Customer Data Validation – a Must-have Process for SaaS Businesses

One of the key things you quickly learn as digital marketing professional working in the B2B space, is that your campaigns targeting existing customers in order to facilitate up-sell and cross-sell opportunities are only going to be effective if you’ve got good quality data in your CRM. It’s been proven many times that bad data hygiene, especially when it comes to customer data, results in lost revenue opportunities. If you’re a SaaS business and you don’t yet have a well-established process of collecting, verifying and maintaining key customer data pints, your customer success, support and other key processes will not be effective either. This increases your chances of loosing customers at their next renewal due to poor overall customer experience.

Validating customer data is a two-level process since you need to collect and validate the information about both the business and the key people who you have been dealing with through the entire sales process – from the day when the conversation started till the day the deal closed.

Company-level data points you should be validating:

• Company name
• Number of employees
• Industry
• Annual revenue
• Email domain
• HQ address
• Main phone number

Contact-level data points you should be validating:

• Contact names
• Job titles
• Phone numbers
• Decision-maker role

The easy part is to figure out the data points you need to be validating. As you can imagine, the more difficult part is establishing a robust customer validation process and figuring out the necessary resources and tools to get the job done. Here are the suggestions from our side to help you get started.

1. Establish a data integrity team

Residing in the operations or marketing departments in your organizational chart, the data integrity team is usually an army of one or two bright individuals who’s only goal is to ensure that the data about you leads, customers, opportunities and deals is always accurate. Their standard workflow includes checking the incoming leads before passing them over to the sales organization, verifying the information about new and existing customers, making sure opportunities and deals are properly attributed to marketing campaigns so that you know what your most successful programs are. We’ve seen many organizations realizing the need of having a dedicated data quality team. This investment is well justified considering the benefits they’re bringing to the business.

2. Get a data enrichment and data validation tool

The ultimate goal of customer data validation is to establish a single source of truth at scale. Continuous data enrichment helps your business automatically validate and refine customer data by verifying its data against trusted third-party data sources. Data enrichment and validation also helps eliminate data redundancies and update existing records.

The goal of customer data validation is to establish a single source of truth at scale

If your business is not yet ready to invest in a full-blown data quality team, and even if it is, getting a data cleansing solution to automatically check your lead and customer records, fill in the gaps and identify incorrect or obsolete data is something that you should consider. In fact, these days businesses would start from purchasing a data enrichment tool for sales and marketing and later they would form a data quality team to take the entire data quality process under control.