Written by: Joshua Loomis | DialSource
*Phone rings*
Oh, looks like it’s a local number. Guess I’ll answer.
“Hi, this is Greg from Sales-y, I was wondering if you had a few minutes to talk about our app?”
“Greg, this is John.”
“John?”
“Downstairs in Marketing.”
“Oh! Sorry man. Don’t know how you ended up in our own call list. I’ll make sure to take you off it.”
This call actually happened to a co-worker at a former company.
Why Poor Data Management Hurts Sales Efforts
It raises the question, if your sales team is accidentally calling other people in your own company by mistake, who else might they be calling that they shouldn’t be?
One of the areas where sales teams end up experiencing the biggest failures is data management. And, there’s a lot of reasons why companies end up with databases filled with duplicates, errors, and unverified call lists.
Let’s go over the big 3 and what you can do about them.
Reason 1: Sales Reps Taking Shortcuts
This is a classic. We won’t spend too much time on it. But sales reps are incentivized to hit quota and sales goals. You make your goals by making calls and sending emails.
You know what doesn’t help you meet quota? (At least by appearance.) Filling out CRM data and updating contact profiles. It’s busywork.
But what happens when you don’t do your homework? Or when the whole team isn’t doing their data logging? It catches up with you. Eventually you’re missing out on follow-ups, annoying people who are already customers, and generally participating in chaos.
Related: Five Steps to Drive More Revenue from Customer Success
Reason 2: Managers Taking Shortcuts
Managers also share the blame for bad data management. There’s the main issue of keeping the team on track and entering info, but it’s also up to the manager to make there’s an ideal system in place.
Managers know that sales is a numbers game. The more prospects you have the more deals you’re going to close. But where it’s easy to start making mistakes is when you’re not trying to make sure time is spent on the most the most qualified prospects first.
Simply getting your reps on the phone isn’t enough. You need to make sure they’re calling the right people. That means setting up a qualification system (I recommend being smart with sending emails and adding the people who click to a call list). That means making sure marketing and sales are working together, and working to make the top of your sale funnel more than a list of bought leads.
It takes time and it takes work, but there’s more to the hustle than just talking to a lot of people.
Reason 3: Companies Taking Shortcuts
I think you’ve picked up on the theme.
I’m going to use a specific example for this one. My last employer wanted a dialer for the sales team. The one that was picked seemed to work well enough. But we quickly realized there was an issue.
It was a separate app from our CRM ( Salesforce ) and had to constantly move data back and forth between the two and liked to do things it’s own way instead of playing nice with our current system.
Data was soon being lost between the cracks and duplicates were being created at a rapid pace (really each time we tried to move the data). If the time had been taken to consider data issues and usage with the new app, the whole situation may have been avoided.
If companies pick more tools for data management, it doesn’t matter how on top of it managers and reps are. There’s still going to be issues.
Instead, you it’s best to pick an app that’s interconnected with your data management system and has reliable built-in automation to save both your reps and managers time while still keeping your data accurate.
In the above dialer situation, we found DialSource to be a great app that lived in Salesforce and kept our data accurate (and our team from having a lot less headaches).
Taking the time to find the right tool and the the right process will make sure you don’t have to worry about your reps calling the rest of your company.