87 Percent of B2Bs Queasy About Customer Data Quality

Does it shock you that 87 percent of B2B respondents in a recent survey expressed "little confidence" in their customer data?

One reason is simply that there's way, way too much of it swirling around. "Often times, companies are overwhelmed with issues related to the quality of their customer data and just don't know where to start," said Chad Gottesman, chief marketing officer, Extraprise. As noted business process and management philosopher Frank Zappa said once, information is not knowledge. Oh, and don't eat the yellow snow.

More than half (54 percent) of B2B companies surveyed indicated that the lack of sales and marketing collaboration is their most important challenge. Only half (52 percent) of companies surveyed claimed to have integration between their sales and marketing systems.

Slightly more than one-third (39 percent) of respondents indicated that data-related issues were the next challenge facing their marketing efforts.

"Marketing executives are waiting for a magic wand to make their investments worthwhile," added Gottesman. "Yet most marketing departments are still facing a huge internal challenge integrating two major components of marketing performance -- sales and marketing."

So what's a B2B to do? Without sounding too much like a pointy-haired boss:
a. Invest in a continuous process to capture, correct, and standardize data
b. Automate as many steps as possible
c. Focus internal investments on the mission
d. Focus your brain trust on the highest value insights and automate the key processes.

The survey findings are based on responses from a sample of attendees interviewed at DM Days New York Conference and Expo 2006. Other topics covered within the survey included how many disconnected data sources cover some aspect of their customers (59 percent have data in at least four different locations whereas 18 percent cite between 5-10 locales and 23 percent claim to have data in more than 10 systems).

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David Sims is contributing editor for TMCnet. For more articles please visit David Sims’ columnist page.

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