3 Steps Lesson for your Data Integrity in B2B Data Management

Most enterprises agree that data management and governance is a growing issue and that introducing a broad data strategy is required to stay competitive and to serve clients better. Sales and marketing technology is adding to the ongoing challenge of maintaining the accuracy and reliability of client data by making data in silos.

Our own particular experience has shown us that accomplishing a comprehensive data governance strategy isn't a simple undertaking. Listed below are the steps required to implement a compelling sales and marketing data strategy, and to get everybody your company adjusted behind a single source of truth.

Step 1: Assess the situation

Before beginning down the way towards a single source of truth, it is crucial to comprehend your technology stack and data workflows. If a company records 3500 distinct applications that are focused towards the deals and showcasing buyers, then Mapping out how the information is shared by multiple functions and multiple systems, alongside which forms it supports, will help break down an intimidatingly confused issue of understanding your technology stack and settling any data issues. Some critical inquiries for you to ask are:

•    What exists in my technology stack?

•    Why is it there?

•    How much does it cost?

•    When is the renewal?

•    Does it deliver on its goals?

•    Could it deliver on its goals if the data was cleaned up or was it brought in as a point solution?

During Infotanks Media's data cleanse project/audit process we found we had technologies in our stack that were not being utilized. Evaluating the circumstance helped us recognize this problem and chop down our spend by thousands of dollars yearly. Also, we were able to get visibility into the who, where, when, and why of our client data. Who are they? Where did they originate from? For what reason did they enter our database? Are they still relevant? Answer these inquiries, and you'll be more prepared for a data purge.

Infotanks Media was established in 2016, and we've stored a considerable amount of data that was not valuable with our current go-to-market strategy. Research demonstrates that 25 to 33 percent of the contact database goes stale annually, so any contacts who haven't been updated in three years have in all likelihood changed jobs or have new contact information. Cleansing old data additionally gives you the chance to bring down the size of your marketing automation platform (MAP) and potentially move to a lower pricing level. When we realigned our database to our current go-to-market strategy, we were able to scale down from 1.2 Million contacts to 400,000.

Having this clean data gave us a solid, encouraging point for adjusting our sales and marketing teams over a single source of truth and a vital step in evaluating your situation. At Infotanks Media, a subset of people from our sales, marketing, business operations, and product teams would meet week by week to drive the project.

Step 2: Data Unification

Once the unique technologies are in play, it's an excellent opportunity to begin considering the data in them. There are several diverse core marketing technologies, similar to your marketing automation platform (MAP), sales force automation (SFA), web content management (WCM) and so forth. In addition to these are your expanded marketing technologies, for example, social media intelligence, content marketing, and so on. Data is collected from every one of these numerous sources, and your marketing and sales operations teams need to take the lead on unifying data from different sources to get a clear picture of a contact or an account. Data unification can enable you to answer inquiries like,

•    How to better score accounts

•    Who are your top accounts

•    How to segment accounts

•    It likewise allows you to do some extremely creative marketing!

Data unification organizations need to mix data from outer and besides internal data sources which enhance your contact information.

At Infotanks Media, binding together our data has helped us distinguish where our contact gaps were. We use Targeting Intelligence platform to separate the correct accounts and contacts while improving inbound leads.

Step 3: Data Governance

Data governance is the last — yet most urgent — venture on your way to data integrity, since it built up the rules of commitment to keep up data consistency. Continuous and progressing refinement of data is required to keep up data integrity, and a data governance council (as unwieldy as that sounds) can genuinely enable you to be successful. Setting up a sanction that is particular with roles and duties, a committee which is cross-functional (IT, marketing, operations, sales, and a decision maker) goes far. Think about the extent of the data you will oversee – is it by a system based, function-based, and all the more imperatively what information is out of sphere? Get an official or a senior leader to act as a sponsor for the group. Setting up a council alongside a sponsor helps guarantees that every member has a stake in the success.

The effect of data integrity is tremendous regardless of the industry. Data is growing at an exponential rate. Cleaning up your data, concentrating on the procedures that the data support, and getting individuals behind a single source of truth is a time-consuming activity. Setting up a data governance council is the ideal approach to guarantee that your business remains focused in the present quick evolving marketplace.

To figure out how Infotanks Media helps organizations with data enrichment and data cleansing initiative contact us at info@infotanksmedia.com