How Bad CRM Data Can Hurt Your Cybersecurity Business

The cyberattack on a critical US gasoline pipeline demonstrates how the deadly, large-scale hack-for-ransom threat is increasingly growing, affecting businesses, schools, hospitals, and other institutions.

Company leaders are starting to realize that their businesses are vulnerable, and they’re looking for solutions to protect their IT infrastructures.

However, as demand grows, the market for selling cybersecurity to SMBs and businesses is becoming increasingly competitive. Although it is difficult for information security organizations to enter these sectors, a smart cybersecurity business campaign is the key to generating more B2B leads and winning the field.

Reaching out to the companies that need your solution requires reliable and accurate data, especially when the competitors are ready to grab any opportunity. However, data quality is one of the major roadblocks for cybersecurity marketers and sales professionals. Bad CRM data can hurt your business in many ways.

This article shines light on what we mean by bad data, its causes, and the possible impact on your business.

How Will You Define Bad Data?

It’s difficult to give a specific definition of “Bad Data.” Missing values, corrupt records, and mismatched file formats are the technical definition. And sure, that’s a component of it, but bad data is so much more than that.

It can contain misinformation that sucks up your time, makes you stay late at work, and causes good ideas to go up in smoke. Bad data leads to high bounce rates, wasted phone calls, and confusing conversations.

Unfortunately, it affects every industry, company, and department. The cybersecurity industry is no exception. Bad data can cause major problems if it isn’t recognized and corrected as soon as possible. Few people comprehend the high consequences of ignoring bad data, and even fewer take aggressive steps to counteract and treat the sources of it.

That brings us to the causes of bad data.

1. Duplicate Data

Customer experience can be harmed by duplicate data. You may send the identical email campaign to duplicate records twice, indicating a lack of attention to detail and appearing as spam. Reporting can also be skewed by duplicates. Multiple salespeople may contact the same customer or, even worse, work on the same account at the same time.

2. Invalid and Undeliverable Emails

When clients submit incorrect contact information, either intentionally or inadvertently, or when sales professionals make errors when entering data into CRM, invalid emails can enter the system. Mistakes can happen when filling out forms on your website, during events where customer data is collected, or when working with an untrustworthy data partner.

3. Role-Based Addresses

When internal research teams and data providers are unable to uncover personal contact information through scraping websites for publicly available data, they may resort to generic, role-based email addresses. Generic emails (for example, marketing@ or info@) are used to manage an organization’s general queries. The person who handles the address likely isn’t the decision-maker. Even if they are, an email sent to the role-based email address they are monitoring is unlikely to elicit a response.

4. Temporary or Disposable Addresses

Many decision-makers are hesitant to share their contact information with others. To download useful marketing materials or attend a conference, some people generate temporary or disposable addresses. People may utilize these email addresses to download gated content, or they may ask a gatekeeper to provide these addresses to sales calls that are not solicited.

5. Data Decay

Data decays on average more than 30% every year. Your decision-maker may, for example, get promoted, switch to a new phone number, or they may move to another organization. It’s a never-ending challenge to keep your data up to date.

Bad Data Can Lead to Lost Opportunities

1. Potential Customers Remain Unreached

No one would want to be limited to only the leads that come to them. You always try to reach more potential customers.

You can get a richer picture of who your customers are, what their pain points are, and what they’re seeking in a product or service solution by looking at your CRM data. As a result, you may work backward from this information to effectively approach and market to new prospects.

However, if your personal CRM isn’t providing you with accurate data on your prospects, there will be a significant divergence between the data informing your lead nurturing and outreach.

2. Impact on Email Marketing ROI

In the B2B world, you can’t avoid email marketing. We understand that the more precise your data, the more precise the messages you can convey. However, missing out on critical information that might drive your content approach can lead to some readily avoidable errors, such as non-conversion-friendly emails.

You won’t be able to effectively capture where your prospects are in the buyer’s journey or what actions they’re performing on your site if you’re dealing with faulty CRM data, both of which are important factors in how you nurture them in your emails. What’s the result? Best case is emails that don’t convert and, as a result, don’t get you any closer to a sale. Worst case? You sabotage your domain reputation and face serious deliverability issues for all emails.

3. Impact on Revenue

All your efforts boil down to generating revenue for your information security firm. Bad data leads to lost revenue by adversely impacting your sales funnel. Due to erroneous client contact information, communications with leads may fail to convert. Your company may be chasing prospects based on stale data, resulting in a significant loss of business opportunities.

Realizing the full impact of incorrect data on your organization can be alarming for many organizations. Bad data can have an impact on sales, marketing, customer service, retention, and almost every other area of your business. Poor data has an annual financial impact of $9.7 million on enterprises. The cost of bad data is projected to be more than $3 trillion per year in the United States.

Can You Improve Your Data Quality?

Yes, without a doubt.

You have spent countless hours and dollars putting together a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to keep your database organized and your sales and marketing teams in sync. However, to boost sales, more than a centralized location to handle contacts and accounts will be required. Your salespeople and marketers will never achieve the full benefit of your investment or their potential as a team until you have high-quality data in your CRM.

To get the most out of your CRM, however, you must follow basic rules to ensure that the data is accurate, that you can get the right insights from your data, and that you continue to improve your data quality plan.

We recommend you focus on five things:

1. Accuracy

Data has to be accurate. Otherwise, there’s no reason to believe in your segmentation or your outreach. Untrustworthy data creates a vicious loop. The less reps trust the data, the less they will rely on it, and the less they will update and maintain it, making the data even less credible and continuing the cycle.

To ensure that your CRM data is accurate, you must develop processes for validating, entering, and updating it from the beginning. Because data can never be 100 percent accurate and is always decaying, maintaining data hygiene is dependent on organizational culture.

2. Completeness

Do you have all of the information you need for each of your files?

It’s typical to have incomplete data, especially in the early stages of a project, such as prospecting. However, omitting crucial data regularly might be a major issue.

It’s critical to figure out what information is essential to which functions and then create processes to get the data your team requires to accomplish their jobs effectively.

3. Consistency

Is your data in your CRM system consistent?

Do all of your email addresses and phone numbers, for example, have the same format? Is there a clear scale for evaluating consumer and opportunity ratings? Is your information in the correct fields?

When data is aggregated from numerous sources, data inconsistency becomes a concern. Keep your data in one place and try to fetch the data from a limited number of sources.

4. Uniqueness

Do you have redundant data in your CRM?

Finding the information that users require can be extremely difficult if you do not have processes in place to merge and delete duplicate data entries, or better yet, to prevent them from occurring in the first place. Worse, it can mess with automation by synchronizing or merging fields from the wrong records or sending out redundant communications.

At the same time, removing duplicates at random can result in missing data since the information you require may be divided across numerous duplicate records.

5. Timeliness

Is all of your information up to date?

In most cases, timely data refers to making sure that the information in your CRM is usable at all times. After all, if the data you’re recording isn’t going to help you take action, what’s the use of keeping track of it?

Organizing and cleansing your CRM data regularly is an important approach for keeping it accurate, relevant, and current.

Focus on Quality First and Then Quantity

The competition for selling cybersecurity is rising, so it is essential to reach decision-makers and influencers.

SalesIntel helps you be confident in your outreach. With over millions of B2B data points and the highest number of direct dials, including mobile numbers, you can segment your audience and take a tailored approach accordingly.