How to Ensure and Maintain Data Quality in Your B2B Business

Around 60% of businesses globally now use data to drive efficiency and boost their business. It’s become as much of a cornerstone to growth as customer profiles or email marketing and is the driving force behind all smart business decisions. Without data, a brand would have nothing to base its future on. 

But, it’s not just about any old data. Data quality is vital if you want to start using facts and figures to influence your processes. To understand more, we’ve put together a guide with everything you need to know.

What is Data Quality?

Data quality essentially refers to how suitable and useful the date you’re using is. Factors such as consistency, accuracy, reliability, and whether or not it’s up to date can all affect the quality. It should also be relevant to your company and the decisions you’re making. For example, if your target audience is 25 to 35-year-olds, but you’re using data that’s been sourced from people of all ages, it’s going to be of a lower quality than data sourced from your target age group.

How Does High-Quality Data Benefit Your Business?

An increasing number of brands and advisors are putting a focus on high-quality data, touting the benefits for businesses. If you’re not convinced, we’ve put together just a few of the reasons you should be.

Be Confident in Your Decisions

Data is the only thing that separates opinions from smart business decisions. It allows you to seize new opportunities, predict the future, and create actionable plans that are built on solid foundations. The better quality data you use, the more confident you can be that your business decisions are the right ones. This doesn’t just apply to you but to your entire team: when your staff know why you’re making the choices you are, they’ll be far more likely to back you.

Improve Your Marketing

Any B2B marketing expert will tell you that the basis of a good campaign lies in high-quality data. Without data, marketing plans flounder in the dark, trying to grasp results without any real direction. With data, they’re straight to the point, designed to see a high return on investment and generate real growth for the business.

Boost Your Teams Productivity

Utilizing good-quality data speeds up business processes and increases productivity. Rather than agonizing over which plans to choose and validating decisions, your sales and marketing staff can quickly spot the right paths to take.

For example, if a prospecting tool like Outbase has identified that your audience is aged between 25-35, and you’re looking at which social media platforms to use, you can quickly see that your audience prefers Instagram over TikTok based on their ‘Ideal Customer Profiles’. There’s no time wastage, and your team can get to work knowing they’ve made the right choice.

Create Streamlined Business Processes

Quality data doesn’t just aid your marketing and sales departments but the entire running of your company. You can generate in-house data to improve the efficiency of your processes, for example. Let’s say that your data shows that factory staff on shorter shifts are meeting their targets more than those on longer shifts. You can then create a new shift schedule that prioritises shorter shifts for all staff, increasing productivity and output. Monitor the data after you’ve made the change to check that it’s working.

Reduce Your Losses

Poor data can lead to a number of losses. You can see lost sales due to messaging that doesn’t appeal to your target audience, a loss in repeat customers due to retargeting that flops, and a loss of time due to inefficient processes. B2B businesses that implement high-quality data can reduce all of these drastically. Instead, you’ll be finding new opportunities, gaps in the market, and areas where you can harness growth.

How Can You Source Higher Quality Data?

Whether or not you need to use high-quality data is obvious when you look at the benefits. What isn’t quite so obvious is how you find that quality data.

One of the most common mistakes businesses make is using too many sources, casting the net wide to try and gather as much information as possible. Instead, start by pinpointing specific questions you’d like to answer, identify how you’re going to answer them, and go from there.

It’s also vital you pull all data into one platform. Use a third-party data integration system to combine everything you collect from marketing reports, data analysts, surveys etc. into one place. You can then correlate your information and create a single overview to align with your goals, making it much easier to actually utilise the data you’ve collected.

Our final piece of advice would be to bring in professionals. Don’t attempt to collect all of the data yourself, but instead bring in a team who knows what they’re doing. This is undoubtedly the best way to ensure you’re only collecting reliable, relevant data that’s really going to aid your business growth. A prospecting platform, as we mentioned earlier, is a great way to start outsourcing your data collection.

Final Thoughts

Whether you use high-quality data isn’t a question you should be asking yourself. Instead, you should be looking at how you can begin your data collection journey and start seeing real improvements in your company. This guide should have given you some helpful tips to begin with, but the rest is up to you!