Acuate Data Quality

Why Keep Bad Data?

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... Read more →

Excel is not a Database

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... Read more →

Tracking Missing Contacts is a Sales Opportunity

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... Read more →

Why Address Data is Needed More Than Ever

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... Read more →

Profiling Made Easy

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... Read more →

Matching the Un-Matchable

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... Read more →

Why You Must Demand Good Marketing Data Now

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,... Read more →

Why CRM De-Duplication Doesn’t Deliver

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... Read more →

Good Data Wins, Always – Mathematical Proof

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.... Read more →

Mainly Pros and a Few Cons with B2B Web Research

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... Read more →