Would you pump swamp water into your swimming pool? Would you pump low octane gasoline into your high performance sports car? Of course not! Because, you spent thousands on these luxury items! But everyday, companies are pumping "dirty data" into their million dollar business applications.

Customer Relationship Management and Business Intelligence software are no longer "luxury items" but necessities for building and maintaining a strong, profitable, customer base. Companies are spending a fortune on these applications in hopes that the return on investment will be huge. Ultimately, their success is entirely dependent on the quality of the underlying data.

Take this scenario - ABC Company spent 5 million dollars on a fancy CRM application for their business development, marketing and sales people. After months of planning, data mapping and capital investment, ABC Company is ready for its pilot launch to the sales organization. Sales people are sent to offsite CRM training, again, another investment. They come back energized and ready to put their new found knowledge and CRM tool to work. But, when ABC Company's top sales rep logs in, she can see that the some of the mapped accounts are not hers… that there is missing address information…no revenue data… and, that a merger 8 months ago sent her biggest account to another region, but it still appears on her list! She thinks to herself, "this CRM stinks" and goes back to her Excel spreadsheet. The CRM doesn't stink. The data stinks…and there goes any hope of significant ROI.

That scenario happens every day, but is avoidable if more emphasis is put on data quality initiatives before the business applications go live. Integration consultants will tell their clients to "clean up their legacy databases" before loading the files into their new tools. This does not simply mean deleting inactive accounts and running a de-duplication process. It takes a more sophisticated method.

Consider some of these statistics derived from changes in D&B's business file - In just the next two hours:

• 706 firms will move
• 578 businesses will change their phone numbers
• 514 suits, liens or judgments will be filed against companies
• 120 new businesses will open
• 120 D&B credit ratings will change
• 120 corporate CFOs will have changed
• 60 companies will change their names
• 40 businesses will shut down
• 10 firms will file a bankruptcy petition
• 1 company will change ownership

The job of tracking and correcting these changes cannot be solely put in the hands of the sales person. Data correction and standardization needs to be mandated at the corporate level and almost always requires the expertise of an outside vendor. In addition to baseline company data, contact information needs to be verified and corrected.

B2B Contact, Inc. has been working with businesses and integration consultants for years to help develop a framework that will support their CRM initiatives. B2B Contact provides the data cleansing and enhancement services essential for a successful CRM implementation. Our business model provides an opportunity to maximize ROI, while building a foundation for future relationship enhancement. The process is multifaceted and begins with baseline data cleansing. Why? Because of the cost of inaccurate data!

• U.S. businesses suffer "losses, problems or costs" of more than $600 billion a year due to poor quality data: The Data Warehousing Institute
  
• By 2005, Fortune 1000 enterprises will lose more money in operational inefficiency due to data quality issues than they will spend on data warehouse and CRM initiatives: Gartner
• "The costs of [not managing information quality] including irrecoverable costs, rework of products and services, workarounds, and lost and missed revenue may be as high as 10% to 25% of operating revenue or total operating budget of an organization:" Larry English, "Improving Data Warehouse and Business Information Quality"

B2B Contact begins by utilizing the "D&B Best Practices" philosophy of company name and address standardization through a sophisticated match process to the D&B referential file of over 14 million US records. This process assigns a unique nine-digit number to each company site record (street address level). This number, the D-U-N-S Number, will help ensure that a site is a recognized business and identify duplicates that were not readily apparent, such as legal name vs. "doing business as" name.

Once duplicates are removed and address information is standardized, information that is missing in client data, such as phone number, SIC and revenue can now be appended. This gives clients the ability to segment customer and prospect data and build sales territories accordingly.

Finally, contact names need to be considered. B2B Contact applies intensive calling campaigns to identify information such as contact names, email addresses, and other knowledge critical to the sales cycle. Through these practices, B2B Contact has found that on average 40%-50% of client contact data is inaccurate or incomplete. This includes data from CRM, marketing databases, and rented lists.

It's clean, now what?
Once a database is purified and enhanced it is ready to load into the CRM application. But, there needs to be a maintenance plan in place to ensure that the data stay's clean. As mentioned, putting that responsibility on the sales rep is probably not the optimal path to take. The baseline client data, such as company name, address, industry, and corporate ownership can be updated through an automated process - D&B provides a best in class service for this. But, contact data is much more volatile and changes at a higher frequency.

B2B Contact offers services that can keep your names, functions and emails up to snuff, and add valuable intelligence for marketing campaigns such as technology or budgeting information. A combination of email blasts and phoning "bounce backs" is just one example of how B2B Contact can manage change. That process pertains to existing data - but how do you assure proper "data hygiene" on leads coming in from the web, phone, and marketing campaigns? A dedicated individual, such as a B2B Contact Business Development Representative, can verify inbound leads before they hit the CRM database. This can be done remotely, or within your facility. Not only is this process show due diligence for the quality of your CRM data, it increases the value of the lead and therefore increases sales productivity.

Ultimately, the message is simple. The data doesn't clean itself. There needs to be a plan in place to fix it, enhance it for marketing and sales efforts, and keep it as pristine as possible. If more companies put the same emphasis on data quality as they do functionality of CRM, marketing and sales productivity would increase and the ROI would be significant!