Siloed data hampering pipeline growth
Revenue may be any company’s problem for a variety of reasons - the team may not be working hard enough, there may be logistical problems or many other issues.
However, one problem which is right there in front of you, but goes unnoticed generally, is that of siloed data.
What is siloed data?
Information coming from revenue-generating operations like sales, marketing, or customer success is kept in separate tech stacks and depositories, making it inaccessible to other teams and people. This is siloed data.
For example: The sales team might use the data from their own tech stack to nurture and convert a lead. This information is unrelated to marketing or customer success information.
As a result, these departments continue to operate alone, without sharing data or finding ways to assist one another.
CS will not get a comprehensive picture from sales about the lead and the effort of sales to convert the lead may not get translated to custom retention.
These divisions cause a lack of smoothness in transition between teams, hampering the goal of maximizing revenue, as data is not fully available to act on.
But why does siloed data develop in the first place?
Difference in departments
Different departments like sales, marketing and customer success have their own way of working, their own tech stack, and their own nuances. They have their own goals to achieve. Marketing has to run certain campaigns, sales has to nurture and convert and CS has to be there post-conversion and retain. All that’s fair, but these are individual goals.
The cumulative goal is to work for the organisation’s betterment and benefit and maximize its revenue. Keeping tab of individual goals, employees lose track of this and forget its their responsibility to ensure seamless transfer of data in optimal workflows with other teams. They think once they’ve done their individual job, its not their problem anymore, and that shouldnt be the case.
Separation of tech stacks
Each team has its own tech stack, to focus on individual goals. With technology evolving and companies growing, more tools are added.
This is okay, but there needs to be a process where data is easily accessible from one tech stack to another team’s, so that they can use it easily. Most organisations do not have such integrations in place.
Resistance to change
The data problem requires technology. Tools and code can solve this problem efficiently.
However, most important positions in companies are occupied by people who aren’t exposed to the power of tech in the data space, given that these developments are relatively new and these positions are for more experienced folk.
This causes a certain resistance to change, to try new tools, products and softwares to solve your problems.
This is how siloed data is created and this hence affects your revenue engine adversely.
How will it affect your revenue?
Inaccurate Revenue Forecasts
If your data is inaccurate, you don’t know what to forecast on the basis of. You’re basically shooting in the dark, guessing that a certain deal or a certain customer will behave in a certain manner, as you don’t have tangible data on their behaviour.
You have to work to combine data in different stacks and depositories to get a forecast firstly, and that too not accurate.
Shabby customer experience
The journey from a lead gotten by marketing to one nurtured and converted by sales and then handed over to customer success for queries and retention is a long one.
Since there are so many touchpoints on the way, and data is not transferred accurately through them, the customer’s experience gets very diluted.
For them, it’s like they were having a different conversation with sales but suddenly that doesn’t make sense anymore because customer success doesn’t know what they were talking about with sales priorly.
This causes a shabby customer experience.
Untapped business potential
Data siloes also cause business potential to remain untapped. If data is available across teams, experts from different domains can see the lead’s journey and together give inputs on qualifying and nurturing prospects.
There may be something marketing can add to a lead, which sales cannot, given their behavior, and vice versa. But if the leads’ data and journey with different touchpoints is not clearly visible to everyone, the potential to convert them reduces, hence losing out on business.
Thus, the cost of siloed data is greater than what you would assume. Its time organisations started paying attention to this and working on it. And for the start, you can read this article about Enhancing your CRM data with Revenue Intelligence