Database(d): Here's Why Most Start-Ups Fail in the First 5 Years

Stop carrying dead weight!

And to draw that connection between dead wood and your business, dead wood data has some serious effects:

• It’s costing a lot of money. Yep, those dead bytes aren’t just sitting there; they’re burning through the budget by affecting the accuracy and speed of marketing campaigns, threatening customer satisfaction, and skewing strategic insights.
• It’s messing with your head. Trying to make sense of data when half of it is useless is like trying to read a book where every other page is blank!
• It gives the team more work. In any business struggling with dead wood is a bunch of people who could be doing better stuff, like maybe their actual job…but instead, they’re wading through all that data sludge.

So while it’s much easier to detect out in the real world, how does one identify dead wood in a database? And what are some tips and tricks, or best practices, to getting rid of all that unnecessary weight?

The curse of dead wood data

You’re reading the right blog if one of the following descriptions of data applies to your database:

• It’s somehow incomplete, like it has a Name, but no Address and Phone. It could have an Initial + Surname + Address, but since your organisation only attempts outbound calls, the record is ineffective at meeting your organisation’s goals.
• It could be a record that’s omplete but has been marked as Disconnected by the Phone Room/Dialler, and/or marked as Return to Sender (RTS) by the mail house.
• The person you’re attempting to correspond with may have passed away.
• There are records that are more current, which makes another record redundant.
• There is basic duplication of data, such as multiples of the same person at the same address and/or phone numbers.

Another example of dead wood data is information that isn’t dead but becoming less relevant:

1. Customers that you haven’t had interactions with, within the last five years
2. Transactional records, even for existing customers, that are more than 10 years old
3. Prospects that don’t meet your target criteria in any way.

Once a business decides they’re finally sick of running their team raw and spending thousands of dollars on marketing campaigns that don’t reach the right audience, insights that are more stress-inducing than strategic, and unhappy teammates who must turn into impromptu data specialists on top of their actual jobs…they’re finally ready to start losing all that dead weight. And that means investing in a good data management and maintenance system!

Make lean seasons, clean seasons

Now, when’s a good time to carve out all that extra weight?

Think of when “low” seasons are for business and work back from that date. This date differs from one business to another. The point is that the project needs to begin and end in a time frame that won’t make it too difficult for business continuity.

Some organisations may even need to run everything in the data cleansing process twice. While it may sound like overkill, this makes perfect sense for a database that needs to be accessed nearly 24/7. Bringing the whole thing down to perform serious maintenance can be a nightmare. But if the update is performed in a sandbox, then the team can work on all the heavy-duty debugging they need to do.

A database that sparks joy

Once everyone is satisfied with the update, then it can be moved to the live, actual database at a time that won’t affect business activities too much. That’s all the maintenance needed for the system completed at a fraction of the time, effort, and money required.

Let’s figure out how all this work can be made easy for your business here.