Get Smarter with SaaS CRM on Demand Quality Data

Dears,

What’s the biggest obstacle to getting the most value from your CRM? Answer me quick within a second. Quick…. Chances are you said it’s your data. Customer management professionals tell us that poor data management is one of the biggest barriers to getting value from their CRM systems

As a CRM professional, this probably isn’t news to you. You know that a unified, current view of your customers and prospects would help you identify your best customers, retain them, find new cross-sell and up-sell opportunities and acquire new customers just like them. You could identify and avoid potential compliance and credit risk. And, your sales force would be focused on closing deals, not on entering information or using outdated, inaccurate information to try to develop relationships. But elusive is the right word, because data management, in a word, is hard. Why?

• Business is real time, but the data fueling your CRM isn’t.

• You struggle with data quality, accuracy and completeness, resulting in duplicate accounts, out of date information.

• There are more information sources than ever before: not just your own information and traditional external business information sources, but also blogs and social media channels like Facebook and Twitter.

• Your sales people need demographic details, and, even more important, comprehensive contact details, especially email, to reach the right decision-makers.

That’s the bad news. The good news is cloud computing and on-demand data approaches are making real-time data updating and integration easier than ever. Through applications you already use, like Salesforce.com Or Oracle CRM on Demand (CoD), you can now bring together your information, standardize and synchronize it with a trusted external information source, incorporate relevant in-context content from social media and news feeds – and keep it all up to date, automatically.

3 STEPS TO QUALITY DATA

Quality data starts by cleaning and standardizing your customer and prospect information – and even more important, adding context to it and stopping new errors before they’re entered, saving you time and money. With Cloud/SaaS CRM, you can:

1. Cleanse and standardize your customer and prospect information to ensure that it is up-to-date, accurate, and actionable.

For Example : To detect and correct data errors before they occur, identify a current, trusted source of business information to act as your reference source. Now through Salesforce.com, for example, you can connect immediately to D&B’s world-leading database of more than 170 million global businesses and 53 million contacts, along with relevant real-world context from social media and news feeds, without ever leaving your CRM.

2. Add context to your information with demographic details, contacts and no obvious relationships such as corporate family tree membership to add insight and show previously hidden up-sell and cross-sell opportunities.
Business information that can enrich your existing customer knowledge includes SIC codes, sales volumes, number of employees, net worth, executive names, and predictive scores, among hundreds of other variables that can provide deeper insight into your existing customers, enabling you to better service them and offer tailored products and solutions.
3. Automatically update your data right through Salesforce.com/CoD so it remains complete and current.

Until recently, keeping your data up to date meant updating it once a quarter, maybe even less. You’d go through the data cleanse and update cycle all over – every time. In the meantime, you made decisions on less-than-optimal information. Here’s where newer developments like cloud computing really are making a difference. By embedding quality data on demand directly within applications like Salesforce.com, you can keep your data current, complete and up to data – automatically. By connecting your CRM to a quality source (like D&B) through on demand access, you can:

• Automate and eliminate the manual work of sending files back and forth to a data provider.

• Check for existing accounts as new accounts and opportunities to enter

• Stop data entry errors before they start by comparing your accounts to a trusted data

• Popular and customize demographic details to enrich and add value

• Incorporate external social media and social media through seamless links And, since your data access stays “always on,” your data does, too – keeping it complete, current and relevant.
To figure out how to make customer data work for you, see D&B’s on-demand insight solution

Following these three steps transforms your customer information into complete, integrated, actionable insight you can use to better understand the behavior of your best customers and act on new opportunities. It’s time to expect more from your investments in CRM. Stop spending time managing your data – and more time putting it to work for you

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