base. For example, if a business has a list of 100,000 customers, it’s highly likely that number is inflated. Another example, during the intake process, customer names often get entered multiple times, in slightly different ways:
21st Century Insurance Company of the Southwest
21st Century Software
21st Century North America Insurance Company
21st Century Cooperative
21st Century Fox America, Inc.
21st Century Oncology, Inc.
21st Century Equipment
21st Century Life and Health Company, Inc.
21st Mortgage Corporation
For both humans and your database, it’s easy to distinguish that these are different customers. However, when leads are entered into Salesforce.com, the results often look like this:
21ST CENTURY ONCOLOGY
21ST CENTURY ONCOLOGY, INC.
21ST MORTGAGE
21ST MORTGAGE CORD
21ST MORTGAGE CORPORATI
Salesforce.com counts this as five records, when in reality it could be only two. Or, it could include any of the “21st Century” accounts listed above.
To accurately determine how many unique customers your company actually has, you’ll need to de-dupe, or identify and eliminate theduplicate entries, to create a new master list.
Doing all of this work manually will not only decrease accuracy due to human error, but also consume hours of labor. For instance, if it takes three seconds for a human to de-dupe one row, that equals 80 work hours, or 10 work days to de-dupe 100,000 rows. And, this de-duping will have to be performed each time you run a report!
Add More Value to Your Organization
Self-service data preparation (prep) is transforming how sales and marketing analysts as well as everyday business users are acquiring, manipulating and blending data by making the process quick, easy, accurate and consistent. Common sales and marketing data can be combined with enterprise applications (customer data, financial data, expense data, HR data, etc.) and third-party data (relational, CSV and other standard, structured data) for analysis—without the need for IT.
In the de-duping challenge mentioned above, 20 rows of data representing the same customer can quickly and easily be turned into one unique customer in seconds.
More importantly, data prep solutions are enabling users to tap information from virtually any source, including dark data housed in previously inaccessible multi-structured and unstructured documents, such as PDF reports or web pages. Users can gain fast access to not only the right data, but all of the data crucial to getting a holistic view of the business. This means more time can be spent on performing analysis that yields actionable business insights.
Faster Insights, Better Outcomes
Timely and accurate reporting of leads, bookings, revenue, pipeline, prospects, contracts and contact status are critical to closing more deals faster. Virtually every business depends on sales and marketing predictability. Organizational planning and strategies need more than just sales pipeline data.
Without the right tools, sales and marketing analysis can come to a standstill, and team members will spend more time prepping data than actually using it to benefit the business. When data can be accessed easily and consistently, sales and marketing analytics can be more timely and accurate. One of the greatest benefits of self-service data prep is increased agility for its users. Ordinary users can dramatically improve the sales and marketing data quality at their organization and transform it into actionable intelligence that drives timely, more informed decisions and delivers greater business value.
Frank Moreno is VP of product marketing at Datawatch, a provider of data preparation software for analytics and operational use cases. He has worked in the enterprise and infrastructure software industry for more than 20 years, serving in various senior-level product marketing and marketing communications roles at companies such as PeopleFluent, Kronos, Cadec Global and Empirix.
