Is data decay really a thing?A guide by BizProspex

What is data decay?Data decay ( in customer, contacts or data

lifecycle) means gradual loss of accuracy in data.

Have you ever called a business to realize they

closed two years ago? Well, we all have.

That my friend, is data decay.

B2B data decays for 3 main reasons:

➔ Company closed

96% business fail in the first 10 years, reports: inc.com.

➔ Person Switched Job

People change jobs, that’s not something new.

➔ Retired

About 4 million people retire every year, as of 2014. From 2014 to 2034, about 80 million people are expected to retire.

Like bananas, your customer data starts out green, begins to yellow, and before you know it it’s attracting flies.

Don’t let this happen to your CRM data.

Tip

Clean and append information to it on a regular basis, if your CRM data mainly consists of big companies, setup LinkedIn and Google alerts to be notified of changes.

How effective your sales strategy be when you are trying to contact a director of marketing

Who left last year?

The answer is not very much.Tip

Do a background check on the data in your CRM.

Append everything you can find about them before making that call.

Don’t ask your sales reps to spend time to clean messy data, they aren’t equipped to do so plus that one hour everyday is effectively loss of productivity.

Hire experts to clean, sort and append information to your CRM and start better prospecting.

Both successful sales directors, working in mid sized B2B companies in the US.

Assumptions:1. They both spent the same amount

of the money to generate leads.2. Had the same number of leads in

their CRM.3. Had the same ARPC (average

revenue per customer)4. Had same selling skills to sell the

software.5. Had the same budget for data

cleaning 4000$ for 2016 (apart from the usual marketing spent on online / radio and paper ad).

To make this interesting, allow me to tell you the story of Kumar and Robert.

Meet Robert.

He recently moved up as the regional

VP of sales for a SaaS company in

Atlanta.

His target is to close 15 deals per

month with 8 sales people and

maintain ARPC of 500,000 $ / month.

He was told that there are on an

average 100 new leads in pipeline any

given month and 8000 leads in total

in their CRM and marketing

automation software.

He loved soccer, but feared he had no

Meet Kumar.

He recently was awestruck when one

of his sales rep informed him of how

big of a mess his CRM data is in.

5000 leads are at stake.

What do you think Kumar will do to

next?

Story for illustration purposes only

The logical next step for both was to do some Googling.

Typical solutions they found or had heard of in the market.

➔ Automated

Companies like data.com offer appending and cleansing services at as low as 10 cents per lead and help them regenerate interest from those stale leads, but, automated solutions lacked when it came to accuracy.

➔ Manual

Companies like BizProspex offer data appending and data cleaning through manual research and human logic ensuring data is as good as it can be.

Kumar, decided to go with manual data cleaning because he wanted to personalize each and every interaction with the leads in his CRM and hired BizProspex to manually append and clean the messy data.

Robert hired an automated data cleaning

company (web based SaaS service) to de-

dupe and append information from

whatever was available with that SaaS

company.

At 10 cents a lead he was told to expect

over 60% accuracy.

What he wasn’t calculating was that 40% of

the leads are going 100% wasted.

On the other handKumar was expecting over 95% accuracy and almost over 80% match rate, because manual approach to data cleaning meant researching for new information on the web for those leads, through company website, business networks, personal websites, human logic, etc.

Download BizProspex’s 5 step CRM cleaning guide.

Tip

Ask your data cleaning company to do a small test, compare manual vs automated results before selecting the vendor to clean your entire CRM data.

It’s no surprise that Kumar had far better data, closed more deals and saved more money.

Let’s look at some stats that helped Kumar score homerun.

Tip

Do the math, how much is an average lead worth to you?

If it is ten X of the investment, you don’t want a machine to append it.

Kumar (manual) Robert (automated)

Spent 4000$ to clean to clean their CRM (spent 100% of

the budget).

Spent 800$ to clean their CRM data (spend only

20% of the budget)

TAT for manual work for 8k leads is a month atleast. TAT for automated work for 8k leads is 3 - 5

days at max.

Spent the total amount on manual data cleaning, and got

back ~20% more data that Robert missed on because of

the automated system.

As they had spent same money on lead gen and has

same no. of leads, that meant Kumar had 1600 leads

more than Robert.

20% of 8000 total leads is 1600.

Spent the rest 3200 on generating new leads

(considering a 5% opt in rate) at 5 $ / click, he

got 640 clicks and 32 opt in’s in pipeline, that is

100$ / opt in.

Avg. close rate to opt in is 15 - 20% atmost, that

means he might have got 5 to 6 conversions at

best.

Got more leads with higher accuracy because manual

data research ensures every contact is duly researched,

unlike SaaS solutions that only use the below mentioned

techniques.

Lost 16,000 $ worth of leads because his

automated system could only match records that

are available in the pre scrapped data that the

SaaS software had.

So, how does manual and automated system differ exactly?

Manual data cleaning requires a human to look

up each record, Google them, find them on

LinkedIn, update information, do background

research, append, edit and improve information.

Manual appending also can help append critical

information like recents updates, achievements

for their company, or on the personal front to

ensure you KNOW everything about the lead

before making that critical phone call.

Every automated data appending company

maintains a master record file (which they

assume is more accurate than yours), because

they constantly buy data from other data

vendors.

They majorly check for 4 things:

Is this record available in their master data file,

if yes, update info in the CRM. If no, move

forward.

Check for typos in the email, name etc, correct

them through data standardization techniques.

Manual data research ensures to not just

check for email bounces but other fields are

also checked and updated, more often than

not, emails are kept active even after

people leave companies to receive critical

emails.

Check for email bounce, if it bounced,

remove record, if it didn’t perform the next

step.

Check company validity through human

logic.

Check company validity through DnB

master data through API.

Apart from data standardization and email

bounce check, human logic can keep an

eye for anomalies that softwares can’t.

No automated data cleaning system can

manually research and update information

to CRM, they only check for standardization

and email bounce check through pre fed

logic, and append whatever info is available

with them for that company.

Leads that are marked important are given

more time to ensure nothing is missed

Every lead is just another contact, nothing

more, nothing less.

5 Reasons to go manual:

1. Sales managers are under pressure to decrease CPL and increase conversion

rates.

2. There is tons of unnecessary sales waste: sales teams spend enormous

amount of time researching prospects and contacting wrong leads.

3. Traditional “lead list” providers suck: legacy “lead list” vendors offer outdated,

badly categorized and mostly irrelevant data.

4. Manual offers new ways of lead qualification: modern logic-based signals

(technology in use, website features, advertising) give the customer much

better contextual businesses information.

5. Sales teams deserve better data: sales teams have long been left in the

darkness of being told that this is the most perfect email list. Not anymore.

What people are sayingWhen you hit your 1st campaign, that is when you realize the value of manual cleaning. (Video)

Gary Sullivan, Founder and CMO

BizProspex helped us generate leads without spending money on new lead generation. (video)

Gary V, B2B IT Consulting Biz

Manual data appending paid for itself with just 2 new leads. (Video)

Ivan, Founder VideoJuke

Want to give it a try?First 100 leads or 5 hours of work ison the house.

Also, we offer 120% money back. (no, this is not a typo).And have a 7 day (few questions asked) money back policy. Learn More here.

Good luck!We hope you’ll use the information above to make a educated decision!

For more (free) data cleaning tips relevant to B2B business, click here: BizProspex

Download our 5 step CRM cleaning guide by clicking here or on the image at side.