I laugh when I hear the term "data clensing." Keeping your data accurate and up to date is the responsibility of each member of your sales team, not just sales ops, sales management, and marketing. The real world is a dynamic place. Sales teams that stay on top of these changes in roles, responsibilities, and contact info always outperform those who think it's the job of someone else.

Great points! We see our customers data degrading at least at 3% per month and having a strong data cleansing practice can lead to an uplift of revenue by 66% according to SiriusDecisions. To the other comments you must look at it as a process and continually have data goverenance in place rather than just a spring cleaning once in a blue moon.

Hey Evan,  
 
Isn't ReachForce running a data cleansing promo? 1000 free contacts? Can you share a link with more details here? 
 

Great post, Trish! Data quality/management is a challenge that is increasing in importance for marketers as their focus shifts more to the Internet. Because we now have more ways to digitally interact with consumers and businesses than ever before, marketers’and sales teams' demands for detailed prospect information are increasing. For example, not only do marketers and sales pros want basic contact information and email addresses, but they’re now asking for Web 2.0 utilization trends (as evidenced by the launch of applications like Flowtown’s Social Lead Scoring, which integrates with Salesforce http://ow.ly/36tdw). To stand out from the surrounding “noise” (social and otherwise), sales and marketing messages need to be ultra-customized. What is the situation of our prospects? What can we learn from their Twitter feeds and LinkedIn activity? What problems do they need to solve? What’s happening in their industries that might impact their purchasing decisions? A major roadblock to answering these questions is data quality.  
 
 
 
CSO Insights 2010 data (http://ow.ly/36tBx ) reports that only 8% of firms responded that currency and correctness of their prospect data was more than 90%, an all-time low. Of course, the inaccuracy of prospect data negatively impacts the effectiveness of firms’ interactions with customer and prospects. As Marketo reports (http://ow.ly/36tKy), 20% or more of a sales rep’s time is wasted talking to the wrong people. Fortunately, we’re finding that most B2B firms are planning to increase their investments in data management. In return, we—as business information providers—must partner with our customers and learn from them so that we can deliver the most accurate information in the best format/user-friendly UI possible.  
 

Wow...great comments so thanks. Data was never sexy so organizations tended to ignore it to their own detriment. But, the data vendors are making huge strides with how they deliver infomration and they are figuring out how to make it part of the sales process. That is cool!

Very relevant post, Trish. I just spoke on this topic with one of our customers, Cisco/Webex, yesterday at the Sales and Marketing 2.0 event - they are seeing tremendous ROI by visiting the data doctor regularly as a process, not an event. Business leaders at the show are in agreement that we need to take a step back in the strategic planning process and align sales and marketing (in general much more), but also align better around data quality and usability. Companies with strong data at the top of their demand waterfall show a 66% increase in revenue (source: SiriusDecisions). We advised the audience to take the following steps in their process to improve data quality and usability - 
1. understand how many "usable" records you have today against your total buyer universe - taking into account how quickly data decays. 
2. look to define what a "complete, fresh, valid" record means for your business. I have examples that I'm happy to share on this if someone wants to see. 
3. the business information providers have stepped up. Reach out to a few and talk to them about how they might help you. Push them on how are they gathering data to satisfy "complete, fresh and valid" data (what is their data collection methodology?)- and ASK for sample files so you can test their accuracy and quality. I'm not going to make this a pitch, but we'd love to talk to anyone facing the challenges above. We have created a series of game-changing technologies + community over the last ten years to help companies with this very challenge of keeping up to data with bad data. Note: no one vendor can solve ALL your needs, so be prepared to find the best one for you or multi-source. The market also allows you now to buy net-new names so you're not duplicating purchases. 
4. ensure that you tightly align sales and marketing strategically so you are measuring and testing the marketing strategy and closing the loop. Test your execution. The point here is the data must be usable so it fuels your marketing/sales strategy. 
 
These strategies and others will help attack the problems we are seeing in today's tough business environment - with 52% of reps hitting plan (source CSO Insights) - and 76% of sales and marketing leaders saying that their #1 challenge going into 2011 is generating more quality leads (source:Marketingprofs) 
 
I will share a link to the slides once we get them up on Slideshare. Hope this helps. @brett_wallace

I have been managing marketing databases for 15 years, and I think one of the reasons that people ignore data quality is that most people don't know where to start. A good simple strategy is to have your sales team code contacts as "gone away" when they dial in and find someone gone, and in addition make sure your marketing automation system and/or email marketing provider tracks hard bounces correctly. Then on a quarterly basis, research and replace all of these "gone away" contacts.  
 
Outsourcing the research and contact replacement is one tactic, or if you have a response management team (phone based lead qual) this may be a good task for them to handle because it also provides an excuse to call and follow up.  
 
Here is the relevant link to Salesify's service page for this type of service: http://www.salesify.com/contact-verification/ 
 
And here is a link to a webinar covering the key steps for better data quality: http://www.salesify.com/webinar-data-quality-counts/

It's great that we have a lot of data vendors who can update informaton for companies depending on the list that was provided to them. I agree that this cuts off time, allowing marketing executives and sales reps to concentrate more, on giving customers quality time and closing a sale. http://bit.ly/ayeen

Investing in your data is a process, and this process will continue to change and grow through the life of the business. It's so true and if you want to think of it as an event then you aren't giving your business the right amount of effort.

'Data was never sexy'...I like that. 
 
Your sales team should be finding data (or indeed, a nice clean, well maintained set of contacts) incredibbbbbbbbbbly sexy. Lot's of lovely contacts to contact for business (and thus commision).  
 
I agree that it's the duty of the sales teams to clean up their datalists.  
 
Using a good quality, versatile CRM can make things a lot easier, marking down live leads, in progress leads and closing leads and deleting them if they don't turn out to be workable.  
 
Great post though, I'll have a look at those two companies.