Understanding The Importance Of Data Quality In Your B2B Business

High-quality data has a big role in business success. It informs many business decisions, helping many organisations understand their existing customers and helps to more effectively capture the attention of their target market based on the insights gained.

However, in a world of data collection tools, software, third-party teams and seemingly endless access to data, it can be difficult for organisations to understand firstly; which data they should be collecting and secondly, how they can ensure the quality of the data is accurate.

In this article, we will come to understand the importance of data quality and why it’s so vital in your B2B business. Looking into the characteristics of “quality data” and the benefits of a carefully considered data collection can have on your B2B business.

According to a study published by BARC, “the use of big data saw a profit increase of 8 percent, and a 10 percent reduction in overall cost”. It’s clear to see that the ROI for B2B business owners looking to take data collection seriously has the capacity to help sustainably grow your company and be profitable at the same time.

4 Things Data Should Be

Data quality is vital for B2B success. Meeting data quality guidelines involves reviewing the information to ensure that none of it is at risk of duplication and is free from concerns around validity or consistency.

Below we take a look at the five main qualities that all data should have:

1. Accurate Data

The data you collect must be accurate. If there are any doubts raised about the accuracy or reliability of the data you’ve collected, the data becomes compromised. This could lead to bad business decisions that can prove extremely costly, so it’s essential the data you collect is accurate.

2. Relevant Data

The data you collect must be relevant and inline with your business goals and overal strategy. Understanding the end goal to any data collection is imperative to ensure the relevancy of and the impact it will have on your business.

Irrelevant data collection means you waste a lot of time sifting through data that doesn’t provide any insight or benefit to your business. All data you collect must be relevant for its intended use.

3. Complete Data

All data must be complete. You don’t want incomplete data that has missing values or sections of missed records, as this does not provide an accurate or full picture of what a data set is telling you. The more complete your data is, the more value it provides.

4. Up-to-date Data

All data must be up-to-date. Similar to our earlier point above on data accuracy, data that is old or out of date is irrelevant and doesn’t reflect the current circumstance a business is in. You want to ensure the data you collect is up-to-date and accurate so that you can glean the best possible information from it. 

How To Ensure High-quality Data Collection?

Before we launch into the importance of data quality in your B2B business, let’s first take a look at how you can ensure quality data collection from the start.

According to Forbes, “there’s a term known as GIGO – garbage in, garbage out. It means that if you have poor-quality data, then the insights your analytics generate will also be of low quality. Because of this, businesses need to ensure that their data collection methods bring in only high-quality data.”

The data you collect must be relevant to your business goals. Once you know what it is you want to achieve, you can collect the relevant data to analyse. To ensure your data collection process is of the highest quality you can:

• Use Looker Studio (previously known as Google Data Studio)
• Use a centralised reporting channel
• Control and manage data quality with the best quality management software. 
• Enforce data integrity
• Ensure GDPR compliance
• Manage data effectively.

The Importance Of Data Quality In Your B2B Business

Now that we’ve discussed a little bit about data collection and how to ensure your process for sourcing data is of the highest quality, let’s take a look at why data quality is so important.

Quality Data Collection Enhances Customer Loyalty

With high-quality data collection, you can identify your ideal customers and connect with them more effectively based on specific data sets. Managing marketing campaigns and using quality data to strategically connect with your target audience is one of the best ways you can enhance customer loyalty and create data-driven marketing campaigns that drive revenue based on customer buying behaviors, demographic and location information.

According to Outbase, accurate data collection helps “engage prospects compliantly, effectively and at scale” so that your team can drive more sales and encourage faster company growth.

Data Collection Informs Decision Making

When you collect high-quality data, you can have confidence in the decisions you are making. High-quality data is reliable, accurate, and valuable, providing certainty to business owners even in times of uncertainty.

Quality data collection drives business growth by predicting future patterns and trends. It produces actionable insights that help inform decisions. Reports show that while “91% of companies say that data-driven decision making is important to the growth of their business, only 57% of companies said that they base their business decisions on their data.”

Using data driven insights help make informed decisions that are aligned with business strategies, removes and helps to overcome any internal biases to which changes or direction the business should take.

Data Collection Improves Business Processes

It is easy in business for decisions to be made based on assumptions. And unfortunately, such decisions are not always effective or even beneficial. Quality data collection more accurately informs business decisions so that improvements to day-to-day processes can be made that help drive business forward. This drastically reduces wasted time, money and resources for everyone involved.

Spend time reviewing your internal process for data extraction with a data extraction audit. This will help verify accuracy and completeness when it comes to the relevancy of insights. It will likely highlight where inefficiencies are being made and the quality of the data can be improved.  

Data Collection Minimises Loss

Poor data collection can have a negative impact on business performance and resulting revenue. In fact, business decisions that are made off poor quality data can be detrimental, causing significant losses that some businesses can’t recover from especially for SMEs or startup companies looking to scale their business based on these insights.

This is why B2B businesses should focus on high-quality data collection. When the data you’re collecting is high-quality, reliable, and accurate, you can make business decisions with confidence and minimise any losses as a result. 

Final Words

Data quality control is essential to ensure continued business success. The importance of collecting high-quality data cannot be understated. With such a competitive landscape that many B2B businesses face, utlising the data many organisations have at their fingertips will help to create more informed marketing, lead generation and sale strategies. It will help you gain insight to the bigger picture and remove yourself from an bias as you look to grow and expand your business for a more sustainable future.

We hope this article has highlighted the importance of data quality and how it can benefit your B2B business going forward.