How Bad CRM Data Is Hurting Your Sales Team Performance and B2B Lead Generation

It should not be a surprise that your SDRs are facing issues with the quality of your CRM data. When you are creating a game plan for sales and marketing, account identification and intelligence insights are two critical factors. While CRM data doubles every 12 to 18 months, 10-25% of the records include critical data errors. 

How Much Does Bad Data Hurt Your Sales Teams?

A recent study shows that 91% of companies with more than 11 employees use CRM software for sales and marketing. Given that number, poor data cripples your revenue, sales productivity, forecasting, and ultimately business growth. When poor data flow into your CRM, it creates a barrier to B2B lead generation. Your sales team faces difficulties building a pipeline, your sales forecasts are off, and your sales and financial projections ultimately fail to be met. While poor CRM data can hurt your team in many ways, here are 3 primary concerns. 

1. Inefficiency 

Dialing a wrong number or emailing an invalid account will waste your team’s valuable time that they could have spent selling. Sales teams can spend as much as a third of their day dealing with poor data. As a result, they get less time to act on the data. 

2. Poor Prospect and Customer Relationships

It’s a fact that lost deals and poor customer relationships are side-effects of bad B2B data. Bad data may negatively impact your customer communication.  If someone misspells your name, gets your title wrong, or references other incorrect information about you, you are more likely to lose interest and not respond. Undelivered messages, emails, and account or contact mix-ups add up. 

3. Low Morale and Frustration Among Your B2B Sales Reps

Putting effort into a wrong prospect can be frustrating for sales reps when relying on inaccurate B2B data to do their job. Most sales reps work on commission or have significant incentives tied to hitting their targets. When they waste time and effort and jeopardize deals due to bad data it inevitably leads to frustration, bringing down the morale of not just the sales team, but the organization as a whole.

Root Causes of Bad CRM Data

On average, 40% of B2B generated leads are either invalid, incomplete, or have duplicate entries. Even the smallest mistake in entering the email Id can create issues for your sales team. Here’s a list of common reasons for poor CRM data:

1. Duplicates 

Duplicate data can create a poor customer experience. You might end up sending the same email campaign to duplicate records twice, which indicates a lack of attention to detail. Duplicates can also skew reporting. Multiple reps may contact the same person, or even worse, may work with multiple people at the same account simultaneously.

2. Invalid and Undeliverable Emails

Invalid emails can enter the system when customers intentionally or unintentionally provide wrong contact information or sales reps make errors when entering the data into CRM. Customers might enter typos while filling out forms on your website, at events where customer data is collected, or by using an unreliable data partner. 

You can avoid these issues and automatically update your records by accessing SalesIntel’s 4.5+ million human-verified contacts with direct dials. Our data platform identifies incorrect or missing information, compares it with our verified database, and suggests updates.  SalesIntel is integrated with some of the most commonly used CRMs namely Salesforce, HubSpot, Outreach, and Salesloft. 

3. Role-Based Addresses

Many internal research teams and data providers who operate by scraping websites for publicly available information may resort to generic, role-based email addresses when they cannot find personal contact information. Role-based addresses are generic emails (e.g. marketing@ or info@) used to manage an organization’s generic inquiries. The person handling the address might not be the decision-maker. Even if they are, they are unlikely to engage with an email sent to the role-based email address they’re monitoring. As a result, you are more likely to have emails go unopened, see higher opt-out rates, and receive more spam complaints. All of these can affect your domain reputation and email deliverability.

4. Temporary or Disposable Addresses

Many decision-makers avoid sharing their contact information. One tactic is to create temporary or disposable addresses for downloading useful marketing materials or attending a conference. People may use these email addresses for downloading gated content or they might ask a gatekeeper to provide these addresses to unsolicited sales calls. 

With SalesIntel, you get access to verified direct emails you need to reach your B2B decision-makers.

5. Data Decay 

Data decays on average more than 30% every year.  For example, your decision-maker might get promoted and their title might change, or they may move to another company or retire. Keeping your data up-to-date is a never-ending challenge. 

As the most reliable B2B contact data provider, SalesIntel never lets that happen to our clients. To maintain our accuracy and avoid data decay, we re-verify our data every 90 days. 

6. Incomplete Decision Support Data 

Decision support data helps managers and VPs forecast sales, pipeline management, revenue, etc. Incomplete and inaccurate data skew reports and make them unreliable. Without a reliable way to know the state of the company and what’s actually going on, management cannot make informed decisions. The sales and marketing team uses this data for prospecting and to decide how they will engage and manage prospects and customers. Having incomplete details will make it harder for sales ops and leadership to make decisions about those accounts (like whether or not to consider them in MQLs or SQLs).

Far-Reaching Implications of Bad-Data

For many organizations, it’s shocking to realize the full impact bad data has on your organization. Bad data can affect sales, marketing, support, retention, and virtually every aspect of your business. Here are some examples of the costs associated with bad data:

• The average financial impact of poor data on businesses is $9.7 million per year.  
• Bad data is estimated to cost the US more than $3 trillion per year.
• Salespersons waste over 27 percent of their time due to bad data.   

A Clearer Path to Sales Success

At SalesIntel, we understand the needs of B2B lead generation and how crucial access to reliable, up-to-date data is for your entire organization. This is why we commit to providing data that is 95% accurate and reverified every 90 days. 

Thanks to our integrations with the most popular CRMs, SalesIntel has been helping B2B companies sell to their dream accounts and power their account-based marketing efforts. If you are ready to get started, get access to over 4.5 million accurate B2B database at affordable pricing. If you want to check our data accuracy, get access to our FREE B2B data.