Let’s face it, whether you’re in sales operations or marketing analysis, your data is constantly questioned at best or simply wrong at worst. Sound familiar? Poor data quality and limited data access can plague the credibility of your analytics.

THE SECRET TO FAST, ACCURATE SALES &

MARKETING ANALYTICS

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Manual data input, duplicate entries, typos, invalid email and phone numbers, disparate systems, etc., require you to spend a painful amount of time manually cleaning, blending and enriching your data.

You’re forced to pull data from sales, marketing and financial applications (in a variety of formats) into a spreadsheet to prepare it before you can produce data visualizations and analytics in tools like IBM Watson Analytics or Tableau. The truth is, simply accessing these datasets can be a challenge - and time consuming if you need to request data from IT or other departments.

And the obstacles don’t stop there. Once you have access to the data you need, even the savviest Excel power-users face challenges and make common mistakes that wreak havoc on the timeliness and accuracy of your sales and marketing analytics.

DATA STRATIFICATION

Understanding how your data is separated in categories within spreadsheets can be challenging.

FORMULA ERRORS

More than 80% of spreadsheets have errors. And sales and marketing analysts’ love for Pivot tables can flaw your data.

FORMATTING ISSUES

De-limiting in the wrong place or with the wrong indicator, empty rows or columns, multiple data types within a column or subtotals are just some of the issues.

PROCESS ERRORS

Being too lazy or too busy to document steps taken to access and prepare data, or manual “over-rides” (that often produce a different result each time) are common.

EXPECTATION SETTING

When you have to guess “how long” something may take it’s hard to set expectations. Instead you’re given a timeframe (which is rarely long enough) to produce a report or a project, so you’re always playing catch-up.

For both humans and your database, it’s easy to see that these are different customers. However, when leads are entered into Salesforce, the results often look like this:

21ST CENTURY ONCOLOGY

21ST CENTURY ONCOLOGY, INC.

21ST MORTGAGE

21ST MORTGAGE CORD

21ST MORTGAGE CORPORATI

Salesforce counts this as five records, when it might be just two. Or it could include any of the other “21st Century” accounts listed above.

For those using a sales platform like Salesforce.com, your database is a critical resource. It’s used for sales tracking and for outbound marketing, identifying types of customers and pinpointing titles. But many of these databases are full of duplicate data fields that don’t accurately reflect the customer base. For example, if a business has a list of 100,000 customers, it’s highly likely that number is inflated because during the intake process customers are often entered multiple times, in slightly different ways. For example:

DEDUPING FOR DATA QUALITY

21st Century Insurance Company of the Southwest

21st Century Software

21st Century North America Insurance Company

21st Century Cooperative

21st Century Fox America, Inc.

21st Century Oncology, Inc.

21st Century Equipment

21st Century Life and Health Company, Inc.

21st Mortgage Corporation

DEDUPING FOR ACCURACY AND EFFICIENCY

To determine how many unique customers your company actually has, you’ll need to dedupe, or identify and eliminate the duplicate entries, to create a new master list.

Deduping manually not only increases inaccuracies because of human error, but also consumes hours of labor.

If it takes you three seconds to dedupe one row, that means it will take 80 work hours or 10 work days to dedupe 100,000 rows. And you’ll have to de-dupe every time you run a report!

Imagine if 20 rows of data representing the same customer could quickly and easily be turned into one unique customer in seconds. Sound impossible? It’s not.

But you need the right tool.

When it comes to sales, timely and accurate reporting of leads, bookings, revenue, pipeline, prospects, contracts and contact status are critical to closing more deals faster. Virtually every business depends on sales and marketing predictability. Organizational planning requires more than just sales pipeline data - it needs pricing, margin and discount analysis, customer profile and sentiment analysis, territory and account reviews, channel partner performance, market data, win/loss analysis and more.

Similarly, marketers depend on a variety of data sources to feed dashboards with inquiries, opportunities, conversion rates, click-streams, pipeline contribution, website traffic, click-through and open rates, content utilization and more.

In reality, sales and marketing people don’t always use their reporting tools effectively to capture the information they need, follow process guidelines, or keep records up to date. And when it comes to data capture and sales status reporting, they sometimes depend on external regional sources or third-party organizations, which takes quality control out of their hands.

And the best tools, processes and systems won’t yield positive outcomes if they’re not embraced, so they must be easy to adopt, use and quickly demonstrate results.

PROCESS IMPROVEMENTS REQUIRE BEHAVIOR CHANGE

BETTER OUTCOMES REQUIRE FASTER INSIGHTS

More importantly, data prep solutions are enabling users to tap information from virtually any source, including dark data housed in previously inaccessible multi-structured and unstructured documents such as PDF reports or web pages.

With self-service data prep users can gain fast access to not only the right data, but all the data crucial for a holistic view of the business. This means you can spend more time performing analysis that yields actionable, quality business insights.

Self-service data prep is transforming how sales and marketing analysts (and everyday business users) acquire, manipulate and blend data by making the process quick, accurate and consistent. These solutions enable users to easily access and clean messy, disparate data without having to rely on IT or other resources.

With self-service data prep you can blend data and prepare reports quickly and accurately, and export what you need to leading business intelligence and visualization tools to improve productivity. Or you can combine common sales and marketing data with your enterprise applications (customer data, financial data, expense data, HR data, etc.) and third-party data (relational, CSV and other standard, structured data) for further analysis.

SELF-SERVICE DATA PREP TO THE RESCUE

http://www.datawatch.com Easy to learn and use for rapid and welcome adoption.

Access to data from other areas, e.g. finance systems, without relying on departmental or additional IT resources.

Access to accurate, reliable, secure, consistent data that can be quickly retrieved and easily exported, providing data snapshots and predictive analytics for insight into customer health.

Real-time views of sales pipeline and dashboards with drill-down capability.

Without the right tools, sales and marketing analysis can come to a standstill, and you’ll spend more time prepping data than actually using it to benefit your business.

When data can be accessed easily and consistently, sales and marketing analytics can be more timely and accurate. Ordinary users can dramatically improve the sales and marketing data quality at their organization and transform it into actionable intelligence that drives timely, more informed decisions and delivers greater business value. Benefits of self-service data prep

To find out more about self-service data prep visit www.datawatch.com