Data Complications Can Be Catastrophic for B2B Companies

With greater ABM and CRM investments, the management of data can become increasingly difficult to the point of a business collapse and unsatisfactory customer experience

A Demandbase report indicates that ABM investment for B2B marketers will significantly rise in the next few years. Yet, many B2B marketers are overlooking the data complication that is reaching the tipping point.

Data is beginning to seem like an unstoppable force. Forrester reckons that investments in digital marketing technology will hit $122 billion by the next year, and an unmanageable amount of data will flow in. Its collection and management has been slowly brewing over the years. Since the advancement of CRMs, the issue has increased tenfold and is a critical problem now. In the beginning, CRM made brands presume that it could hold all the data and become the single source of data power, but it did not pan out as expected.

Also Read: Taking a Revolutionary Stand for Open Internet

Many companies possess several orders of CRM through different departments. Inputting all the data causes overlaps because CRMs were never intended to work across multiple systems. Adding to the complication is the work pattern of different departments. For instance, sales and marketing teams have their own data collation technique, and adding it to the bigger system could cause greater complications. Apart from CRM, data flows in through several other tools and sources. The end result of the gathered data is not streamlined, and management becomes hectic, if not impossible.

B2B enterprises are desperate to have a single source of dependable data that will allow them to generate customer insights and provide an improved and seamless customer experience. Several companies, including Salesforce, have tried their hand in fixing the problem for years. The latest possible solution is in the market, at the moment, but only time will tell if the solution is successful. Meanwhile, industry leaders turn to other possible strategies to deliver data management.

A Gartner study laid out four characteristics that a data platform requires for data management efficiency. Companies should be able to be data agnostic. Consuming data from any source, account or person, should be possible. The use of ABM as more than a tool for advertising will be possible only with a thorough understanding of the company system. For instance, a marketing team should not only be aware of the company’s revenue and customer details but being well-aware of the workings of their available technology, and their relationships with other business corporations as well.  Knowledge of the content interactions across departments can also help them acquire a greater understanding of the streaming data.

Also Read: Developing Marketing Strategies for 2021- Critical Points to Be Aware Of

An enterprise can utilize approximately 91 marketing point solutions. As a result, apart from being data agnostic, being channel agnostic is essential. A company data tool must be able to add intelligence and insights acquired from multiple datasets to any platform. A data management tool should have the capability to acquire and understand the data from CRM, marketing automation, or a content management system.

For all the complications, an AI-driven solution has been the most obvious choice at this point in time. While solutions are being experimented with and tested, focussing on available data management solutions should be of top priority. After all, an unorganized system would lead to unsuccessful marketing tools and a dampening customer experience.