Do you want to understand the true value of your data, explained through a simple yet compelling calculation? Check out the video below. Contact Acuate for your FREE, no obligation data audit. Continue reading

It’s like healthy eating, if you’re not used to it, there’s a crazy up-and-down cycle of trying to eat healthily, succumbing to fast foods, trying to eat healthily, succumbing to fast foods, and on it goes. Then one day, you crossed that pivot point, you’re now a healthy eater, and you have the self-control to avoid and manage eating fast foods. Or, you just give up and stay unhealthy! You justify this by noting that you only live once or what’s the point of living unhappily or something along these lines. Either way, you use logic to back-justify your results... Continue reading

A very common way for businesses to store data is within Excel. People are convinced of Excel’s superiority as a database. I mean, after all, Excel is familiar right? It’s easy and it’s user-friendly and you’ve been using it for years. There is just one problem with this – Excel is not a database. Excel was made as a spreadsheet application. Sure, it is a great complement to any database due to its ability to turn your rows of data into nice looking charts and reports. But when it comes down to it, storing your data is not a job... Continue reading

If you have a business relationship with someone and they leave their company, then you lose that connection and potentially future business. But there’s an opportunity here, an opportunity to create TWO new relationships: a relationship with the company they moved to and a relationship with the person who has replaced them. Anyone who is in sales knows that following people that you have a relationship with can turn into new opportunities, and finding their replacement is an opportunity to forge a new relationship with new possibilities. The most common scenario is that contacts change jobs and your relationship with... Continue reading

For many years, when you mentioned data cleansing everyone thought of cleaning addresses. The rapid deployment of address management software in 1990s and 2000s meant that wherever you went, you were asked to enter your postcode and then your first line of the address. (The world learnt to enter addresses backwards!) The last decade has seen more solutions with international address cleansing and the integration into new technologies. So, the world’s addresses have got better, postal authorities now provide definitive datasets for their addresses and it’s a normal expectation to have address capture and management software everywhere. But many saw... Continue reading

You’ve probably seen the movie ‘Groundhog Day’ when Bill Murray awakens only to re-live the same day over-and-over again. This is how we’ve been feeling over the years when clients send us data. We use the same techniques, same algorithms and same approach to clean poor-quality data. (Oh, if you’ve ever wondered what Groundhog Day is, then check out the quaint story on Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groundhog_Day ) In the end, we got a little tired of repeating the same process by creating the same routines in SQL or writing the same code, so we decided to write a tool that did... Continue reading

We get invited to solve some very complex data problems and what we found over the years is, when you take into consideration the exact nature of the data and context it is used in, then you can generate much better results. Generic matching engines are good for 80% of duplicates or matches you’re seeking, the remaining 20% need a lot more effort. (I’m using the convention that duplicates refer to records matched with a single data set and matches refer to records matched across multiple data sets.) For many people finding 80% is good enough and they can live... Continue reading

If you’ve ever had the opportunity to call for appointments or sell on the phone from a list of contacts, then you know hard it can be. It’s not for everyone, but for those who master the phone techniques, it can be an incredibly worthwhile endeavour to achieve great returns. With so many ways to market, from emailing, social media, webinars to exhibitions, etc. telemarketing is one of the least appealing because of the difficulty of the task. But many companies have a dedicated sales force and they continue to use the phone to make appointments and sales. Telesales is... Continue reading

Over the years, its always been a challenge getting clients’ data in and out of their CRM applications. In seems to be an impediment to fixing and cleaning data. Everyone wants good quality data, but sometimes the hassle of getting IT or the clients’ CRM supplier to extract or import data becomes a hurdle. As negotiations take place with IT or the supplier to perform the tasks, the data continues to degrade, marketing campaigns must wait, and reports continue to use poor quality data, producing inaccurate figures. You see this happening a lot with niche CRM applications, where the vendor... Continue reading

I keep seeing a common phrase that 80% of the work of a Data Scientist is data cleansing. I’m not sure whether this number is a true reflection or not, for me it reinforces the need for good quality data if you want good quality results. If you’re not familiar with the term Data Science, it’s a set of techniques used to extract meaningful information from data sets using methods from Mathematics and Computer Science, particularly, statistics, machine learning, classification and data analytics. You may say that this has been around for over 20 years, and it has, but with... Continue reading

Sometimes something is so obvious and so true, that we find it difficult to create all the time. For example, being positive all the time. It’s easy to see that it’s a good idea, but as human beings we experience negative environments, negative events, negative people, etc., that lead us to have negative emotions and thoughts. So being positive all the time becomes a constant challenge. If being positive becomes your dominate state of mind then you can handle the negatives as they arise, by rationalising it, re-framing it, seeing the good in it or seeing the good in people,... Continue reading

In all my years looking at data, I’ve never found a CRM database without duplicates (I’m assuming a database of more than a few thousand records.) Many of the CRM systems have easy ways to identify duplicates, but duplicates still remain. So why is that? The main reason is that duplicates are far more complex than simply matching of names, emails, etc. Yes, you will match some obvious duplicates this way, but there are many more complex versions. CRM applications assume the data is correct in the first place, that the data is present and that the data is in... Continue reading

How bad does someone’s data have to be before they realise that bad data just doesn’t work. Working with bad data gets bad results. You try and get away with it until it no longer works for you. You realise you cannot carry on. With no choice, you see that good data is the only way to be. As with so many things in life only when things go wrong do you change your attitude towards something…I’ve been there many times myself…it’s only human. So, let’s learn this lesson a little earlier, before things go really bad for your data.... Continue reading

Acquiring current and accurate B2B data can be difficult from data suppliers. They tend to be good for senior positions, but problems arise if you want positions lower than this or you want contacts in niche segments. Whatever you’re looking for, currency will be a problem. Is the contact that you were supplied current? Some vendors have current data but many do not. To be honest, it’s not easy to keep B2B data current with job mobility at 11-15% per year, a lot of maintenance is required to keep a database current. It’s worth commissioning your own web research. The... Continue reading

Recently I was asked to source some data for a client, and after engaging the main data suppliers, I chose a vendor I trusted. I’ve purchased data many times, so I wasn’t expecting this result. Well you can imagine I wasn’t too happy to find over 60% of the contacts supplied where no longer at their stated organisations. Now 60% is very high. With B2B data degrading at 10-22% per annum depending on which industry, I was expecting 1 in 10 or at worst case 1 in 5 contacts to be out of date (the latter case is what I... Continue reading

In the last two blog posts we focused on these six reports: Seven Dimensions of Data Quality Data Quality Trends Duplicate Trends Company Level Capture Team or Departmental Level Capture Individual Level Capture If you didn’t get a chance to read Part 1 or Part 2, here are the links 9 Most Popular Data Quality Charts (Part 1) 9 Most Popular Data Quality Charts (Part 2) In today's post we look at three more important charts that all companies should look at, namely: Data Degradation Information Quality Profiling Data Degradation Chart I can't stress enough how important data degradation is.... Continue reading

Last week we looked at three charts most often requested by clients, charts that are very useful in managing your business’ data quality. If you didn’t get a chance to read Part 1, here’s a link 9 Most Popular Data Quality Charts (Part 1) In this second of three posts, we look at a further three charts that are essential for managing your data. When speaking about data quality, most of us focus on what’s wrong with our data, but there is another more important measure, namely, what data are we missing. Having data with errors is annoying and a... Continue reading

I don’t know about you, but when I receive a lengthy business report I always have a feeling of ‘oh no!’ I’ll admit it, I love looking at charts and diagrams…I feel I can see the right questions to ask immediately…what the chart shows and what the chart doesn’t show. I can then decide to read the report or seek answers elsewhere. When you’re busy, this has to be the best way to see information. “A picture is worth a thousand words” is never truer when analysing data quality results. In this first of 3 posts, I’m going to briefly... Continue reading

My nephew’s thinking of a career in sales. While researching on the internet he came across the infamous sales movie Glengarry Glen Ross starring Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon and Alec Baldwin. For all sales people out there, this is just ones of those movies you watch, whether you agree with the contents or not, but for some young sales people, the testosterone driven environment is really encouraging. One of the most famous scenes is where Blake (Alec Baldwin) is sent from the parent company to motivate an underperforming sales team by unleashing a torrent of verbal abuse. In that scene... Continue reading

When you fancy a particular meal, sometimes going to the right restaurant is what you need, but if you know it’s home cooked, then it’s likely to taste so much better. Well, that’s my feeling about creating a targeted data set. Buying is sometimes right, but often, building your own is so much better. Before I start on the pro and cons, I have to say, for some target markets there are some very good niche data suppliers out there, in which case buying is a no brainer. However, there are many companies that are just not happy with the... Continue reading

I recently came across a lovely Telemarketing company with a compelling proposition of guaranteeing good quality appointments for his clients for a fixed price and the client would get to determine the quality, a good deal all round! So, here is someone delivering what they promised, but their results are dependent on two key factors: The message The data As an experienced marketer, one can control the quality of a message until it gets the conversion rates you require. However, this company relies on the client providing their data as basis for the telemarketing campaign. If the quality of the... Continue reading