B2B organizations rely on their CRMs to optimize sales, execute marketing campaigns, and track KPIs and engagement. However, 90% of contacts in the average CRM are missing key data. That means sales teams are trying to sell to people without knowing their email, company phone number, job title, or even their right name.
How can anyone be expected to hit their number like that?
It’s not just contact data that’s missing, either. Engagement data like phone calls, meetings, and emails are frequently absent as well. Without those key details, sales leaders and sellers alike are flying blind and don’t have the actionable signals they need to be successful.
Missing CRM data impacts other areas of the go-to-market team as well. Marketing campaigns are less effective and more error-prone. Customer Success makes mistakes on renewals and upsells. And ultimately, revenue takes the hit.
That’s why finding missing CRM data and “filling the data gap” are priorities for so many revenue teams.
Read on to find out how it’s done.
Why am I missing CRM data?
Bad data hygiene is often the result of missing CRM data. A few of the top reasons B2B organizations have incomplete CRM data include:
- Manual data entry
- Lack of data quality processes
- Incorrect mapping across integrations
- Not leveraging data automation
- Reps don’t log data
- Top-of-Funnel contact forms
The common themes here are manual processes and technological limitations. Luckily, there are a few easy fixes for both of those.
What happens when your CRM is missing sales data?
Incomplete sales data can be annoying to deal with. But more importantly, it will be harmful to your organization and business objectives. While there are many potential problems, when your CRM is missing data you face:
- Inefficient Marketing
- Inaccurate Sales Forecasts
- Poor Customer Success
- Lost Revenue
Inefficient Marketing
CRM data management is important for all marketing efforts but is absolutely critical when marketing to B2B organizations. For example, if your organization employs account-based marketing (ABM programs), it’s important to follow good data management practices so you can track target accounts and make it easy for buyers to buy from you. Integrating the various tools from your tech stack into your CRM will let you to track communication and engagement with all key decision-makers and critical influencers across your various channels. This will allow you to craft your ABM strategy to deliver highly relevant and compelling touchpoints for each target account. By using CRM data to tailor your messaging to each account and the issue they are facing, marketing efforts can improve dramatically. For example, MarketingCharts/Epsilon saw that email performance gets a 473% increase in CTR and 146% more opens.
Organizations that utilize physical marketing campaigns, such as direct mail, sample kits, brochures, sample kits, or gifts also rely on the accuracy and completeness of CRM data. It could be especially damaging if you don’t have the information you need to send out your campaigns. Even worse, you may waste budget and cause confusion by sending to the wrong addresses.
Inaccurate Sales Forecasts
Sales forecasting is critical for planning overall business goals, driving short-term spending decisions, and allocating resources. Sales leaders use forecast reports to mitigate risk and catch red flags in advance. Most importantly, sales forecasting enables you to make data-informed decisions that facilitate growth.
Even if you are allocating ample time to work on sales forecasting consistently, your reports won’t be accurate if your CRM data is missing. Salespeople spend an average of 2.5 hours on weekly sales forecasts, but their predictions are generally less than 75% accurate!
Reliable forecasting requires having the full view and context of all sales activity and contacts involved.
When your CRM is missing data, your sales forecasts will not be accurate enough to make data-informed decisions that drive revenue.
Poor Customer Success
When your CRM is missing data, your CS team may struggle to properly service accounts, monitor account health, mitigate risks, and ultimately drive retention. Successful customer lifecycle management prioritizes assigning metrics to every step or milestone starting from day 1 with the customer. From there, ensure you have the visibility to track these metrics. This often includes measuring conversations and activities around account health, renewals, and engagement.
However, if your CRM is missing data, how will you be able to monitor if your team is talking to the right people about the renewals? Furthermore, a gap in knowledge of engaged contacts leads to poor account transitions from sales to customer success, making it harder to onboard and start things right, let alone cross sell or upsell.
Lost Revenue
Every opportunity matters, especially in competitive B2B industries like SaaS. When a contact, meeting, or engagement is not logged to your CRM, you lose out on potential revenue. In fact, 44% of CRM users estimated that their organization loses over 10% of annual revenue because of bad data hygiene.
In the short term, your reps will lose out on potential deals. In the long run, you’ll struggle to have enough accurate data to make informed decisions to optimize sales and drive growth. Even if you consistently hit your targets, you won’t be able to scale if you don’t understand the factors that are influencing deals and customers.
Overall, when you’re missing CRM data, you’ll lack insights on the types and depth of engagements that lead to pipeline generation and advancement.
How to Find Missing CRM Data
Once CRM data is missing, it’s next-to-impossible to find it manually. Specialized technology is needed. Fortunately, new automation tools make it easy to find data and write it back to your CRM.
Our approach at SetSail is what we call a Data Gap Assessment. A Data Gap Assessment is a free and easy way to learn how many contacts, emails, and meetings are missing from your CRM. Using proven sales data automation technology, SetSail’s sales data experts will complete the assessment in just 3 weeks.
The process involves connecting to the email, calendar, and CRM and running a 12-month lookback to get a complete history of engagements. Our algorithm then uncovers missing data and accurately maps it to the correct accounts and opportunities. SetSail goes beyond just 3rd party enrichment to find missing contact details. We use our signature parsing extraction algorithm to get information that is more up to date and often missing from any 3rd party sources.
At the end, we’ll provide a detailed report showing the activity, contacts, and contact details missing from your CRM. In addition, SetSail will present your data in its dashboards to illustrate what complete visibility into rep performance and deal progress would look like.
Once the results have been reviewed for accuracy, SetSail will start writing data back to your CRM, giving you both historical data and ongoing visibility. The result of this increased visibility helps with an array of strategic goals, including more effective ABM campaigns, smoother account transitions, and better coaching and forecasting to increase close-rates and deal size.
Want to find your missing CRM data? Get a complimentary assessment to uncover your data gap today!
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