Take a few minutes and do an honest analysis: do any of the situations described below reflect the current pain points or needs of your B2B sales process?
You need to prospect a database containing outdated and not very reliable data;
You need to organize your database to facilitate relationships with your customers and leads.
If you identified with at least one of the scenarios above, then you need to better understand what the business data sanitization activity consists of. This article was written to help you in this mission. Let's go ahead?
What is data sanitization?
Within the context of B2B sales, we can classify data uk email address list sanitization as the process of identifying and correcting errors, inconsistencies, and problems in commercial database data sets.
This process also includes tasks such as:
the removal of duplicate information
the correction of typos
the standardization of formats
updating outdated information.
How important is data sanitization?
Data sanitization is essential because databases containing outdated data can result in:
making strategic decisions in the wrong way
creation and development of ineffective commercial actions
considerable loss of productivity of salespeople and marketing professionals.
Remember that assertive and up-to-date data is essential to ensure the success of any B2B sales strategy.
What are the benefits of data sanitization?
There are numerous benefits to investing in a sanitation process. We can mention 3:
1. Greater accuracy in decision making
Generally, one of the main reasons for making mistakes in decision-making is the use of inconsistent or outdated data. Imagine the loss of allocating an entire pre-sales team to actively prospecting with a database containing errors in 90% of the contact phone and email information? Clean data generates more business opportunities.
2. Saving time in prospecting
By ensuring that information about each lead to be prospected is clean and up-to-date, you will be saving the pre-sales area valuable time, avoiding rework and problems caused by incorrect data, in addition to making room for more priority tasks.
3. Improved lead segmentation
After cleaning, you’ll be able to segment your list based on criteria relevant to your prospecting, such as industry, company size, or contact title, ensuring your salespeople can find the right companies and approach the right decision-makers to generate new business.
How to sanitize data?
There are currently several providers of B2B prospecting list data sanitization services. This work will involve tasks such as:
1. Removing duplicates
It starts by identifying and removing duplicate entries from your list. This prevents, for example, the same contacts from being approached by different salespeople.
2. Standardization of formats
Data such as dates, telephone numbers and addresses must follow a standardization in order to generate consistency and facilitate future analyses.
3. Integrity check
Analyzes the integrity of your data, such as CNPJs, to ensure they are correct and complete.
4. Updating information
This ensures that contact information is correct and up to date. This includes names, titles, companies, emails and telephone numbers.
5. Email address validation
Include email validation on your list to find out if they are still valid and active.
[BONUS] Data Enrichment
In addition to cleaning, you can take advantage of and enrich your database with additional strategic data , such as number of employees, estimated revenue, sector and economic size, website and social networks, among others.
It is also important to remember that company data is very dynamic and perishable. Therefore, it is recommended that you maintain your lists periodically to ensure quality so that you and your team can prospect more and better.