8 reasons to refresh your business data

1. Puts your company at risk

Not referencing the right information, be it contact, company or product/service can damage your company's status and reputation. In addition to ensure compliance and risk management, for industries with strict regulatory requirements, it's essential to ensure that your data is accurate and up to date to avoid legal or compliance issues.

2. Consider your return on investment

Failure to focus your sales and marketing efforts by targeting the wrong customer segments can result in a poor return on your investment. Think operational efficiency - data that isn’t refreshed can lead to inefficiencies, such as misaligned marketing efforts. It can also lead to outdated inventory information or inaccurate financial reporting.  Refreshing data helps streamline operations, reduces errors and when it comes to your sales & marketing campaigns will undoubtedly provide a better ROI.

3. Poor data can prove demotivating to your sales team

Your sales team are a valuable resource and wasting their time and your resources following up poor data leads can prove to be hugely discouraging. Gaining access to accurate, up-to-date B2B company and contact information will play a key role in supporting your business needs and your sales team.

4. Potential loss of your customers

Out of date data that relates to your customers will not endear you to those clients and can reflect badly on your business credibility and reputation. Updated data allows you to better understand your customers' preferences, behaviours, and needs, enabling you to offer more personalized products or services, build stronger relationships and improve your customer experience.

5. Inability to track or forecast accurately

Being unable to monitor the effectiveness of your sales campaigns can adversely impact your future sales and marketing strategies. In addition, outdated data can skew your predictions, which can negatively impact your budgeting, resource allocation, and long-term planning. Accurate, up-to-date data is essential for reliable forecasting.

6. Staying mindful of cost vs benefit

It takes time and money to find new customers and in the current market, it's important to be mindful of these costs. It is also why targeted business data is a smart choice to help you take control of your lead generation. Marketing campaigns whether direct mail, print or email can be very costly, so ensuring that you have good quality business data is important from the outset.

7. Don't negatively impact future sales opportunities

Business data evolves over time—new trends, customer behaviours, and market conditions can significantly shift. It is also the case that potential clients will not take kindly to poor data relating to their company which could negatively affect the opportunities to win new business. Keeping your data updated ensures you can make more accurate decisions based on the most current and relevant information.

8. Helping you stay competitive

At the best of times, inaccurate and poor data is difficult for any sales team to work with. It causes issues with follow-up calls and limits customer touch-points, causing frustration and negativity in your sales teams. Your competitors are likely refreshing their data too, so to stay competitive it is vital to keep on top of it. Not doing so risks your business falling behind in terms of strategy, innovation, and responsiveness to market changes.

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Here are some key ways to help keep your database clean and up to date:

Keep it centralized – try to avoid holding multiple data sources – that way there is only one place to search and update. Of course that is easier said than done, but tools such as Zapier can be used to link & share data between web based apps. Keep it segmented - implement segmented target groups – based on buyer personas and campaigns sent, as well as their relationship with you (prospect, existing or lapsed customer) Keep it updated – add new data immediately as well as updated campaign results Keep it clean – keep an eye on email results & make sure you manage opt-outs & bounces responsibly

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As data specialists we at Kompass have been in the B2B data industry for over 60 years - it's what we do best. Our goal is to help businesses understand customer data and how it can be used effectively. With data available from 70 countries, targeted sales & marketing lists can be created for specific market sectors, using our uniquely detailed 55k product & service classification system. We are a global data provider with locally sourced data through dedicated data integrity teams in each country, which ensures you will have access to very best quality data which in turn can help give you better long term sales results for your business.

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Disclaimer: Please note that this blog only contains general information and insights about legal matters. The information is not advice, and should not be treated as such. Kompass.com