If you want to make sure you’re handling B2B data correctly, these five best practices in data management will put you on the right track.

Data Management Tips

1.   Learn Everything About Your Objective

Do you have an objective for data management, summarizing what you hope to accomplish with data? You can’t effectively manage anything without knowing the objectives. You won’t know what’s working, what’s not, and what to change.

Ask yourself a few questions to outline your data management objectives:

• Which data do you intend to collect?
• How will you process it?
• Is it time-consuming?
• Does it contribute to your business goals?

Answers will help you decide if it’s worth following the objective. Some examples of data management goals are:

• Buyer profile creation
• Account targeting
• Buyer intent monitoring
• Improving business outcome

2.   Closely Follow “Data Quality” Rules

IBM reports that data quality issues cost the US economy $3.1 trillion per year. This is a multifaceted problem not confined to one aspect of quality. The O’Reilly survey report confirms this.

How to fix data quality issues?

Data experts advise these best practices:

• Examine the quality of incoming data.
• Append missing customer data to get a complete record.
• Remove duplicate records to avoid wasted effort.
• Standardize the format of business elements like email, phone and title.
• Configure your data management system for multiple languages and metric units.
• Eliminate records that don’t fit the target criteria.

3.   Regularize Your Data Management Practices

It’s crucial to periodically confirm accuracy, as the business value of outdated and irrelevant data degrades over time. So, how often should you optimize or cleanse the database for maximum benefit?

That’s hard to say in general. Most likely, it depends on the database size. The more data you possess, the more often you should clean it. The schedule may vary by organization, but ensure it’s a continuous process. A proper routine of data assessing, cleansing and enriching keeps your business information in good shape.

4.   Understand and Improve Data Security

The data within your organization should be readily accessible, but at the same time, you must also put protections into place to prevent a breach.

Below are some practical tips to secure your customer data:

• Insist on secure and foolproof authentication.
• Safeguard confidential data with strong cryptography.
• Consistently follow data regulations like GDPR and CCPA.
• Prepare a strategy for managing a potential breach.
• Test data management tools for vulnerabilities.

5.   Centralize Data

Centralizing data such as in a data lake makes it easier to handle. It helps keep data uniform, connected and complete across the organization. Additionally, it simplifies data management and analysis processes, which will likely enhance revenue generation. Standardizing data in a data lake is critical to avoid redundancies.

Other benefits of data centralization include:

• Increased security, as users can’t access the data unless they receive privileges via a tightly controlled system.
• Database remains up-to-date as multiple users can update details that are vital to your brand.
• Centralized storage reduces the total space required for storing and processing data.

Never Stop Learning

Putting this advice into practice will improve your existing data management strategy. Meanwhile, read our other B2B blogs for best practices tips.