Good phone numbers are a huge help when reps are trying to move deals forward.

This is especially true in the world of texting — a poll we ran showed 81% of customers were okay being contacted by SMS in a buying cycle or after becoming a customer, and with an almost 100% open rate and 50% reply rate, getting to these phone numbers is crucial to successful engagement.

81% of customers are open to SMS communication in a buying cycle or post conversion

 

But There’s A Problem…

Phone numbers are among the most unreliable data elements in CRM

Why?

  • Prospects submit fake phone numbers in form fills
  • Purchased leads from providers like Zoominfo have bad phone number data
  • Reps don’t update CRM contacts once they get a valid phone number through another channel (eg: email signatures or referrals).
  • Reps put phone numbers into the wrong fields (eg: they put a phone number in the Mobile field without validating it is actually a cell phone number)

 

Just how prevalent is this?

In a recent study conducted with a mid-market customer who uses ZoomInfo, Outreach.io and Salesforce, we found the following data from an analysis over a 2 week period.

Of 77 contacts that we identified as having verifiable phone numbers (using email signature data), only 6 contacts had phone number information and of 5 of these, there was a conflict between what was in Salesforce and what was in the email signatures.

This means a data provider match rate of only 7% and and error rate of 83%

 

This costs time & money

The cost of bad data in CRM tends to go up exponentially over time, and phone numbers are no exception.  Here are just a few examples

  • Direct Costs:
    • You’re paying $$$ for leads that have bad numbers (and you don’t know how often this happens)
    • Reps spend time calling the bad numbers in the CRM and losing time
    • Reps spend time combing through activity history to try to find good numbers to call/text
    • Reps spend time pinging team members hoping they have good ways to reach the customer.
  • Indirect Costs
    • The cost of not reaching a customer when you need to can lead to lost deals and churned customers.

 

Truly To The Rescue

By using our analytics software, the customer was able to create a number of automations that automatically cleaned up phone number data in their CRM as the rep engaged their customers.  For example, when a rep dialed a phone number that was disconnected, that number would be flagged inside the CRM and if a number proved to be SMS-capable, it would be added to a ‘Verified Mobile’ field for future use.

Most interesting of all, however was that we proved that the source of a lot of this ‘shadow’ data was actual email signatures, and that our software could proactively parse this data and update the CRM with high accuracy/reliability

 

The Result

Increase the phone number coverage in their contact pool from 7% to 19% (more than 2.5X improvement), they also achieved 100% accuracy in verifiable phone numbers!