Every year when autumn comes the assistants of the sales department get a little nervous. They know what will happen in short term. It’s almost Christmas and the selections of contacts to receive a Christmas card have to be made.

Every year it’s the same. First the selections for every account manager are made and they will have to check manually if these are correct. This year will be the same as ever, which means that:

• relevant companies and contacts are missing
• new companies and contact persons will be added
• contact persons will be deleted
• contact persons will be transferred to their new company
• addresses appear to be not up-to-date

This is one of the best audits to validate the quality of your data. The number of additions, modifications and deletions indicates how accurate your employees have maintained the data in the CRM system. I think that most of us recognize the problem and maybe are part of the cycle themselves. Moreover, it clearly shows where your data management procedures fail. Most likely the account managers are expected to maintain the data themselves, which they don’t see as their primary task. If not account managers have to maintain the data the sales support team usually has to do so. But who will give them the required input? Only accurate data entry, actively monitoring and periodically checking against external sources will help to keep your CRM system up-to-date.

In general the Christmas card has little value for your relation with your contact persons, but such an intense mass mailing is very profitable for your data quality. Until your procedures are in place, keep sending Christmas cards to optimize your data quality.

It must have been around 2002, that I was discussing the Return On Investment of data quality tools with one of the founders of Human Inference, Norbert Mergen. While discussing the well known benefits: less return mail, more effective campaigns, reduction of debitor risk, single customer view, … I brought another subject at the table: isn’t it strange that we really do ROI calculations on such an obvious need? Did you ever create a fence in the garden and question the ROI of a hammer? We published on this matter in dutch back in 2002 in the CRM Marketing Centre and included the hammer discussion. And now, in 2008, it is so interesting to see that many people nowadays have put the same questions, reading the blog of Jack Vinson “Stop thinking ROI, think success!” Anyway, it may not convince your management, so you will still need to do the maths, but just bringing the subject to the table may help you getting your data quality project going.