Decay is natural. If you leave anything alone for too long, it will age and, usually, become outdated. When it comes to data, this process is considerably speedier.
Because of this, many organizations are working with a B2B database that is outdated, invalid, or incomplete. Dirty data impacts all areas of an organization, making it critical to regularly clean your data.
What is Data Decay?
Data decay refers to data quality deterioration within sales and marketing databases. This data tends to decay from inaccuracy, outdated, coming from an unreliable source, or aging out.
B2B businesses rely on accurate databases for sales and marketing campaign success — from phone numbers, email addresses, tech stacks, to branch locations. According to a Dun & Bradstreet study, data quality continues to be a top priority for them.
Out of all surveyed companies that decreased their investment in data:
- 35% of them saw in their overall performance decline.
- 75% of those companies saw a decline in sales and marketing performance.
And out of all surveyed companies that increased their investment in data:
- 94% of them said their sales and marketing performance improved.
How Can Data Decay be Prevented?
The smallest bit of prevention can counteract time and resources waste spent on data decay mishaps.
One of the easiest methods to preventing data decay is switching from manual data entry to automated digital tools. Although database specialists are still essential to data hygiene, digital automation continuously appends and corrects decaying data.
And when you’re building your tech stack, consider their integrations so that data is updated from multiple sources. Standardization (also known as normalization) is also essential to preventing decay — data needs a foundation for data to append seamlessly.
What Can Be Done About Data Decay?
We know that data is changing constantly. When you consider the sheer volume and variety of data we see every day, you quickly realize that modern data is nothing like the simple firmographics of the past.
Modern sales and marketing is reliant on more than just data gathering. Your team must be able to derive insights from data sets and then act on this information in new and innovative ways.
With clean, accurate data, you make sure that you are always targeting the right people, getting the right insights, and acting on them at the right time.
ZoomInfo can help:
- Eliminate obsolete records
- Update missing fields
- Check email validity
- Normalize data values
- Capture contact activity
Zoominfo also appends your B2B data with information like:
- Industry,
- Company revenue and size,
- Title,
- Job function,
- Management level,
- and much more!
Deep Clean Your B2B Database
Data decay occurs in every database because of how often people change jobs or titles, companies go out of business, and mergers occur.
Businesses turn to B2B database tools because theirs is cluttered with outdated, invalid, or incomplete contacts. Dirty data impacts all areas of an organization, including marketing, lead generation, customer relationships, and finance.
This post was updated on February 8, 2021.