Pipelines start looking a little thin.  Executive Leadership applies pressure to Sales Management. Sales Management applies pressure to their teams. Sales Management applies pressure to Marketing.   Sales reps react.  Marketing reacts. Sometimes targets are reached,  sometimes they aren’t.

And when they aren’t?

Every [more...]]]> Anyone involved in a sales/marketing organization will recognize a familiar story…It goes something like this:

Pipelines start looking a little thin.  Executive Leadership applies pressure to Sales Management. Sales Management applies pressure to their teams. Sales Management applies pressure to Marketing.   Sales reps react.  Marketing reacts. Sometimes targets are reached,  sometimes they aren’t.

And when they aren’t?

Every story needs a hero and a villain.  Sales and Marketing start to point fingers.  Relationships deteriorate.  Trust erodes. Growth stagnates.  Heads roll.

So who is to blame?  It certainly varies – and usually depends on how each team reacts.

The typical sales reaction will likely be to take a long look at all of their prospects and try to press a little harder and get them to the next stage.  They’ll also dig a little deeper – prospecting, hitting the phones.   It’s an honest effort, and sometimes it pays off.  The typical marketing reaction is to ramp up the activity, spend a little more, get more creative with messaging, target bigger lists, explore new channels.  It’s an honest effort, and sometimes it pays off.  If these reactions are indeed typical, then most of the time both sales and marketing are working hard – and can hardly be labeled a villain.

But every story needs a villain, right?  If not Sales, if not Marketing, then who?

The lineup of potential suspects is not a short one – the product, seasonality, the competitive landscape, the economy…the list goes on.  In this tale, though, we’ll focus on a culprit that lurks behind the scenes, whose reach extends into everything Sales and Marketing do…Dirty Data.

Let’s take a look back at the “typical reactions” of Sales and Marketing groups under pressure.

Sales is grinding harder, making more calls, trying to get prospects through the funnel quickly.  Dirty Data obstructs all of these activities.  Reps dealing with records that are duplicative, incomplete, outdated, and/or inconsistent are wasting precious time; and time often makes all the difference between a won deal and a lost deal, or even getting a seat at the table.

Marketing is amplifying the number of campaigns, spending time and energy brainstorming new ideas and deploying them quickly.  Marketers are dealing with these same records… duplicative, incomplete, outdated, and/or inconsistent.  All of the effort they put into the campaign they deployed often misses the mark, because they have bad information, or not enough information to intelligently segment their targets.  Dirty Data strikes again.

Honest efforts from both Sales and Marketing have been compromised in one stroke by an inaccurate database, and we all know the effects of missed targets can be far-reaching.

It’s a tragic tale, but one that doesn’t have to end here.  Make sure tune in for Part II – we’ll discuss common issues in data, and what to look for to understand whether you have a data problem or not, and if so, how big?