Three Ways to Transform Sales with Modern Customer Data Mastering

“Tamr allows [our sales teams] to focus on what they do best, which is helping the customer, not looking through data to find the customer.” — Director of business and product strategy, retail.

Knowing who your customer is, what they buy, and how often they buy is critical information for every business. It’s crucially important for sales. Sales can use customer data to find the perfect time to pitch an existing customer a new product or work on an upsell opportunity before a contract renewal. Unfortunately, at the moment it’s too costly and complex to get high-quality, ready-to-use customer data to the salespeople when they need it.

Solving this challenge with customer data mastering can have a big payoff, as a recent Forrester Consulting study demonstrates.

The Total Economic Impact(™) study concluded that an average enterprise customer based on the Forrester composite would realize on average nearly $9 million in total benefits over three years by modernizing customer data mastering using the Tamr Cloud-Native Master Data Management (MDM) Platform. Those benefits included increased productivity for sales FTEs of $2.6 million and increased profit from additional opportunity creation of $2.1 million.

As part of its analysis, Forrester Consulting conducted interviews with data leaders and users in different industries managing anywhere from anywhere from 4 million to 500 million customer data records using the Tamr Platform. With Tamr’s machine-led data mastering solutions, organizations can reduce the manual efforts required by data engineers and analysts to generate cleansed, curated customer views by 70 and 80%, respectively.

The candid interviews revealed both the extent and the commonality of their challenges, identifying three ways modernizing customer data mastering can improve sales.

#1: Improved Sales Productivity

Interviewees wanted to empower their sales teams to be more efficient in generating leads and interacting with customers. To achieve those goals, they needed to ensure their data was high quality and easy to access. Using the Tamr Platform, sales agents spent less time searching for and verifying contact and account records, allowing them to spend more time on revenue-generating tasks.

Previously, data used by sales agents often contained errors and required additional research. A single customer could be represented by multiple records, which resulted in sales teams duplicating efforts and providing a subpar customer experience. Tamr boosts sales agents’ efficiency by creating a single, unified customer profile and allowing them to focus on their core job of conversing with customers, understanding the customers’ needs, and helping them solve their problems.

A financial services organization reported a 50%-80% reduction in time in connecting to the right customer. “Our front office teams have seen a reduction in cycle times with Tamr compared to older systems because they are getting the necessary information quicker,” the organization’s data chief said.

#2: Better Data Quality and Trustworthiness

Across those interviewed, the lack of a single source of truth for customer data resulted in incomplete and duplicate customer records. These data issues led to discrepancies between the number of customers and the number of customer records, really fundamental stuff.

Perhaps more worrisome: With no streamlined customer data pipeline in the legacy ecosystems, business users didn’t trust the data to inform their daily actions and strategic insights.

“Data was completely siloed in specific functional areas, and [in] some cases, [the data was] literally just buried in people’s heads,” said the director of business and product strategy for a retail business. “On top of that, data just got replicated from one system to the next, and created this chain reaction of data. And then there’s metadata and paradata that goes along with it as well. Folks were just really confused, and were like, ‘How do I make sense of all of what we have?’ People were unsure of what was the source of truth.”

The Tamr Platform reconciles customer records across the enterprise and achieves a single view of the customer. An organization can assign a unique Tamr ID to each mastered record so it can streamline data consolidation. The Tamr ID plays a key role in optimizing sales interactions and improving the efficiency of downstream data initiatives.

A manufacturing organization was able to shrink the pool of customer records in their systems by 20%. This allowed their sales team to optimize their campaigns to target the smaller, verified customers.

#3: Faster Time to Opportunity

As sales and business development employees get access to better-quality customer records, they can generate net-new opportunities from these leads as a result.

An interviewee at a retail organization noted it used Tamr to comprehensively build out customer profiles, enabling sales to better discern between new and existing customers: “As we pumped more and more information into the [Tamr] Platform, we have quickly been able to harmonize it all and take action. Our sales team can spend less time trying to figure out how to expand within our existing customers and actually work on expanding and pulling in new opportunities,” the interviewee said.

Financial services organizations in the study reported that using Tamr resulted in shorter customer onboarding times by at least 50%, which meant faster revenue generation and an improved customer experience. Salespeople at a media organization were able to make eight additional phone calls to customers per week through improved customer data and less time spent on research, creating different pathways to opportunity.

Read a full copy of the study, including Forrester’s detailed methodology and more wisdom from the Tamr customers interviewed.

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