Behind every successful company, whether it’s a multinational corporation or the smallest start-up, is clean and qualified data. In the following article, we share some of the best ways you can grow and protect your most valuable asset ¦ Your data.
If you want to increase the success of business and maximise upon the sales and/or marketing activities you undertake, you need to ensure the data you have is of good quality.
Here we share how you can grow, improve and protect your data ¦
Invest time and money in growing your data
Data is your business’ most valuable asset, it’s therefore no surprise that we recommend you invest in it. In order for your business to grow, you need to invest time and money in sales and marketing activities. This essentially enables you to grow your data, by measuring what activities work and which don’t, along with the ability to record customer and prospect data.
Recording all business data should be a consistent and continual process, as it will enable you to remain agile and on-trend. It will enable you to react to the most accurate, up to date information available and stay ahead of the competition.
Ways you can grow your data include:
- Buying in data from an external partner
- Using lead capture techniques at events and online
- Ensure tracking is included on all sales and marketing activities
- Implement an integrated software solution and record each aspect of your business, from stock, sales, marketing, accounts and finance.
In our article Data Quantity Versus Data Quality , we explained that, Simply having a lot of data does not help. In fact, it can muddy the waters and make decision-making more difficult, increasing cost and reducing efficiency. As such, once you have access to multiple sets of data, it’s important to improve the quality of it to ensure it’s fit for purpose. Only then will you be able to use the data to its full potential.
Improve the quality of your data
Growing your data is the first step to becoming a data-driven business. The next step is to find a way of being able to easily understand your data and obtain intelligence from it.
To gain actionable insights from your business data you need to have one version of the truth, in which case, we’d recommend implementing an integrated CRM software solution. Only by having one integrated solution, whereby all data is contained in one location, will you have access to accurate sets of data that can be segmented or manipulated to enable you to discover new trends, potential future issues or business requirments. To implement a solution to manage your data, you first need to cleanse it, removing any duplicate information.
Protect and maintain your data
For you to be able to maintain a high level of quality data, you need everyone within your company to be responsible for the data they input into your chosen system. To ensure everyone understands what is required of them, it’s important to create and implement a process that clearly details what you expect each department to record and how they’ll be held accountable.
According to Jim Collins, author of Good to Great, the key point is that who questions come before what decisions “ before vision, before strategy, before organization structure, before tactics. Therefore, no matter how good your data is, you need a good team to record it, improve it and maintain it. Get it right and your business’s growth trajectory is likely to continue or accelerate. Get it wrong and your tentative step forward might lead to the proverbial three steps back.
Only when you have good quality data can you begin to truly understand how each department can better work together to improve the success of your business. Quality data will enable you to pre-empt the needs of your business, including stock, customer service requirements, and even staff requirements. From this you’ll be able to create targeted strategies and make informed business decisions enabling you to build a successful business.
