The ROI of Data Orchestration

It’s axiomatic that an investment in information technology (IT) must bring a return. If we spend a dollar on a new solution, we must see a Return on Investment (ROI) of some sort: 5 cents per dollar, ten cents… hopefully more. Sometimes, the ROI is easy to see. You migrate an on-premises system to the cloud and realize immediate savings on the hardware cost. Divide the savings by the cost of the migration and there’s your ROI. Often, however, ROI is a little harder to determine, but it’s still there. Indeed, a positive or negative ROI for technology definitely shows up in financial results, whether we’re tracking it or not. Data orchestration falls into this latter category. 

A quick look at data orchestration

Data orchestration is a combination of process and tooling that creates higher quality, cleaner and enriched data. It enables sales, marketing and support organizations to work with a unified, normalized and correct data set. Data orchestration realizes this goal by automating and orchestrating the various steps required to optimize data investments at scale. 

To use a simple example, a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system and sales order management system at the same company may each have its own separate database of customer contacts. Though these two databases contain the same list of names and contact details, there can be many variations in the data. Duplicates may abound, as well as incomplete or incorrect data, e.g., one database has a record for “John Smith” while the same person is listed as “Jon Smith.” This may seem trivial, but if there are thousands of such errors, it can start to have a negative impact on productivity. A data orchestration solution automates the process of discovering and correcting such errors.

Data orchestration ROI Drivers: Subjective but very real  

How does data orchestration create ROI? It’s somewhat subjective, but very real. To understand the ROI of data orchestration, it helps to identify just how much it costs for an employee to perform an action in your organization. It’s a higher number than most of us might think. For example, if a marketing operations staffer is paid $20 per hour, the cost of his or her time is not $20 per hour. The real, or so-called “fully loaded” cost of that person’s time includes the costs of their taxes and benefits, the insurance that covers them, the facilities and utilities that enable them to work in the office and so forth. The fully loaded cost of a $20 per hour employee might be closer to $50 per hour when everything is added up.

With a fully loaded cost of employee time in mind, you can start to estimate the cost of an employee wasting that time. For the sake of argument, let’s say that employee time costs $1 per minute. Thus, calling the wrong number of a customer, hanging up and finding the right number could result in the waste of $2 or $3. Is that a serious problem? Maybe. What if you have 50 sales reps wasting half an hour a day on wrong numbers? That will cost your business $1,500 per day, or $375,000 a year. 

Now you’re paying attention, right? If data orchestration can save your organization $375,000 a year just by eliminating wrong numbers from the customer database, that’s a strong driver of ROI.

Productivity is another factor in data orchestration ROI. If you define productivity as a measure of successful work performed per time period, then the less time wasted, the higher the rate of productivity will be. Data orchestration helps people get more work done per day by reducing useless tasks like correcting wrong data or looking up missing information.

Revenue drives ROI, too. With CRM and sales systems, better customer and lead data should lead to closing more deals. Increased revenue is a strong “R” in ROI. 

Data orchestration ROI across revenue teams

Data orchestration produces ROI across your revenue teams. Routing data to the right people, another element of data orchestration, improves workflow efficiency. A cleaner, more uniform data set should also lead to better alignment between sales, marketing and support teams—an essential element of Revenue Operations (RevOps).

-          Marketing—Data orchestration drives improved productivity in marketing with more efficient lead list uploads, lead scoring, personalized email campaigns and data enrichment. In financial terms, the average RingLead customer saves about $600,000 per year in projected data cleansing costs. Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) jump by 20% as well.

-          Sales—With customer data analysis, data orchestration can improve marketing outcomes by identifying happy customers and interested prospects. The process streams buying signals and sales updates directly to sales reps. In RingLead’s experience, use of data orchestration results in a 5X increase in lead-to-call conversions—along with a 350% overall improvement in the odds of qualifying a lead. Better quality data also streamlines the Request for Proposal (RFP) response process, helping with productivity and revenue growth.

 -          Support—When customer support teams have access to the right data, the support process goes better for everyone involved. The support team member becomes more productive, which is good for ROI, but perhaps more importantly, the customer is usually happier, which leads to long term revenue growth. Data orchestration helps with post-sales processing, customer onboarding and Service Level Agreement (SLA) prioritization. These processes run more smoothly and efficiently with data orchestration—resulting in ROI throughout.

Of course, these are just a few of the ways that data orchestration results in a positive ROI. 

To learn more about RingLead’s data orchestration platform, and what a solution like RingLead's can do for your business, visit www.ringlead.com.