The Importance of Trusting Data

Data allows businesses to understand exactly who to target when it comes to selling its products. Data also lets them know which products this target audience is most interested in buying. And that is just the beginning. Are current marketing efforts working? Is a business spending too little or too much on these campaigns?

No matter what size business, data helps to increase sales and retain customers; manage inventory; cut down on waste; and use marketing dollars more effectively.

At LeadGen Compass, we advise our clients every day on the importance of gathering data and using it to grow their business. While it may come as a surprise, many times smaller businesses are better able to use data than larger ones because they are more agile and can act more quickly when presented with data-driven insight. Further, unlike huge corporations that often have much more data than they can reasonably act on, small businesses usually have just the right amount of self-generated data.

So why do people fail to act on data? Especially when they have been told over and over (and likely have experienced it firsthand) how important data is to grow a business? It all comes down to trust. 

No matter how good the data, many business owners and salespeople worry that their data is wrong and resort to their gut instincts. This happens even when a business owner does trust their data. While gut instincts aren’t a bad thing, in all but a very few circumstances, businesses are much more likely to succeed if decisions are made using accurate data. In other words, they let data take the lead when it comes to decision making. 

According to business analytics and marketing experts, this “distrust” of data is common. It stems from not knowing the right questions to ask when it comes to data or failing to ask questions at all. And no matter what type of data you are looking at, if you don’t trust it, you won’t use it.

To combat this problem, it is important that business owners and salespeople understand what their data is telling them. It also is important that everyone – from the CEO to the salesperson in the field – is speaking the same language when it comes to data. 

Blind trust in data is not the answer, either. While it is important to trust your data – you also must make sure it is trustworthy. To do this, a proactive approach is critical. Rather than fixing incorrect data by finding and correcting errors after data is collected, business owners, sales managers and sales teams all must all make a commitment to create and compile data correctly the first time. This is the only way to ensure quality data. It also is critical for any business that is serious about cultivating a data-driven mindset.