It is because no organization would be willing to put their resources like time, man-power, and operational costs at risk. Besides, it will degrade your marketing campaigns and thus result in terrible revenue loss for the company.  Above all, poor data quality can ruin a B2B marketing company’s growth and reputation.

 However, with a clear data quality strategy, you can improve data quality to boost your sales.

 But, the first thing you need to understand is:

What is Bad Data in Business Database?

Inaccurate data can affect a B2B company in many ways. But investing in data quality can help a company to gain better sales performance. That is the reason more and more companies are now investing in data quality and analytics.

Data is the most valuable asset of a B2B company. But, at the same time, bad data has no value except its ability to mislead companies. So, when do you consider data to be bad data in a business database? Find below:

• Incomplete information
• Inaccurate information
• Data entered wrongly
• Duplicate Information
• Data not updated
• Data with several errors of entry
• Non-conforming data
• Insufficient data

How can You Improve the Quality of Your Business Database?

Do you want to increase the value of your business database? All you need is high-quality data. So, how do you acquire that?

Find below 8 ways to improve data quality:

1. Understand the True Nature of Your Present Data

Take time to study the quality and nature of your existing business database. Is your data conforming to expected patterns? Is your data accurate and complete? Can you rely on this data to boost your revenue? These are some of the questions you need to be asking yourself to have a complete understanding of your business database.

As per the Data Science Journal, there are 5 data quality indicators.

These are: 

• Availability –Availability refers to the level of convenience to obtain data.
• Usability – This determines whether the data is useful or not.
• Reliability – This means whether we can trust the data or not.
• Relevance – This determines how relevant the data content is to the users.

Understanding your data as per these 5 key indicators will help you to know the nature of your data. Thus, it will help you to analyze the areas where you need to improve.

2. Apply Effective Lead-generation Strategies

It is very important to acquire data that generate opportunities. You can do this in various ways.

• Get MQLs marketing qualified leads from your marketing department with the help of demos.
• Get CQSLs or conversational qualified leads with the help of chatbots and live chats
• Get PQLs or product qualified leads with free trials.
• Get MQAs or marketing qualified accounts to reach potential buyers.
• Enhance engagement with leads with the help of newsletters, email campaigns, live chat, and many more.

3. Normalize Data 

Data Normalization is very crucial for every B2B company. This process eliminates some units of measuring data. This helps to easily compare data from various sources. Also, a relational database has more than one location. So, data normalization helps to eliminate redundancy.

4. Train your  Sales Team to Enter Data Correctly 

Sales Teams are responsible for creating new leads or updating existing data. So, you need to make sure that they are trained efficiently to accuracy. For this, you need to train them to understand data and how it should be used. So, you need to invest so that your Sales Team is able to enter accurate and complete data without any errors.

5. Check for Duplicate Records

Duplicate data can create confusion in B2B sales. So, you need to have a proper approach to deal with them. The best solution is to catch them and delete them before any activity gets to associate with them. For this, you can set alerts to receive automatic notifications. Also, running weekly reports to catch the sources of duplicates can help.

6. Integrate Sales and Marketing Data

There is a significant connection between the Sales and Marketing teams of a B2B company. They both help in boosting the revenue of the company. However, there lies a disconnected attitude between these 2 departments when it comes to data integration. That may be the biggest barrier to proper data integration. So, the leaders of both the teams need to make sure that all the team members of both the teams put necessary efforts to help in the data integration process.

Moreover, there is also a problem with messy data. So, it is important to clean up data using data mining tools. Some companies even keep their database in a single centralized location for the sales and marketing team to get real-time leads.

7. Perform Data Reviews on Regular Interval

Many organizations do not consistently review their data. These companies fail to realize that they might be sitting on a gold mine. So, unless you dig and find out what is there for you, you will not know. Also, you can know the findings of regular data review that can help in future data strategy. So, regular audits and automation of data cleaning are important.

When performing data reviews you need to adhere to the 6 dimensions of data quality. These are:

• Accuracy
• Completeness
• Consistency
• Timeliness
• Validity
• Uniqueness

8. Use the Best Technology

Most of the B2B companies have a large volume of data. So, it is best to apply data quality technology to improve data. This will ensure consistent data standards and high-quality data without much manual effort. This can help the companies to use the data for decision making to boost up sales.

Inaccurate data can affect a B2B company in many ways. But investing in data quality can help a company to gain better sales performance. That is the reason more and more companies are now investing in data quality and analytics.