Picture this: you’re the Director of Sales at a restaurant tech company, and your team is bringing a new killer piece of restaurant software to market. This solution will help restaurant owners streamline operations and boost their bottom line. You know it’s a great product and believe it can deliver real value to your customers.
The problem is your sales team is dealing with serious CRM data decay thanks to an ancient database. We’re talking ‘hasn’t been updated since Twitter was still called Twitter’ old. With 20% of restaurants closing within their first year and only half surviving beyond 5 years, the restaurant industry faces high turnover driven by both economic and operational pressure. This rapid change makes it incredibly challenging for those in the foodservice market to keep their CRMs up-to-date.
The team isn’t hitting their targets because most of the contact data in the CRM leads to a dead end: either the restaurant has closed, ownership has changed, or the contact no longer works there.
In fact, one of the contacts now works at a new restaurant that opened just down the street, and it would be a perfect fit for your software. Unfortunately, the restaurant is so new that it’s missing from your CRM because the most recent contact list you bought is already out of date.
Actually, there are a lot of things that are missing from your CRM, like phone numbers, websites, and physical addresses, making it difficult to segment and target prospects. The sales team was supposed to manually update the database when they encountered missing or outdated information, but with monthly sales quotas to hit, no one had the time.
The team says they need delivery marketplace and POS data for every restaurant to help boost their close rates. They know this data will help them personalize their pitches and prioritize locations that use systems compatible with their software. But you don’t have this data, and you have no idea where to get it.
Now you’re scrambling because your team is failing to meet their targets, wasting time and resources with bad data that leads nowhere. You know this data decay in your CRM is leaving you and your team blind to the market. You know it also means you’re missing out on opportunities, and it’s stopping you from making informed strategic decisions as a sales leader.
Sound familiar?
CRM data decay refers to the loss of accuracy and relevance in customer data over time, as contacts change jobs, companies close, or information becomes outdated, leading to ineffective marketing and sales efforts.
The rate of B2B data decay is increasing exponentially, reaching 70% a year in 2024, according to Gartner. This means if you start the year with 10,000 contacts in your CRM, you’ll only have 3,000 valid contacts by New Year’s Eve. What’s worse, you won’t know which of those 3,000 contacts are accurate, impacting the reliability of your whole database.
This data rot doesn’t exist in a vacuum: inaccurate, incomplete, and out-of-date data can have far-reaching consequences for your business, especially in the notoriously competitive foodservice industry. It results in wasted time and money, market blindness, lost opportunities, and poor ROI. It affects more than sales and marketing: it impacts many critical parts of the business, including operations, supply chain management, and customer support, among others.
So, how do you tackle data decay in your CRM? The old approach of just buying contact lists simply won’t cut the mustard anymore. Contact lists offer static data that is only valid at a single point in time. These types of lists are also often limited in the breadth and depth of market intelligence they can offer: the lack of context around listed contacts makes it hard to understand their business needs and offer a more personalized approach.
Even worse, uploading purchased contact lists into your CRM can result in errors or duplicate data that can be painstaking to fix and cause confusion for your sales and marketing teams. It’s time to consider a better solution that will help your team move forward, not backward.
A clean, accurate, up-to-date CRM is the foundation of insight-led decision-making. It provides a full, clear view of the market, so you know what is happening now. It helps you make decisions with confidence, knowing that your sales and marketing strategy is being informed by the most recent, comprehensive information available.
Brizo FoodMetrics’ List Enricher feature keeps your database up-to-date by importing your existing data and supplementing it with the latest foodservice market intelligence.
Simply upload a .csv file from your CRM and Brizo FoodMetrics will automatically match those accounts to its database of over 2.1 million foodservice establishments. From there, you can enrich and update your data with Brizo’s real-time market insights before exporting it back into your CRM.
Brizo will automatically detect and flag future data updates to your previously imported establishments, ensuring your CRM is always clean, and your team is always working with the freshest, most accurate and up-to-date insights.
A robust database helps streamline lead prequalification by identifying high-quality, high-potential prospects more quickly and easily so your sales team can close more deals faster.
Want to learn how to enrich your database so your team is always working with the most accurate, up-to-date market intelligence? Sign up for a free trial of Brizo FoodMetrics and start making data-driven decisions with confidence.
