A lot of bad data comes down to human error. If an organization doesn’t have any sort of standards or policies to articulate how the data is entered into their CRM, different iterations of your data will exist and be committed to your CRM, causing inconsistent, incomplete or missing data, outdated information, and duplicates. The solution is data standardization, also known as normalization, which creates an enforced, organized and consistent environment for entering data into your CRM. It’s important to normalize before you dedupe. Normalizing first provides a springboard effect on your deduplication efforts, which will cut the cost and time associated with deduping, protecting and cleaning up your database. Normalization is a foundational level enabler. Not only will deduplication perform 500% better after normalizing, but any application that attempts to connect with your data will see marked improvements in accuracy and performance. Macon Raine’s database standardization services allow you to define standards for the fields in your database, and run batch processing to ensure standard values across your systems.

The URL is the most important and under-appreciated field in a contact database. It acts as a unique identifier for every company and makes contact and account matching easier. It is just as important to have a URL for a company as it is to have an email address for a person. Company names are ambiguous. Coke, Inc. and The Coca Cola Company, Inc. will never be matched by any fuzzy matching logic, now matter how advanced. A URL, however, is as close to a unique identifier for companies as you will find. For both deduping accounts as well as for appending company data, a URL is the sole highly recommended best practice. For both deduping accounts and appending company data, effectiveness and match rates will skyrocket after appending URLs. Our process combines both technology and people, to quickly, accurately, and cost effectively verify and append data to your company and lead data.

In B2B sales, data about your target companies might be equally or more important than the contacts at that organization. Understanding the target market requires the right data, as well as updated data. Therefore, the fields in your database must be complete and up to date. Most organizations have only 40% of their company data fields populated. This does not give you a holistic picture of your target companies. The fastest way to double or triple revenue is to identify your best buyer, and our data services team will populate those missing fields to enable you to do just that. Our data services team will append company data to your existing leads and accounts. The company firmographic fields are explained in the graphic. We typically see a massive increase in the match rate on the company firmographic database after URLs have been filled and the data has been normalized.

Data will continue to change as people change roles, jobs, and careers. As a result, your contacts’ email addresses change as they move from one company to another. Others abandon that old AOL address. Unqualified leads opt out of your email communications. As these changes occur in real time, as you read this guide, your data decays. Updating existing contacts enables you to segment, personalize and target your messaging in order to run effective marketing automation campaigns. Our data services team will ensure your contacts remain updated with fresh contact data sourced from the web, by appending your existing contact data. This includes titles, emails, phone numbers, addresses, social profiles, blogs and professional bios.