When B2B teams conduct sales outreach, they tend to focus on quantity rather than quality.
The assumption is that more leads mean a greater chance of success, right?
In reality, the answer is often no.
Your data quality determines the results of your outreach. The good news is that B2B teams can improve low-quality data in many ways.
Read on to learn about data quality, common issues, how to assess quality, and the best tools for managing data. Here, we look at it from a contact and CRM perspective, two key areas for go-to-market (GTM) to ensure your customer records never fall short.
Contact data quality refers to how accurate, complete, and consistent the contact details in your CRM or data provider are.
When the characteristics are broken down, they simply mean:
CRM data quality measures how accurate, complete, consistent, and unique the data in your CRM is. Data quality issues are prevalent in the CRM, including duplicate records, incomplete fields, and outdated information. All these CRM quality issues can lead to missed sales opportunities, incorrect lead routing, and other direct mistakes, ultimately resulting in revenue loss.
Wasted time, missed opportunities, and a lack of personalisation contribute to poor data quality.
Having quality data solves all of these issues and more. Below are five key benefits of quality data.
Quality data is the core of any successful B2B sales team.
It leads to more opportunities at a high level, as you can make decisions based on accurate customer data.
Better data means better opportunities, which means more revenue for B2B sales teams.
According to Experian, 94% of organisations believe their customer and prospect data is inaccurate in some way.
Organisations with accurate data save significant money and have a competitive edge over those without it - see this example from Cognism customer CEC Marketing:
According to ZoomInfo, an average B2B salesperson wastes 27.3% of their time searching for bad data.
With high-quality data, less effort is required to find the right information, reducing SDR workload.
When the data is correct, you can better personalise your outreach messages.
Details, like whether the prospect’s company role or industry is up to date, will make all the difference to your business strategy.
Email bounce rate affects B2B teams significantly.
If your email bounce rate is too high, it signals to internet service providers (ISPs) that you’re sending spam emails. This reduces your chances of landing in your prospects’ primary inboxes.
As a result, your sales team wastes time and effort.
High-quality data helps to combat this by keeping your email bounce rate low. Essentially, this improves your email deliverability and overall outreach efforts.
Now that we’ve gone over the fundamental reasons your business needs to care about contact and CRM data quality, let’s go over how to assess it.
There are several core actions you can take to do this, including evaluating your current situation, running a data audit, addressing current issues, and validating your data. Let’s go through each in more detail now.
You can’t improve data quality without knowing your current situation. As a first step, assess where you are now.
This includes answering questions like:
A data quality audit is a crucial aspect of enterprise data management. At Cognism, we use an audit framework for our GTM data that spans coverage, completeness, and accuracy.
If we were to look at each area in more detail, it would look like this:
It’s easier said than done, but addressing data issues is key to improving quality.
Some of the most common data quality issues include:
You may think, what causes these issues?
There are many reasons, one of which is a lack of correct policies.
For example, you might have imported company data from a validated lead list years ago. Since then, many key decision-makers may have changed their companies or roles within them.
With data quality rules in place, you can implement regular audit checks and create strict data entry protocols.
Data validation ensures the accuracy and quality of B2B data. It involves verifying that your data meets the specified format and requirements.
Data validation helps to prevent:
Working with reputable vendors like Cognism is the best way to ensure valid data. Buying lead lists from unscrupulous vendors can quickly lead to data quality issues.
It’s not worth spending your money on poor-quality data, as this will immediately impact your sales outreach efforts.
If you use data providers, ensure they validate emails and phone numbers, update their database frequently, and maintain compliance.
Data enrichment is also beneficial since it prevents B2B data depreciation and duplication.
Cognism is a data provider that meets all of these requirements. Click here to schedule a demo with our team.
Creating data governance policies ensures that data is managed appropriately.
These policies essentially act as building blocks to establish a structured system for data integrity, security, and compliance.
A data governance framework should include the following:
This quality framework should include policies and the people responsible for data stewardship.
Data stewardship teams ensure data quality within departments or areas.
Knowing who’s responsible for your governance framework improves accountability. It also enables quicker resolution of compliance and quality concerns.
A LinkedIn and Edelman’s survey found that:
In many B2B companies, it’s common for sales to use one type of software, marketing another, and IT yet another.
There are a few major issues with this approach.
Using multiple software quickly leads to siloed data and a lack of departmental collaboration.
A centralised system for all data allows departments to collaborate more effectively and share insights.
Human error causes many data quality issues. However, it isn’t necessarily your employees’ fault if they aren’t adequately educated in such matters.
To prevent your team from falling into these pitfalls, educate them on data management best practices.
You can:
Tip: You might also like to teach your employees how to understand data insights for better interpretation.
Effective data quality management is not a one-time project.
You must continuously review and update your policies and best practices.
The difficulty is that updating data quality procedures without a valid reason can lead to problems.
For this reason, you can determine if changes are needed by:
In addition, you should maintain accurate documentation of your processes, data sources, and systems.
Keep this in mind when approaching data quality challenges:
“If you don’t write it down, it doesn’t exist.”
Companies can use different B2B databases to improve their data quality.
With these tools, you can minimise the effects of bad data on your business. Below are five B2B data tools for you to consider.
With Cognism, you can access high-quality and up-to-date company and customer data that complies with the GDPR and CCPA. It lets you reach ideal clients through business emails, direct dials, and phone-verified mobile numbers.
It also offers a Data as a Service (DaaS) solution, with flexible delivery options to integrate B2B data in the format and frequency of your choice:
Cognism’s data enrichment is vital for maintaining high-quality CRM data. You’ll be able to ensure the completeness of records, scale reliable processes, and access fresh and verified data on demand with no lag.
There are two ways to use enrichment in Cognism:
ZoomInfo is a B2B lead database that collects, verifies, and publishes millions of contacts and company profiles in real-time. It provides insights into industries, employee headcount, revenue, company location, and more.
ZoomInfo relies on community verification for phone numbers rather than conducting individual in-house verification.
Lusha provides sales teams with verified B2B data.
It’s mainly known for its Chrome Extension. You can open it on LinkedIn, Salesforce, Sales Navigator, or any company site to quickly access prospect contact data.
Lusha used a credit-based pricing system, which is a minor downside. All Cognism licenses include unrestricted data access and individual and page-level exports (subject to fair use policy).
UpLead is a business intelligence tool that offers contact and company information.
Business users can search for prospects by industry, location, technology, employees, title, and revenue. It also provides a Chrome Extension that works on LinkedIn and company websites.
With access to quality mobile phone numbers, you can achieve your targets with 70% fewer calls.
In a case study with Ultima, Cognism enabled its sales team to achieve the same results from just 30 calls as they had previously with 150.
When evaluating Cognism’s data against top competitors, Siddhartha Jain, Head of Marketing Strategy and Operations at Darwinbox, noted:
Cognism empowers revenue leaders with high-quality data to enhance and optimise their sales strategies.
By eliminating guesswork from data hygiene, Cognism equips your teams with tools that prioritise quality, personalisation, and intelligence.
With solutions like our sales prospecting tool, your data remains actionable - so your GTM strategies consistently hit the mark. Here’s how:
Cognism provides the intelligence and tools needed to create clear prospecting guidelines for your sales teams.
By integrating firmographics, contact data, signals and intent data, Cognism’s web app ensures reps target the right accounts with confidence.
This, combined with Cognism’s compliance-first approach, keeps your CRM up to date and actionable, serving as the foundation for all GTM strategies.
Cognism Enrich takes data hygiene to the next level by automatically updating and enhancing your CRM with the most accurate and comprehensive information.
From filling in missing data fields to removing duplicates and outdated records, Enrich ensures your database remains reliable, actionable, and fully compliant with GDPR, CCPA, and SOC 2 standards.
Cognism acts as a personalised sales assistant for your reps, delivering real-time insights, target accounts, and contact profiles.
With accurate mobile numbers, job titles, and real-time signals such as funding rounds, job changes, and hiring events, Cognism empowers your team to personalise outreach and engage with high-intent prospects at the perfect time.
Cognism offers phone-verified mobiles that give you access to the most up-to-date contact data for Directors, VPs, and C-suite decision-makers.
Cognism’s tools enable precise audience segmentation by combining quality data with powerful insights.
Use Cognism’s web app to define your ideal customer segments and to deliver hyper-targeted, personalised experiences.
Together, they help your teams drive better conversations and stronger relationships.
Salespeople are notorious for wanting to close deals quickly. This can lead them to cut corners, such as neglecting data quality.
This isn’t ideal since, as we’ve explained, quality data is essential to sales success!
High-quality data matters, but it doesn’t have to mean a slow and inefficient prospecting process.
Cognism is your partner for improving your business data. Here are just some of the benefits we’ve brought to our 4,000+ customers:
We’d love to do even better for you! As a start, why not try Cognism’s data for yourself?