Just as better ingredients make a better pizza, better data leads to better quality lead gen.
Letting data quality degrade, or to put in another way, failing to improve data quality when you have the opportunity to do so, is a major drag on prospecting productivity.
If you are managing a lead generation effort and want to avoid a major slide in lead quality and quantity, you must monitor how data quality is being preserved and improved.
Let me give you a common scenario. Company is struggling to close new accounts as discovery calls are too few or of poor quality. I get called in to find that there was never a best prospect profile, records dumped in were overly broad, and that as callers call little effort is made to separate those probable to buy from those unlikely to buy, to determine who has a vendor and who does not, or who is likely to buy a lot from those likely to buy a little. Wonder why good meetings are too few?
Or another common scenario, prospecting program is setup correctly to segment by qualification criteria, potential worth and more. But alas, over time, callers neglect to note “A” level prospects from the “D” level prospects, and those not qualified, even though the system was setup to make it easy to do so.
Your team is making the calls anyway. With every call your team should, at minimum, seek to improve data quality. With just a question or two and a few clicks of the mouse, your team will be better able to allocate time to those worth more time.
If not, the average and the not worthy end up getting more prospecting time than they deserve, while higher value records are under called as they are not properly coded in the database.
As a team leader, if you don’t want to spend a ton on money having your reps calling less worthy records repeatedly while the better records are neglected, you need to make sure that data quality is being preserved or improved with every call.
This is just one downside of “just make more calls” prospecting management. Improving the quality of the effort gets neglected. Making more calls into a s—pile does not lead to more good meetings.
