It starts as a typical day in Marketing Ops. You’re preparing a new demand gen campaign with personalized outreach to key accounts. You log into your CRM to pull the needed data, but what greets you isn’t the straightforward, actionable dataset you were expecting. Instead, it’s a mess of incomplete fields, inconsistent formatting, and outdated information.
Your first instinct might be to pull more data from ZoomInfo, or another third-party provider, to fill in the gaps. But instead of fixing the problem, you’re just piling on more unverified, inconsistent data, further muddying your database!
Your stomach sinks as you realize you’ll need to spend hours—again—manually cleaning this data before the campaign can even begin. And you know this isn’t just your problem. Sales is frustrated, too, but for a different reason. They’re working with leads that are incomplete, outdated, or riddled with conflicting information. Perhaps they even added inaccurate or conflicting data in their rush to close a sale!
Whatever the culprit, some contacts are now missing key details. Suddenly, the tool supposed to be the backbone of your marketing and sales efforts feels more like an anchor holding you back.
When did the CRM stop being a solution and start being the problem?
How Your CRM Becomes a Liability
CRMs are designed to unify and streamline customer and account data, providing a central hub for marketing and sales to manage their interactions – the relationships – with customers. But without proper automated data governance, they can quickly spiral into chaos, and you are left to repeatedly clean them up.
Here’s a scenario we’ve seen time and again:
Your sales team, eager to hit their targets, enters new contacts and account details into the CRM as they go. Every seller has their own style—some input only first names, others forget to fill in key fields. A few even enter placeholder data like “John Doe” or “123 Main St.”, or some fields are not entered at all as sales may not have the information.
Meanwhile, your CRM is connected to your marketing automation platform, which pulls in this incomplete and inconsistent data for targeting and segmentation. Bad data then spreads across your systems like a virus. Leads are miscategorized, campaigns are aimed at the wrong audience, and account insights become unreliable. Worse, if your company operates across multiple business units or uses multiple CRM instances, the problem compounds. Each system is updated differently, creating silos and disjointed efforts that make collaboration nearly impossible.
Trust in the CRM erodes, and the tools meant to empower your team become roadblocks instead.
The Ripple Effects of Bad CRM Data
When your CRM is unreliable, the consequences don’t stop at marketing and sales—they spread throughout the entire organization, creating a cascade of challenges. Your sales team chases cold or irrelevant leads because inaccurate data has led them astray. Instead of focusing on high-value accounts, they waste valuable time and energy, leaving genuine opportunities untapped.
Meanwhile, marketing is grappling with campaigns built on faulty data. Their carefully crafted strategies fail to reach the right audience, leading to missed targets and wasted budgets as frustration explodes.
The strain doesn’t stop there. Collaboration between marketing and sales begins to crumble as trust in the data erodes. Meetings that should be spent discussing strategy and alignment devolve into finger-pointing sessions, with each side blaming the other for the disconnect. Instead of working as a cohesive unit, teams are stuck debating the numbers, unable to move forward.
And then there’s the operational toll. Hours are wasted manually cleaning and cross-checking records, tasks that are both tedious and prone to error. This effort could be redirected toward driving growth, yet instead it is consumed by reactive firefighting.
The longer these issues persist, the harder it becomes to rebuild trust, both within your teams and with your audience.
The Solution: Data Quality Governance
Data quality governance is a continuous, automated process of monitoring, cleaning, and enriching your data to ensure it’s accurate, consistent, and actionable. It shouldn’t be manual, and it shouldn’t be a one time project. When teams rely on manual data scrubbing, inconsistencies creep back in, and the cycle starts all over again.
With the right tools and processes in place, your CRM can work as intended, empowering your teams to focus on strategy rather than data cleanup. This is the Datagence approach to Data Quality Governance. Once implemented, automated technology and built-in governance processes ensure that your data stays clean, your systems stay in sync, and your team can trust the information they rely on every day.
Here’s how it works:
Ongoing Data Validation: Our solutions validate new data as it enters your CRM instead of relying on periodic cleanups. This includes checking for incomplete fields, duplicates, and formatting issues.
Enrichment and Standardization: By enriching your CRM data with missing details—like company size or job titles—and standardizing formats across systems, we create a cohesive dataset that works for everyone without requiring manual work or large, costly data dumps from your data provider.
Seamless Integration: We ensure that your CRM and connected platforms, like marketing automation tools, are synced in real-time, preventing the spread of bad data.
Proactive Monitoring: With continuous monitoring in place, we catch potential issues before they snowball into larger problems. For example, if sales updates a record incorrectly, the system flags it and makes corrections automatically.
What Success Looks Like
When data quality governance is in place, you log into your CRM and the data is clean, reliable, and ready to use. Fields are complete, leads are categorized correctly, and the insights you need are readily available. Your marketing automation platform pulls the right data for targeting, and sales trusts the leads they’re working with.
Instead of scrambling to fix issues, you’re collaborating with sales on strategy, aligning efforts, and driving real results. Campaigns are hitting the right audience, sales cycles are shortening, and customer satisfaction is climbing.
This is what happens when you apply the right data quality governance solution.
CRM Mastery is Waiting
Your CRM should be an asset, not a liability. With Datagence’s data quality and enrichment solutions, we’ll help you turn your CRM into the reliable tool your business needs.
