Prospect Data Ages Like Milk – Not Wine. What’s Its Expiration Date?

By Author: Gerald Valentine
Total Articles: 33
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Most companies consider prospect data one of their most valuable assets, and it’s hard to argue that point when prospect data is the bedrock of effective outbound sales and marketing campaigns.

Meanwhile, maintaining and cleansing that valuable data typically requires more time and resources than companies can handle in-house.

As a result, many companies have never analyzed their prospect data integrity – let alone how bad data affects their actual sales and ROI.

If they did, they would probably be shocked to find that outdated or incorrect data is costing them a serious amount of money. Between 30% and 40% of all business objectives fail due to bad prospect intel. Over the entire U.S. economy, bad data is to blame for $3 trillion in lost revenue – each year.

The good news is that prospect data governance can keep databases clean with 99% accuracy.

When Does Data Expire?
Most businesses aren’t even aware that prospect data has a very real expiration date! Every year:

40% of people switch jobs
66% of job functions and titles change
40% of people change their ...
... phone number
37% of email addresses are deactivated
That’s why 62% of all businesses are basing critical business decisions off of data that’s up to 40% incorrect. Even worse, a quarter of all business databases contain critical errors.

The longer that incorrect data stays in a system, the higher the costs climb.

If one bad piece of data just sits in a database and rots, it will rack up $100 in lost revenue due to the time being wasted and poor business decisions being made from that data. However, it only costs 1% of that to verify the incorrect information and remove it before it enters the database.

Businesses need an ongoing system to purge irrelevant or invalid data while verifying incomplete information so they can use it to build proper lead nurturing, email marketing, and content marketing strategies.

65% of buyers say they’ll consider switching brands if a company doesn’t try to personalize communications and 85% say they expect businesses to personalize the very first point of contact.

How can businesses build effective personalization strategies for both prospects and current customers with bad prospect data?

Well, they can’t! That’s why only one out of every five businesses are effectively personalizing content at scale.

How Can Prospect Data Governance Help?
Going through a database once a year to check for invalid email addresses isn’t enough.

Many businesses don’t realize that 15% of their data contains duplicate entries while another 18% contains invalid ranges or missing fields.

Every business needs regular monitoring and governance to ensure that each piece of data on prospects and leads is accurate and up to date – ideally every 90 days or so.

Prospect data governance cleanses expired data through rigorous verification, validation, and tracking before updating that data to a CRM platform and delivering completed reports about any discrepancies. Data governance can also help close the gaps with verified notes.

Prospect Data Governance Solution
Flobile can convert that curdled data into active prospect profiles that deliver value to businesses to make confident decisions.

The AI-driven data scientist-developed system purges old data and verifies entries with up to 99% accuracy to empower sales teams with actionable insights. Flobile data governance solutions scan databases every 90 days to close loopholes and deliver reports on the findings.