Data doesn’t win awards, turn heads, and it’s rarely the first thing you show off when presenting your shiny new Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy. But if your contact data is ropey, your sales and marketing plan is already on shaky ground.

For something so critical, data management is shockingly underloved. Brand gets budget. Content gets the attention. Campaigns get the excitement. But data? That’s often someone’s part-time job, usually buried under other priorities, if it’s anyone’s job at all.

When fingers start getting pointed in the direction of messaging, brand, or activity, that stealthy saboteur is going unnoticed because no-one's spotted you’re talking to the wrong people, or no one at all.  It's the silent profit drain.

The tangible cost of poor data
 

You may not feel it all at once, but it chips away slowly:
 

• Marketing money wasted on emails no one opens, calls that go nowhere, and ads targeting ghost contacts.
• Sales time lost chasing leads that don’t fit your current ICP or were last active five years ago.
• Pipeline inflated by contacts that will never convert.
• Compliance risks quietly growing in the background, ready to bite. 

It’s not just an admin problem, it’s a performance problem.
 

Gartner reckons poor data costs businesses nearly $13 million a year. Forrester says 21% of marketing budgets go down the drain because of bad data. And yet, many companies still can’t confidently say how fresh or accurate their CRM actually is.
 

Who owns it?
 

The main struggle is that data ownership is everyone’s problem and no one’s job. Marketing builds the database, sales adds to it, operations need it to be right, and the CTO worries about compliance. But ongoing accuracy? Enrichment? That falls through the cracks.
 

It’s not uncommon to see customer-facing teams relying on spreadsheets or hunting through old emails to find a correct phone number. In some cases, businesses don’t even have the right contact details for active customers, let alone prospects. We’re not talking advanced analytics here. We’re talking basic contact hygiene.
 

Data is your foundation
 

If you’re serious about GTM performance, that is, you want campaigns that convert and sales conversations that count, you need to get serious about your data.
 

It’s the fuel behind every part of your go-to-market engine:
 

    ✔ Cold mailing lists?  Need refreshing and enriching at least every quarter

    ✔ Personalised messaging? Needs accurate insights.

    ✔ ABM? Needs clean account data.

    ✔ Sales outreach? Needs verified contact details.

    ✔ Revenue growth? Needs the right people in the funnel.
    ✔ Customer data?  Needs constantly refining with adds, moves, changes
 

The better your data, the stronger your targeting, the sharper your messaging, and the higher your conversion rate. It’s not rocket science, it’s just good housekeeping.  But someone needs to be properly responsible for it.
 

So what should you be doing?
 

You don’t need a data science team or a huge investment. But you do need a consistent approach:
 

1.  Start clean: Standardise what fields you collect and how they’re entered.
2.  Enrich over time: Use every buyer touch-point to build a fuller picture - interests, job moves,  intent signals.
3.  Validate as you go: Stop bad data at the door with tools that check accuracy on entry.
4.  Schedule clean-ups: Regular de-duplication and audits should be non-negotiable.
5.  Clarify ownership: Make sure someone is actively responsible for data quality across teams.
    

Don’t wait for the cracks to show
 

Bad data doesn’t blow up your GTM overnight, it just quietly undermines it until you wonder why nothing’s quite going the way it should.
 

If your pipeline isn’t performing, don’t just blame the creative or the content. Take a hard look at the database it’s built on. Because if your data is weak, everything else in your go-to-market plan is already playing catch-up.

How we can be a MaaSive help:

If this is one of those jobs a job that gets overlooked, no-one wants to own or be responsible for we can take it on for you.  Get in touch and we will offer some helpful advice, whether you want to move forward or not.