Ditch the Dirty
Data to Improve Sales, Calculate ROI
Good prospecting, selling and effective lead nurturing require
clean data. Clean data increases sales. A “junk” lead will not turn into
a customer. Dirty data also decreases the marketing department’s
ability to measure aggregate lead data to accurately analyze for ROI.
Your sales team, dealers or distributors won’t trust the leads sent
to them if a lead is missing information, contains incorrect
information or is a duplicate.
As marketers increasingly use multiple web-based lead generation
sources that rely on the prospect to supply their contact information,
the possibility of receiving dirty data also increases.
Here are steps to create clean leads with trustworthy data.
- Catch missing information: Use software or
manually review each record to ensure that the lead record has a
first and last name, a complete phone, email and mailing information
before it goes to sales.
- Delete duplicates: Use a lead
management system with defined rules to merge multiple
contacts from the same household or business or to delete duplicate
leads from the same person.
- Upper and lowercase correction: Clean up lead
records that look like this: “JOHN SmItH, 123 ELM streEt.”
Correcting case errors creates a better impression when sending
prospects personalized emails and snail mail.
- Validate addresses: Check addresses
against U.S. Postal Service software to verify that an address is
legitimate. If the inquirer claims they live at, “123 Starship
Enterprise,” the software snags it.
- Verify consumer names to addresses: Use
name/address verification software to verify that the name attached to a
validated street address is a person that actually lives at that
address.
- Append more data: We advise our clients to keep
online “contact us” forms are brief. Why? Because the more questions in
the form, the less likely prospects will complete it or provide accurate
information. We work with third-party firms to append certain types of
data to lead records, such as Claritas Prizm® demographic
data. Sales people will be more productive when they know more about a
prospect before contacting them.
- Define leads to keep out of the system: There are
leads that you don’t want distributed to the sales team. These include
competitors, your employees, and inquirers that are clearly not in your
target market, for example, students. Define these types of leads
for your company so the lead management system will prevent these leads
from being distributed to sales.
Data Quality
Contributes to Increased Sales
When lead data quality improves sales will also improve and money
is saved in the long run.
- The sales force spends less time wading through low quality leads.
- Leads don’t sit in the sales person’s lap and go untouched – where
sales can be lost.
- More opportunities are uncovered earlier in the sales cycle.
- Accuracy improves the prospect’s view of your company. Nurturing
emails, direct mail and contact center calls avoid rejection because
contact information has been corrected.
- Dollars aren’t wasted when direct mail doesn’t make it to the
prospect.
- Passing only clean leads to sales reduces clutter in the lead
management and sales force automation system. It provides marketing with
better aggregate lead data to accurately analyze for ROI.
Call Us to Organize
Your Lead Data
SmartLead by AdTrack has solutions to address all of these steps. Call a
SmartLead account executive to discuss how we can improve the accuracy
and quality of the leads distributed to your sales
team. 800.735.3237
