Data Accuracy: The key to generating your Sales and Marketing pipeline
As a B2B Sales or Marketing expert, you’ll be all too familiar with the challenge of trying to search for and find accurate information about potential leads. All too often the data you have just spent hours or days searching for is either out of date, or just plain incorrect. This can result in you contacting the wrong person and inevitably having to go back to the drawing board to start all over again.
Hubspot recently carried out a study on 6,200 sales and marketing employees, and they all noted losing at least one hour if not more, per day, manually searching for information about potential leads and future prospects. It’s a huge amount, and such a massive waste of time when alternative solutions are available.
So what’s the common thread tying so many of these errors together?? Put simply; poor data.
Poor data quality comes in several forms:
- Duplicate contacts
- Inaccurate data: wrong email, incorrect gender, or mistakes in the name
- Incomplete data: you cannot personalize your segments or your communications
- Unstandardized data: information that isn’t consistent in format, such as a mixture of names starting with lower and upper case (rather than all upper case)
- Obsolete data: your leads are moving and regularly change companies or jobs
Obsolete data: your main enemy
In 2021, almost 30% of your B2B database will become obsolete after only one year. 30% in one year, that’s just crazy! 😱 If you’re a member of the Sales and Marketing team, then this is one of your biggest nightmares ..
.. and what’s worse, is that this rate is continuously increasing. People are changing companies more often and more quickly than ever before, and if this is the data you’re relying on, then all of your hard work could be utterly useless!
Not only, could you be increasing your ‘bounce’ rate and damaging your domain reputation (Marketing teams hate that 😉), but you could be wasting vast amounts of your time trying to make contact with people who have simply left the company.
Let’s face it, if they’ve moved and you didn’t know, then you’ve potentially missed out on securing a sale at the company they were with - and - think about it for a second - if they’re still in the same kind of role, then arguably you’ve missed out at their new company too, because you’ve clearly not nurtured the relationship enough, for them to ‘take you’ with them!
If you have accurate and sufficiently detailed information, then this provides real value-add in the commercial relationship. If you have consolidated, correct contact data, your prospecting efficiency will be hugely, positively impacted, not only from the personalization of your email campaigns but also in nurturing your customer relationships.
In essence, having clean, accurate and detailed data is essential for your B2B prsospecting and business efficiency!
So, how do we make sure we are using the right data in our Sales Automation processes?
This is not rocket science. It is actually quite easy to connect different tools for the purpose of automating your sales process to enable you to focus on where the real value is: selling. In this blog we review 4 of the best integrated tools to get you where you need to be:
- Dux-Soup
- Dropcontact
- Pipedrive
Here’s the lowdown ..
1. LinkedIn
LinkedIn is the world’s most accessible and up-to-date, B2B database, so it seems likely this professional social network is already one of your prospecting starting points (and if it isn’t yet, it soon will be)!
However, the process to find, copy and paste prospect information is laborious and takes a lot of time (which you could be spending on selling)!
Fortunately, there are tools that can scrape LinkedIn and help you to automate your LinkedIn prospecting.
2. Dux-Soup
Dux-Soup is a Sales Automation tool directly connected to your LinkedIn account. It scrapes your targets’ profiles in LinkedIn, to ensure your messaging can be completely personalized.
Dux-soup provides vital information for each lead from their public LinkedIn profile: first name, last name, function, experience, company name, company LinkedIn profile, photo, to name but a few, and can be integrated with tools such as Pipedrive, which we talk about below. This integration means, results from Dux-Soup are automatically added to your Pipedrive, which is another time-saving solution right there!
💪🏼 One-click replaces hours of time-consuming (and let’s face it, totally mind-numbing) copy-paste activity. Can’t ask for better than that!
3. Dropcontact
Dropcontact enriches all your B2B contacts directly into your CRM.
When you add a new contact or update a contact/company card, Dropcontact processes and updates all of the information.
You can plug Dropcontact into Pipedrive (as well as Salesforce, Hubspot and many more, thanks to Zapier) with just one click. Boom!! All of your data is automatically enriched, allowing you to:
● Add contact titles (Mr. or Mrs.) to personalize your comms
● Correct and normalize first and last name formatting
● Delete toxic characters (like emojis or encoded fonts)
● Add validated, verified and up-to-date professional email addresses
● Add company website and Linkedin pages
● Add the industry sectors
● Detect and merge potential duplicate contacts
💡 The ability to find data in real-time is THE key to guaranteeing accuracy.
Dropcontact has developed its algorithms to provide you with B2B data in real-time without using a stored database.
Almost all data is verified and validated by Dropcontact before correcting the record in your CRM.
4. Pipedrive
Pipedrive is a straightforward and efficient CRM, and to make things even easier, Dux-Soup and Dropcontact are integrated directly into it 💚 which makes it super easy, not only to automate your outreach, but also to push lead gen activities directly into your business pipeline for the Sales and Marketing teams to get cracking on!
So, now what?
Well, we’ve given you all the facts, now it’s down to you to get started! If you want to save time, and ensure the data you’re working with is up-to-date (and GDPR compliant), then you’ve got all the info you need right here in this blog!
By combining the use of these four easy-to-use tools, you can launch your lead generation activity and be confident that you’re on the right track.
To help you a tiny bit more 👉🏻 you can even view the entire process here.
With these tools on board, in short, the hard work is being done for you, so now, you can focus on the human side of prospecting 😘
If you want to learn more about B2B prospecting and GDPR, Denis Cohen from Dropcontact explains everything about it here.
