Data Enhancement: how to improve your sales by improving your data

• Purge, correct and complete your databases with information from your own and from external sources
• Glean insight enabling you to make better decisions to beef up your business plan

The need to store and analyze data to be used as effectively as possible has become the norm. Defense, security, research, business management and, increasingly, marketing and sales require enormous amounts of correctly interpreted information to face the challenges of our modern world.

Through “cleansing” or standardization techniques known as Data Enhancement, companies seek to improve knowledge of their current and potential customers to segment them as best as possible and address them not only with the most pertinent and pinpointed messages, but also with products and services best aligned with their true needs. Basically, they seek to make the most of their databases.

Let’s be frank. If we haven’t heard of standardization processes, it is most likely because our databases are a bit, shall we say, untidy.

What is Data Enhancement?

As we were explaining, Data Enhancement is a set of techniques and procedures that serve to enhance both B2B and B2C databases by cleansing and complementing them.  It is the little addition that helps us break the barrier of chaos and disinformation in our records.

Data Enhancement consist of:

• Purging databases by eliminating duplicate or incorrect records
• Validating and correcting email addresses, telephone numbers and postal addresses
• Completing the data by adding different external sources, both public and private (always in compliance with data protection legislation in force)

“Inflating” our databases with steroids

Let’s take a more detailed look at how we work at DataCentric to achieve optimal, actionable databases. The specific steps are:

• Examining our clients’ databases and aligning them with their marketing and/or business plans
• Identifying the data that are incorrect, incomplete, duplicate, incomplete and so on.
• Defining the analytical models that the business needs to draw valuable insight based on the business’ objectives, the data it has and could have, and so forth.
• Establishing the data that each one of these analytical models requires.
• Determining the right sources to enhance the databases with the missing information.
• Connecting our clients business to the missing sources of data.

These external sources are basically the property register, street maps, the National Statistics Institute, telephone and telemarketing directories, the business registry, chambers of commerce and the Internet. This way, although a business has no more than a consumer’s email address, it can eventually gain full information about their address, employment, lifestyle and so forth.

How can Data Enhancement help my company?

Let’s take the example of a specific business plan based on Data Enhancement where the aim is to enhance the company’s possibilities by improving segmentation and scoring our customers.

• First, identify your most profitable customers and find the traits that make them similar. In order to do so, you must analyze your databases and fill them out with information taken from your own company plus other information from third-party sources.
• Examine the products and services in your portfolio that correspond to each customer segments’ needs and profitability.
• Lastly, you can determine the demographic, financial or other types of data that best define your customers since you now are able to seek other similar potentials.

This will give you insight to help you decide the traits that these new products should have and who they should be sold to in order to maximize on results. It’s a bit like knowing that you have to sell perfume to women and cologne to men, but also including how many will buy the most expensive version, how many the cheapest, which messages will attract the each group the most, which other products they might buy based on this, and what other purchases they may have made …

On the market, you can find various Data Enhancement solutions that enable you to perform these steps. At DataCentric, along these lines, we have a team of experts to develop your data as much as possible and a Data Lake containing all types of information on individuals and companies that will enable you to enrich your databases and make decisions to help you to meet your business objectives.