Data Management Can Help Your Sales Team Save Time
One of the most important resources for businesses is time. If you don’t speed up your processes and get more done in less time, it can affect the rate of your team’s productivity and lose some time-bound business opportunities. In fact, a recent survey shows that 66% of sales reps’ work hours was spent on non-sales activity and 50% of sales reps surveyed feel that they spend too much time trying to find the right person to contact. This means wasted time and resources for your business.

With properly-maintained data, you can gain a lot of benefits for your business. One of which is to help your sales reps make the most of their time and optimize their capacity to close out more sales for your business. The right data management process can help you maximize the use of your business data to drive up your sales team’s productivity. You might have tens of thousands or even millions of data points available in your CRM system, but if they are not properly managed, you won’t be able to use them to your advantage.

It’s Not Always About The Tools
One of the steps that most businesses take whenever they feel that their sales team isn’t doing well is to buy new tools or incorporate additional sales processes. These can include coming up with a sales playbook for your team or using additional sales enablement apps, which can just make the job more complicated for your sales reps. Not that there’s anything wrong with using new tools to do more calls, but if you are constantly providing your team with dirty and unorganized data, then your new tools will not help much.

Your sales team greatly relies on the customer data they are provided with. For them to make the most of every customer contact that they make, it’s essential that you improve your prospecting methods to come up with useful contacts only. Moreover, cleaning up and managing the data before you hand them over to your sales team can help them focus more on contacting prospects, instead of cleaning up your messy data.

What Your Sales Team Should Focus On
To help your sales team focus on their functions and be able to close out more deals for you, here are some tasks that they should be more focused on:

1. Making phone conversations
2. Searching relevant records
3. Send out well-written emails
4. Contacting prospects on social media channels

But if your sales team is spending a lot of time updating, organizing or correcting records and attempting to contact people using incorrect information, then you are just wasting your team’s time and your business resources. Think about the amount of money you have to spend just to build a team of talented sales reps. From recruitment and hiring to onboarding and training, your business might have already spent a hefty amount of money just to make sure that you have the right sales rep in your team. If all of their time will be used to clean up data, then it will take you longer to get your ROI.

By following proper data management practices for your customer database, your sales reps won’t have to struggle with contacting prospects and they’ll be able to make more sales in less time. Organizing and cleaning up your data can help you optimize the use of your records and eliminate any costly mistakes due to dirty data. Using dirty and old data can be more difficult to deal with and will eat up some of your sales team’s precious time, which they could have instead used to close out more deals. It can even render your marketing efforts ineffective. But with a good data management system, you can guarantee that the data you are using are still relevant to your business.

This is why you should think about how your data is being managed and used. Do you have a quality process in place to make sure that all the data being entered in your CRM are accurate and relevant? How credible and useful are all the records saved in your database? Think about how these incorrect data can affect every call experience made by your sales team and how it can impact your ROI altogether.

Data Quality Matters For Your Sales Team
Refining the quality of your data should always be made a priority. To make sure that your sales team has all the information that they need to close out more sales for you, here are some data management practices that you should consider implementing.

1. Improve your research process
The quality of the data that you get will greatly rely on how your research is done. To get those hard-to-find industry data that your sales team needs, you should start by improving your research. Start broad, then dive into the specifics. You should also know how to recognize a quality source and make sure that every information that you get from several sources are verified.

2. Incorporate quality audit in your process
Apart from improving how you do your research, including quality audit in your data gathering process should also be a priority. Set up an audit team to help you make sure that every customer data set that will be passed on to your sales team is relevant, accurate and useful in your sales process. Implement a lead scoring system such as ranking leads from 1, 2, and 3 or by using terms like ‘hot’, ‘warm’ or ‘cold’, or even by color coding. This will help sales and marketing teams understand which data to prioritize. This quality scoring system can also serve as your sales manager’s guide on how he will allocate the customer records appropriately to different reps. This process will help increase the sales team’s overall efficiency and productivity as the data they will be dealing with will be sales-ready.

3. Include custom data programs in your resources
Using customized data for your marketing and sales processes can also help your team save time. With custom data sets, your sales reps won’t have to filter through irrelevant records and just focus their efforts on calling or sending out emails to the right people.

Why Outsource Your Customer Data Management
To help enable your sales team and be able to complete more sales for your company, it’s important that they are equipped with high-quality data. But cleaning up and managing large amounts of data will always take up a lot of time and resources. It’s something that you can choose to do in-house, but if you don’t have the manpower to do so, you can consider outsourcing to a reliable business partner. If you want to improve your data management processes to be able to boost your sales team’s productivity, you should think about hiring data managers or contacting an outsourcing partner to handle it for you. And if you are considering outsourced data management, contact us here at Assivo to help you get started.