Bad contact data may not be the top of your priority list, but it could be slowly and silently draining the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. Emails go unanswered as they land in the inboxes of people who left months ago. Time spent dialing disconnected numbers earns you nothing and can never be recovered.
Gartner estimates that businesses lose $12.9 million each year due to bad-quality data. However, it doesn't have to be that way. It's time to leverage tools that clean and enrich your sales lead database, so your team's time is spent following leads that pay.
Why Your Contact Data Is Decaying
Contact records don't stay accurate on their own. Some of the primary factors making your data go stale faster than yesterday's croissant include:
- Job changes
- Company mergers and closures
- Email addresses retired
- Reassigned phone numbers
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, average employee tenure is just 3.9 years. This rapid turnaround means a sales lead database that was pristine last year could be riddled with dead ends today. Every stale record is like a small tax on your company's time, one that compounds fast when you have a database of thousands of contacts.
The Productivity Drain of Bad Contact Data
Let's consider what low-quality contact data does on an average day. Sales reps spend hours on bounced emails and wrong numbers, instead of selling. Every returned email and disconnected number slowly chips away at their morale and incentives.
If you purchase business email lists full of unverified addresses, your team is just filling up lots of uninterested people's junk mail folders. You're blowing through your marketing budget targeting people who will never even see your message. None of this shows up as a major expense on your accounts; it just slowly chips away at motivation and productivity.
Clean Data Is the Solution
Your team is already working hard; that's not the problem. What they need is better information. The challenge is that paying employees to carry out contact enrichment can be expensive and time-consuming.
To get a clean contact database that's full of verified contact info, you need a platform that does the heavy lifting for you. Software like ZoomInfo maintains and verifies B2B contact records at scale. It will refresh details, flag changes, and give your team up-to-date and accurate data to work from.
This will transform a decaying liability into a productive asset with the potential to generate exciting leads and major sales.
Make Bad Contact Data a Thing of the Past
There is no need for any business to hemorrhage money following up bad contact data anymore. Time spent following up and fixing dodgy contact data can now be spent following up real leads. Harness the power of AI to bring your sales lead database to life again.
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This article was prepared by an independent contributor and helps us continue to deliver quality news and information.