What is the Issue at Hand?
- Organization is Technology Rich, but Insights & ROI are Poor
What Have Modern Marketing & Sales Leaders Learned?
- Modern Marketing Organizations Have Realized that CRM Data Quality is A Team Sport
“Where there is data smoke, there is business fire.” — Thomas Redman.
A marketing leader from one of my B2B clients stated they prefer to ask salespeople to create spreadsheets of potential invitees to virtual events rather than selecting invitees directly from the CRM.
Their rationale for the approach is that salespeople won’t keep their CRM contacts up-to-date, which results in bad data they can’t rely upon to send event invites.
There are variations of this story across B2B organizations that have invested significant sums in CRM and marketing automation technology. Yet, they have failed to deploy pragmatic processes and instill sales and marketing alignment at the most basic level — contact management.
1. Technology-Rich, but Insights & ROI Poor
If marketing teams place blame on the sales team as the ones responsible for CRM use and sound data (or lack thereof), those marketing teams may be on the way to the dustbin — you won’t be seeing “Big Data,” marketing ROI, or strategic insight from them. You’ll find that these organizations are not only underutilizing their CRM and marketing technology investments, they’re also making too many decisions based on tribal knowledge or gut instinct rather than data.
These marketing teams need to approach the problem differently.
2. Modern Marketing Organizations Have Realized that CRM Data Quality is A Team Sport
In these organizations, salespeople are the “front line” for working with CRM data. However, there is alignment with teams from marketing, sales enablement, sales operations, and operations regarding the importance of reliable CRM data and their mutual responsibility.
None of these teams would venture to ask the sales team anything about customers, contact, or opportunity data that did not come from the CRM. And you won’t find parallel efforts to manage this data via spreadsheets.
You’ll also find sales and line of business leaders in these organizations fully vested in the team approach because they recognize that the company’s growth is at stake!
If you want a transition from poor to great CRM data, the first step is to elevate the conversation to the right leadership teams. Trust me that they all have a vested interest in better data and the insight it provides.
Salespeople are not the cause of bad CRM data. Lack of alignment and leadership are the culprits.