There is often a natural tension between a company’s marketing and sales departments. While they both support a company’s revenue goals, a sales team’s personal paychecks are often directly affected by the quality of the leads they are given by marketing. This, in turn, can often lead to a finger pointing battle over who is doing their jobs well enough.
Many of our blog posts cover how our data quality products improve a business’s bottom line. Here, we will look at a recent case study where our customer data verification service helped build morale and reduce conflict within a talented sales and marketing team.
The problem
This was a case of a dance with two partners: a marketing group that did their best to provide prospects from its lead generation channels, and a talented sales team whose top performers were frustrated by chasing after too many dead-end leads, and not having enough time to pursue the good leads.
In this case, there were good intentions on all sides. Bad leads don’t always wear name tags, and even the best lead generation process is prone to bogus entries – for example, when you make an attractive offer of free information in return for someone’s contact information, some people will make things up to get the goodie without being contacted in the future. Worse, these bad leads incurred per-lead charges on the company’s CRM and marketing systems.
How we helped
Preventing these bad leads is often beyond the scope of many businesses’ internal capabilities – however, implementing a cloud-based solution to validate these leads against extensive data sources was the key to solving this problem. We helped this client deploy Service Objects’ DOTS Lead Validation – International service, so they could validate and cross-check their lead data to flag bogus leads and ensure data accuracy.
Once they validated each lead as a legitimate person that could be contacted, they used our quantitative authenticity score in conjunction with their own intent scoring criteria to help determine the next step: move the lead into the sales funnel, set them aside for long-term nurture campaigns, or reject them outright. Over time, they moved from validating and scoring emails to checking phone numbers and then leads as a whole.
The result? A much happier sales team, thanks to substantially improved lead quality, and much smoother cooperation and collaboration between sales and marketing. And as a bonus, the company saved money through our data verification service validating these leads upstream, before entering them into their marketing automation platform, to reduce per-lead charges due to bad data.
The intangible benefits of lead quality
We often talk about the financial or competitive benefits of better contact data quality. However, we shouldn’t overlook the intangible benefits of better business tools. When morale is low and people are in conflict, sometimes – perhaps more often than you think – poor tools or systems can be part of the problem.
Does your organization struggle with conflicts like this client did? Consider reaching out to the friendly product experts at Service Objects. We’ll respond to your concerns with free no-pressure product demos, expert advice tailored to your workplace, and even a free 500-transaction trial license to test-drive our products on our nickel. Contact us, and let us help make your workplace happier too!
