How to delete your way to better sales and marketing performance

Leaders are told every day that they’re sitting on a goldmine – deep insights just waiting to be harvested from years of accumulated data. It might sound counterintuitive, but many high-growth companies actually stand to benefit from less data: a robust pruning strategy to keep their sellers focused and drive more accurate and meaningful engagement data for marketing functions. Riley Newman, former head of data science at Airbnb, said it best: “better data beats more data.”

Step 1: Understand

Longtime customers of Salesforce and other CRM solutions often have the complexity to show for it. Even for companies that consistently embrace best practices and new releases, it’s easy to accumulate time capsules of previous business processes and approaches. Each time you change your opportunity stages, account types, statuses, and lines of business, you’re likely fossilizing your legacy process in perfectly preserved data and configuration.

To address this, start by separating the signal from the noise by taking time to analyze how the system is actually being used today, and what opportunities there might be to improve processes, increase efficiency, and enhance compliance with established and emerging data protection regulations. This should include a complete data profile of all active fields, including uniqueness, completeness and timeliness. Look at transactional data to see how records created, modified, and used at different time periods differs. Patterns will undoubtedly emerge and a framework to address them won’t be far behind.

Step 2: Prepare

Maybe it’s obvious that consultation with stakeholder teams and refining requirements is critical, but it sometimes gets lost in the urgency to take action. Often, teams using CRM data sit roll up to multiple organizations, like sales, marketing, support and customer success. In many cases, they do not have natural connective tissue within the company to identify where business processes overlap and implement a unified design accordingly — so the chances that a single team or person has the sightlines to build a complete strategy are vanishingly slim. Taking the time to understand these intersections is an important step in understanding the sources of technical debt – the decisions, configurations, and data that are carried beyond their useful life.

Take contact data for example. How many employees are with the same company and in the same role today that they were in just a few years ago? Some, to be sure, but not many. Most companies don’t have a governance strategy to ensure this data is kept up-to-date, and third-party tools designed to enrich data can be imperfect and often run only on demand. But contacts can drive more than just deal velocity — as a critical part of marketing automation, customer success, and sometimes customer support, you might find yourself documenting the data flows for each business process for the first time.

You’ll need a plan of action, good reporting, and a structured cleanup approach that balances risk. Your plan should have the following features:

Validation – Refine the rules and criteria and socialize with stakeholder teams. Allow them to review and confirm changes before processing to ensure requirements are complete.
Remediation – For data that will not be deleted, how can you ensure it will still be useful and drive business value? Consider what opportunities there might be to map legacy opportunity stages to new ones, or old verticals to the current organization. Can you thaw some of the permafrost around your oldest data to improve understanding of your sales and marketing performance over time?
Phasing – start with a pilot in a sandbox environment, then schedule the cleanup in production over a period of weeks. Processing your cleanup in batches will allow you to identify and mitigate unexpected dependencies and impacts, and allows you to implement robust fallback strategy in the event you find yourself cutting too close to the proverbial bone. You’ll also ensure you don’t overwhelm interfaces and managed packages that might choke on a high rate of change.
Governance – Ensure that processes and owners are identified to complete future cleanup activities on a scheduled or automated basis. You’re developing a set of business rules through the process of completing this first cleanup — how can you leverage them to ensure you’re not repeating the process again in two years?

Step 3: Grow

The benefits are numerous.

Licenses based on data volumes, like Salesforce and Marketo, will see immediate breathing room, saving money and avoiding license costs to support data that is no longer relevant.
Your marketing team can zero in on real, engaged prospects; and the percent of assigned contacts actively engaging will increase, helping sales personnel focus their limited bandwidth on higher probability opportunities.
In the post-GDPR era, it’s important to recognize that storing personally identifiable information places the company in a position of trust. By eliminating data that is not tied to active pursuits or current customers, teams will dramatically reduce opt-out volume and risk exposure.

And it’s not just a one-time benefit. Armed with the vetted business requirements and recommendations developed through a cleanup project, you’ll be able to integrate this data governance approach into your day-to-day business processes and expand it to new objects and systems. And as your organization continues to acquire new data, adherence to these data policies will help ensure the team remains focused and maximizes its opportunities.

It might seem counterintuitive to spend energy and budget on a cleanup effort to remove data, when sales leaders are seemingly pushing for the opposite — more leads, more pipeline, more contacts. But they don’t want more just for its own sake. They want better outcomes, and, as a rule, sales organizations are time- and resource-constrained. There’s simply not enough time in the day to chase every lead. So it’s all the more important to make that time count, and ensure that teams can focus on what is timely and relevant to drive growth — and the best way to do that, without buying a single new SaaS tool or reengineering your sales organization, is right in front of you.

Remisphere Digital exists at the intersection of strategic thought leadership and tactical, technical expertise. Led by technology consulting veteran Nate LaFerle, Remisphere Digital’s offerings in HR technology, business transformation, M&A and enterprise data management help global companies solve complex challenges and drive measurable ROI. For more information, visit www.remisphere.com