Salesforce will stop renewing Data.com licenses in just a couple of months, so hopefully you’re well on your way to finding a replacement and building your migration plan. If not, keep reading. This blog series is all about helping you do that.
The first post encouraged you to look at your existing data against your needs to determine the gaps. Now it’s time to clean the data you have before you replace Data.com. You don’t want to mix dirty data with clean.
Step 2: Clean Your Data
We’ve already mentioned that as much as 70% of your data will be incorrect in a year, if you don’t work to keep it clean. Even if you’re using Data.com Clean, you may want to do a thorough cleaning before your transition to a Data.com alternative.
Ask yourself, are you happy with the quality of your data? Do you have a lot of duplicate records? Is your data standardized and normalized, which is critical for solid data matching and cleansing going forward. If your data is not in tip top shape, we suggest you clean it before replacing Data.com.
The ROI of data cleansing
Remember that dirty data clogs your workflow and adds friction to your sales and marketing processes. It limits your ability to develop an accurate ideal customer profile (ICP) and target the right accounts. It means you’re not getting a clear picture of your prospects, which affects your engagement, credibility, and ultimately your win rates. Even just a 5 or 10% error rate means you’re leaving that much revenue opportunity on the table.
You’ve probably read about the 1/10/100 rule. The thinking is that it takes $1 to verify a record as it is received and $10 to later cleanse and de-dupe it. If you do nothing, the cost is $100 per record as the errors are felt over and over through lost opportunities and wasted resources. Cleaning your data now helps you avoid the $100 penalty down the line.
The steps to cleaner data
There’s no two ways about it. Cleaning data is a messy business and you will likely want to hire a third party data provider to help you with it. In fact, as you consider alternatives to Data.com, you should ask if they have a professional services team that does data cleansing.
Even if you hire an outside service, there are still a number of steps you need to take and certain tasks you can’t delegate. Some will require manual effort, so better get started as soon as you can.
A good approach is to make this a formal project with executive support from both sales and marketing. That will help you align on goals and ease the allocation of resources, particularly if you choose to work with a third-party service. So what next?
Step 1: Backup your entire database just in case you need to go back and restore the old data.
Step 2: Create your “keep or purge” criteria. You’ll want to keep data that’s fresh and relevant and purge what’s not. For example, you might delete records with no activity in over a year or two. Also think about purging leads with bad email addresses or phone numbers, and those who have unsubscribed.
InsideView went through our own major database purge a couple of years ago and reduced our marketing automation costs by 50%, simply because we were managing a much lower volume of records.
Step 3: Identify duplicate records and set rules for merging and purging. You can use a cleaning service to flag duplicates for you, and some will even do the cleanup on your behalf. However, because of nuances, you may prefer to have someone who is familiar with the data review and individually take action on each.
Step 4: If you haven’t standardized and normalized your data lately, we suggest you do that as well. For example, do you sometimes abbreviate and sometimes not? Sometimes use legal entity names and sometimes dba’s? Are your addresses normalized? Do you have a mix of Ave., Ave, and Avenue, WA and Washington?
When you standardize and normalize your data, you’ll improve your match rates with your new Data.com replacement, which means you’ll be able to refresh and enrich more records. You can do this step manually or have a service provider do it for you.
Step 5: Update and enrich the records that remain with clean data from your new service provider.
Get in the habit of good data hygiene
Cleaning isn’t a one-and-done exercise. While it’s critical to thoroughly clean your data before migrating to a Data.com alternative, in part 3 of this series, we’ll look at how you can keep your data clean. If you can’t wait, download the full Data.com Migration Planning Guide today. Or, if you’d like to talk with a data and sales intelligence expert, let us know and we’ll be glad to help.
READ PART 3
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