If we haven’t been clear enough yet: Your database, and the data stored within it, is insanely crucial to the success of your sales and marketing efforts. But just because you have data in your database does not mean it’s good, accurate, or usable. The data you source from a prospecting or sales intelligence tool isn’t always up-to-date or properly formatted for your systems. And, it doesn’t matter if you make really pretty graphs and visualizations in your data visualization tool, you won’t get any insight if the data the tool uses is just flat-out wrong. Additionally, businesses are collecting more data than ever before from more sources and tools than ever before and that’s bound to create some friction somewhere in your revenue processes.
“Clean,” high-quality data enables your people and increases the power of your tech stack. So how do you get it? Use a Data Quality tool. This category exists to provide solutions that ensure that your data is accurate and usable. It’s lighter for your salespeople to conduct their outreach when job titles, phone numbers, etc. are uniformly formatted. It’s easier for your marketers to identify key engagement segments when the data that determines a prospect’s segment is consistent and accurate. It takes less effort for your customer/client success personnel to understand, diagnose, and respond to issues and requests when the data they use is in a standardized layout that’s easy to understand. Data quality affects all of the levels of your revenue operations, making a data quality an important addition to your tech stack.
The Options for Data Quality Tools
Because data quality assurance is a pretty specialized function, there aren’t a lot of tools in the space and they all have very similar functionality. Be careful of data quality tools that are full customer data or “data governance” platforms. These platforms will usually have a data quality tool as a part of the platform, but contain it in a complicated piece of software with capabilities that not only might confuse you, you probably don’t need. Openprise is a great example of this; their offering includes things like account scoring, attribution, lead routing, etc. The following tools are some of the best for data quality:
- Insycle
- DemandTools
- Ringlead
Data Quality Tool Must-Haves
When you’re evaluating your options for data quality tools, you aren’t going to find a lot of variance in terms of what they do. So, it’s important to focus on how you can use it. Simpler isn’t always better here. You should have an idea of the amount of customization you need, but be sure to consider how easy it is to use the various functionality. Just like other tools, you’ll have to consider the tradeoffs between those two things as you make a decision. However, any tool you might consider should do at least these things:
- Integrate with your CRM/Database: While many tools will, at least, work with data imported from a spreadsheet, the job these tools are hired to do is keep CRM data formatted and clean. Without integration capabilities, you won’t get the value you’re looking for out of the tool, your data, or your CRM.
- Data Handling and Cleaning: Formatting, merging, validation. The ability to easily format the way your data looks, merge duplicate data in accordance with your needs, and validate data to ensure it’s accurate and usable, is what increases the value you’re getting for your effort.
- Automation: Automating data handling and cleaning is how you scale the value you get from your data, CRM, and data quality tool for your effort. Be sure to work out the best parameters to handle and clean your data for your business before you automate it.
- Bulk Functionality: If you’re thinking about a data quality tool, you probably have enough data to warrant the use of bulk functionality. Your tool should be able to retrieve, handle, clean, and import large volumes of data, and it should be able to do so quickly and accurately.
Our Choice: Insycle
Insycle is the hidden gem of the Data Quality Assurance category. While it’s a product that’s been gaining buzz, it doesn’t have the presence of a RingLead or a DemandTools. However, we’ve found it to be the best data quality tool on the market by flying colors. It’s easy to sum up Insycle in these 3 words: overall user oriented.
This is clear even before you decide to use Insycle. They’re extremely transparent with their pricing, where other solutions hide pricing behind free trial offers. Their pricing page allows you to estimate the cost based on your needs down to the feature and even the specific number of records in your database. And yes, you read that right: down to the feature. Insycle only has you pay for the features you need, and that’s if you even need to pay at all. Their free tier is plenty robust if you have less than 4,000 records you think need to be cleaned.
Insycle’s user focus carries through to actually using the tool. Their functionality is impressive, at the least, in terms of their quality, depth, and ease of use. The user interface is very straightforward, allowing you to easily access any of the tool’s functionality. At the same time, they offer a breadth of customization options that you’d expect to make the tool much harder to use. But it’s not. It’s a trade-off you’d normally expect to make and Insycle manages to avoid it. They’re able to keep it simple with a step-by-step user experience supplemented by support information within the tool.
Where they still go above and beyond is their user support. You’ll find an option no matter how you like to obtain support when using a tool. Their support documentation is detailed and easy to sift through. Their service team is extremely responsive, considerate, and helpful. And, they offer plenty of resources built into the tool’s UI, intuitively providing users with support information. Additionally, the team at Insycle is extremely receptive to suggestions and criticism. Oftentimes, you’ll make a feature request or communicate a frustration and see that feature implemented or frustration solved within a few weeks.
On the other hand, Insycle can be a lot. The full solution has a lot of features that do pretty different things and it can be overwhelming. While it’s easy to use the customization options, they can be intimidating. It becomes clear why their support is so prevalent in the app and is of such high quality. You need to use their support resources to really understand what it can do and you aren’t going to be efficient with it right away. It’s by no means a “plug and play” solution. It’s also probably best if you have a smaller database, as the pricing of the tool and how efficiently it runs is directly tied to the size of your database.
On the whole, it’s as if Insycle asked “What’s everything someone with a data quality assurance need will ever have to do?” before they designed and developed their product. If so, they definitely delivered on answering that question. They do a great job managing the overwhelmingly robust nature of the tool with their user interface and support resources. On top of that, it’s tough to match their pricing model and transparency. They also distinctly go above and beyond to consider their end users and customers in all of the aspects of their offering. Insycle delivers a data quality solution that cannot be beat and should be getting way more attention.
If you’re looking for a data quality tool or are realizing that you have a data quality assurance need, put Insycle at the top of your list. Even if you aren’t actively looking, they’re a group and a product worth keeping an eye on.
