DiscoverOrg Survey Finds Data Quality the No. 1 Concern Among IT Marketers

Online, September 26, 2013 (Newswire.com) - Concern about the quality of customer data was cited as the number-one issue with the use of CRM and marketing automation systems, according to a new report on adoption of these tools at IT companies conducted by DiscoverOrg, www.discoverorg.com, a three-time Inc. 500 recipient and provider of sales and marketing intelligence tools used by the top IT vendors in the country.

In the report, "Room for Improvement: Data Quality Impacting CRM and Marketing Automation Usage at IT Companies," bit.ly/18WsgKG, 33% of the respondents listed "keeping data accurate in all systems" as their biggest concern, followed by "getting sales personnel to use the automation tools" (23%) and "achieving significant ROI" (18%). A large number of respondents (58%) said they relied on IT sales reps to update their CRM data.

The report was based on an online survey conducted by DiscoverOrg in July 2013, which collected 359 responses.

One unexpected finding was the fact that 24% of respondents said they are still not using a CRM system but are either tracking sales activity via Microsoft Excel or not tracking their IT lead and sales pipeline until revenue is realized. This was especially surprising given the introduction of many low cost-of-entry players like Zoho and cloud-based pay-per-user models like Salesforce.com and SugarCRM.

DiscoverOrg decided to conduct the survey in order to gauge the effectiveness of automation tools and learn more about the ways they are used within an IT sales organization.

"Companies spend thousands of dollars purchasing and maintaining these highly sophisticated systems in order to track and manage massive amounts of customer and prospect data, and ultimately to drive sales," said Henry Schuck, Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer of DiscoverOrg. "With the number one reason for CRM adoption failure being bad data, achieving data quality through improvements in systems and processes is a critical success factor in IT sales."

Some other key survey findings:

• Salesforce.com was the most popular CRM system, used by 46% of respondents; this was followed by Microsoft Dynamics (10%); as cited above, 24% said no system was in use.

• Marketo was the most popular marketing automation tool (13.5%), followed by Hubspot (9%) and Eloqua (6.5%). More than 60% of respondents said they didn't use a marketing automation system.

• 58% of respondents said they relied on sales reps to update system data, a factor they said contributed to a lack of trust in data accuracy.

• Many respondents said their systems didn't allow them to segment contacts by current technology deployed (61%), industry type (30%), company size (42%) and job title (35%). This limits their ability to accurately target messaging to prospects.

About DiscoverOrg
DiscoverOrg is the leading sales and marketing intelligence tool used by the top IT vendors, staffing companies and consultants targeting IT departments of Fortune-ranked, Mid-Market and SMB companies in North America. Offered in the form of a constantly refreshed database, DiscoverOrg specializes in mapping out the IT org charts of 15,000 companies complete with verified email addresses, direct-dial phone numbers, reporting structure, IT project updates and technology installed base. Each of the 250,000+ IT decision makers in the DiscoverOrg database are updated and refreshed by the company's team of 80+ in-house researchers at least once every 90 days, enabling customers to reach the right person at the right company with the right message at the right time. For more information, please visit http://discoverorg.com.