Stop sweating your data; it’s better than you think

Dun & Bradstreet put out a piece titled “5 Shocking Stats About the State of B2B Marketing Data,” and I wasn’t shocked. 

Maybe I’m cynical, or perhaps the years of experience at companies large and small caused me to react with a shoulder shrug and “meh.”

The starting salvo in the article was that only 50% of B2B professionals are confident in the quality of their sales and marketing data. Even though over 80% say, it’s crucial to their success.

Here’s why I don’t care–this will always be the case.

Data and everything related is much more similar to a biological organism than an inanimate object.

It is constantly changing, evolving, and growing. 

Although I agree with the author that the modern marketer should be data-hungry and data-obsessed, I don’t think it’s manifesting correctly. 

I too often hear dirtiness of data, the lack of the data, or the fragmentation of data used as justifications for inaction. Improving the state of your data is like keeping a tidy house; it’s a never-ending process. But just like you don’t put off dinner with friends because there’s a dust bunny under the bed, you shouldn’t put off projects waiting for your data to be perfect. You will be waiting a long time!

More importantly, what you have is likely better than you think. 

Digging in and building data-driven processes and workflows will highlight your data priorities. And like most predictive models, including lead scoring models (which is often meaningfully driven by 5-8 attributes) you will release, it’s not as bad as you think!