Why and how Incorrect Data can hinder your sales team?

The sales function is the most crucial function in any organization. It brings new customers and takes the business graph to new heights.

To survive and grow you need a fabulous sales team that can perform in challenging situations.

Sales teams use many things to enhance the top lines. Apart from their selling skills, they rely on sales leads and data to explore the right customer at the right moment.

Experts say that it is critically important that your sales team is provided with accurate sales data. Consequences of providing incorrect data to them could be devastating.

When the sales figures show a decline month after month, it is the time to investigate. Most likely the culprit is incorrect data.
How would it hamper the performance of the team? The blog explains it further. It discusses various shortcomings of the same, and also tells ways to improve the same.

• Your sales team struggles in tapping the right business leads

In the extremely competitive market today, every second count. When you provide incorrect data to the salesforce, they start tapping the leads. However, it yields nothing at the end of the day.
By the time the team realizes that the data they have been following is incorrect, your competition grabs the most promising customers.

Do you think the damage is recoverable? Perhaps not!

In today’s business scenario, changing the mind of a customer is more difficult than acquiring a fresh customer.

Therefore, lead quality is far more important than the lead quantity.

Not only sales team get frustrated by tapping wrong customers, but they waste their valuable timealso. The productivity for that day or month goes for a toss, and there is a big dent to the variable pay.

Don’t you realize by now that the impact is quite severe?

• Your sales team unnecessarily overshadowed by the competition

When your sales team struggle with incorrect data for a few months and the sales figures drop consecutively, it creates a total chaos.

Nobody understands what is happening around? How come the competitors are outperforming, and your graph is touching all-time low?

If the situation continues for a few months, you get crushed by the competition. People lose confidence in their abilities.

Hence, if there is a slight suspicion about the quality of the data, then it should be checked without delay.

Incorrect data gives misleading insights and push the potential customers away instead of pulling them.

• Tremendous load on the bottom line

Controlling operating cost is a compulsion and not choice. In the fiercely competitive market, you need to keep track of every penny spent.

When your sales team discovers that the data given to them was incorrect and it spoiled the whole month’s performance, the impact is much severe than it appears.

Had the data been correct, the sales team would have added customers to the kitty. Due to incorrect data, the operating expenses incurred in the entire period didn’t add anything to the top lines.

Thus, you get a hit on the bottom line which is difficult to recover. If the error continues month after month, then it becomes impossible to recover.

• Your sales team loses interest

The sales team is always enthusiastic and cheerful. When it breaks its own records, your company conquers new horizons.

However, when sales team sees a dip in the performance, it loses confidence, It is not a good sign for any organization.

Don’t let is happen with your company. Therefore, check every bit of the sales data carefully before mailing it to the sales head.

You need expert data analysts who can proactively identify the lacuna. If they find out the discrepancy afterwardor when the sales team identifies it and sends the data back; then it is too late. Extensive damage has happened by the time you correct it.

Moreover, sales representatives get variable pay in the form of commission earned on the sales performance. This commission is a big morale booster for them. When they don’t receive it, a real destroyer

Hence, to keep the interests of the salesforce alive; check the data validity.

• Outsourced sales model gets hampered more by it

So many organizations are moving from in-house sales model to outsourced model. Several B2B sales organizations offer services that help in shifting from costly model to cost-effective model.

It allows the companies to establish a more comfortable and intimate relationship with clients. However, one thing may jeopardize the whole thing; incorrect sales leads.

• Decision impact

When sales team goes and meet customers with an incorrect database, they can’t tap the right customers. Thus, their whole projection goes for a toss. It causes impact the decision-making process also.

Also, when you tap incorrect customers, it causes a dent in the reputation of the company. People make a negative opinion about it.

Experts say that image-building is a tough task in the competitive environment today. Therefore, managers should ensure that the same doesn’t happen just because of a negative set of data.’

• How to get the right data?

After discussing a lot about the potential hazards on the sales performance by providing wrong data, let’s understand how to ensure the correctness of it?

Experts say that maintaining data quality at the source is possible, but you need to put efforts.

Technology makes it cost-effective. Hence, building a system and infrastructure to collect right data is approachable.

Outsourcing the task of data validation could be a promising idea if you don’t want to overload your existing team.

When data sources say that a correct data can step-up the sales as high as 15 percent, it is worth putting some efforts in determining the validity of the data.

Build data format and fields that integrate with the master data file. The inferior quality of it hurts the credibility of the company.

When marketing hands over data to sales, and sales doesn’t check the validity of the lead, it results in tapping the unrealistic data.

Proper validation helps in creating a good-quality physical database.