How To Curate A Better CRM Experience With An Actionable Gallery Of B2B Data

Have you ever been to the Guggenheim? An art museum of impressive architectural proportions in New York City, its ever-evolving collections have served a range of artistic pallets for decades. To put it simply, the museum is a visual feast; and if you like art, you’ll like the Guggenheim.

Similarly, your CRM solution, like Salesforce, is an actionable gallery of data, rife with different views and procedures for managing that information, from interaction tracking to revenue reporting to customer retention. In today’s digital age of customer-first imperatives, if you’re a marketing or sales professional tasked with making such data-driven decisions, the thinking goes, you like and depend upon your CRM platform.

The thing is, unlike an art museum where curators tailor your experience for ease of flow and overall enjoyment, your CRM experience doesn’t come ready-made with insights curated to the particulars of your objectives. And so, with that, your performance is ultimately impacted by what you do with the data that’s in your CRM; it’s really that simple.

According to research from SiriusDecisions, 65 per cent of companies believe their sales representatives spend too much time on non-selling activities, such as research and manual data entry. Likewise, marketers are left frustrated by the continuous impact of data decay, with 83 per cent reporting they struggle to create a single customer view due, in large part, to the poor quality of their data.

After all, as robust and intelligent as your CRM database is, it’s but a floorplan for success without your inputs – without your data creations. Accordingly, if you want to learn from your CRM experience – and achieve the be-all and end-all of customer retention – it falls on you to curate a winning path, one achievable through intelligent workflows and relevant data.

Supercharge The CRM Experience With The Right Data

Today’s marketers are professional jugglers who play critical roles in virtually all stops of the customer journey. Dropping the ball on the path to retention permits easy access for competitors to swoop in and pick up where you left off. And like with sales, it’s data that drives success; with quality customer data facilitating a streamlined process to achieving ROI – one that starts with personalized messages to the right contacts, and ends with a sales-qualified lead (SQL).

Unfortunately, sales and marketing misalignment remains a challenge in B2B organizations and works to stall the path to progress. Marketing believes its leads are qualified, but not followed up on properly. Sales teams get frustrated with inaccurate or incomplete information. The struggle, you see, is actually quite similar – and the data found in your CRM experience is often the culprit for the disconnect at large.

According to DemandGen, more than two-thirds (69 per cent) of respondents said the top challenge to maintaining data quality is old or outdated information. This should come as no surprise, given that 37 per cent of email addresses change annually, and 66 per cent of people’s titles and job functions change annually. To add to the issue, any time marketers take it upon themselves to update existing leads or contacts, there’s room for human error. In other words, if you’re not vigilant, a large portion of the leads your team has generated will be outdated within the year.

At the end of the day, with the right solution, the information flowing into your CRM will always be in the format your sales team needs for efficient follow-up and reporting, saving time for both teams.