Romain Boldi is responsible for Ellisphere's Data Marketing solutions. He manages solution development projects for marketing and sales departments, as well as internal product marketing actions. In this interview, Romain Boldi shares his views on the importance of setting up a reliable and usable data repository for data marketing actions.
What is B2B improper data?
Simply put, I'd say that unfit data is data that can't be used, data whose quality and freshness are in doubt. To define what constitutes unusable data, let's take a basic case: a company has a CRM that groups together all its customer data. However, in reality, one of these customers is inactive without the CRM being filled in. Canvassing or even invoicing operations are triggered, of course, without any possible feedback.
What are the different stages involved in cleaning up the data in a company repository?
There are 4 main stages in cleaning up a B2B database:
- First of all, a database audit is the prerequisite for detecting the level of obsolescence or decay of a corporate data repository. Initial checks will verify the presence of certain key fields, whether or not addresses have been standardized, whether certain data have been properly structured, whether they are complete, etc. This audit measures the quality of the input file and will guide subsequent reconciliation operations.
- The second phase, the qualification phase (Siretisation in France) aims to find and assign the right identifier to the company. In most cases, the address can be used to identify the right company by comparing the source database with French or foreign company repositories. From this stage onwards, we can assess the informational potential of a company database.
- The enrichment phase, in the third stage, will enable the initial database to be completed with the data required for customer knowledge or prospecting.
- Finally, the last phase, which should not be neglected, is the implementation of data monitoring to guarantee their reliability over time.
What are the major challenges facing companies in terms of data cleansing?
Data is information, and information is used to make decisions. The main risk of making decisions based on bad information is to increase the risk of error, or even failure. Before any decision is taken, it is therefore essential to ensure the quality of data, particularly in marketing and sales, to guarantee the correct activation and success of operations.
Romain, can you tell us a little more about data enrichment?
The idea behind B2B data enrichment for a company is to move from a self-centered database based on its own information, such as that provided by its sales, accounting or customer relations departments, to an exogenous database.
The aim is to broaden knowledge of third parties thanks to specialized data, and thus, for a salesperson for example, to be able to detect business opportunities, or for a marketer to improve the precision of his prospecting targeting.
What are the advantages of using an external service provider like Ellisphere to enrich your data?
I see two major advantages for companies in outsourcing their data quality processes:
- The first is obviously time savings: for a company, maintaining a large repository can quickly become a heavy investment in terms of technical and human resources.
- The second advantage is obviously the availability of exclusive information that only professionals like Ellisphere can possess and interpret. What's more, data providers are often already aggregators, and have a wide range of partners at their disposal to supply companies with specific, high-quality data.
