Data decay: The WHY behind why your CRM data sucks.
- “Wrong phone number”
- “The company was acquired”
- “Wrong title”
- “I have duplicates”
- “The data is old”
- “The emails don’t work”
- “My CRM data sucks”
- “I just called someone who’s been dead for a year”
If you’ve heard any of the above comments or something similar; you have a CRM problem. Are their solutions to these problems? Yes, however; today I will give you a deeper understanding of WHY the problem occurs. Many good vendors exist to solve the problems listed above. I want to arm you with a deeper insight, the WHY.
If you understand the WHY, you will be able to:
- Have a deeper understanding to the nature of the problem
- Remove unrealistic expectations (solve the problem, don’t chase a rainbow)
- Define best practices to minimize bad data
- Be informed when choosing a vendor (flashy interface does not solve THE PROBLEM)
- Understand how your CRM decisions effect CRM data
- Help you be an advocate for change management within your organization
- Make you a more informed client (some vendors will like this, others will not)
So what is the WHY?
Short answer:
Contact data decays
If you have a short attention span, if you are brilliant, or have limited reading time, we are done here. That’s all you need and you know what I am going to say in the long answer. Thanks for reading.
Long answer:
First, let’s establish a baseline from the US Department of Labor.
The national average tenure across all jobs in the US is 54 months. That breaks down to 1.85% per month of job attrition. For high-demand IT workers the tenure is shorter with 3% monthly job attrition rate. The rate for Silicon Valley start-ups is almost ridiculous with the average tenure being just over a year.*
*Not from DOL. garnered from several Venture Capital blogs…take it as an extreme example.
A full year of data decay – base factors
A month at a glance does not show the full picture when factored across an entire year. Look at the picture across a year’s time.
When reviewing an entire year, data will decay at about 12%. However, that does not take into account many additional factors including: (more…)