By Darian Shirazi, CEO, Radius

Bad data is a commodity, but good data is priceless.

To me, the statement above is more than just a soundbite. It’s the foundation that Radius was built on. When we started Radius in 2012, our team had one goal in mind – make it simple for marketers to access high-quality data, leverage intelligence, and ultimately drive revenue.

It’s a vision that I’ve shared many times over and a joint goal that I believe all software providers dabbling in AI, predictive, and machine learning should provide in their products today. That’s why today we’re excited to announce that B2B companies can now get unlimited access to the most comprehensive, accurate, and up-to-date contact and account data via The Network of Record™.

Mapping the revenue footprint of bad data

Companies have become data organizations – there’s no way around it. This can largely be attributed to the rapid digitization, expansion of new-age tech like AI and predictive, and massive amounts of customer data collected by CRM, marketing automation, and other systems of record. But the abundance of data is eclipsed by the shortcomings in quality which impacts business decisions and performance:

• $8.8M average cost per year due to bad data (Source: Gartner, Nov 2015)
• 79% of CROs don’t know where their revenue will come from (Source: Xactly, May 2014)
• 66% of CMOs aren’t hitting targets (Source: 614Group, July 2014)

CMOs use data to drive strategy, but most intelligence gleaned from current systems is predicated on inaccurate and stale data. In this case, the proverbial statement ‘garbage in, garbage out’ is negatively impacting companies’ B2B strategies which may be harmful to their success at scale. But, in my conversations with forward-thinking organizations, I’ve found that acquiring and maintaining quality customer and prospect data is the most pervasive challenge facing companies today.

Most organizations are missing revenue targets, running across higher acquisition costs, and seeing lower return on marketing & sales investment because poor foundational data continues to be an ongoing problem.

The business value of good data ranges from high to stratospheric. While every data source has different characteristics and presents a different set of challenges around quality and accuracy, most B2B marketers still have immature data management practices that fail to get value from these varied data types.