<h3>What is a single source of truth in sales and marketing?</h3>
The problem with big data is that it can be rather overwhelming.

It's possible to end up with large silos of information and analytics, with no consistent identifiers and no clear pathway to use all that data for a focused business growth strategy.

The advances in software and analytical skills to make sense of big data are expanding exponentially, of course. We can now strip down, formulate, collate, categorise, measure, monitor and manipulate data to a micro level.

In particular, technology has provided some excellent tools and methodologies for monitoring and measuring digital sales and marketing data.

However, it can still sometimes be a case of too much information to make sense of. Companies can find it problematic if clear results are hard to extrapolate. It’s not just about accuracy and alignment either. You can have a wealth of granular data in your organisation, and still have difficulties in creating meaningful collaboration and communication between different departments. Or, even disjointed dialogue between different teams within your sales and marketing functions.

All of which means you may find that business strategies lose momentum due to contradictory or confusing intel, lack of clarity or duplication of effort.

Most companies now have multiple ways to capture and measure leads, and the customer pipeline. But how many have a single source of truth, to reconcile and clarify it all? Can you line up your marketing and sales activities with revenue implications in an accurate and consistent way?

&lt;b&gt;Going back to basics&lt;/b&gt;

The currency of business growth is leads. The holy grail of marketing and sales is developing the capabilities to treat each lead as an individual selling opportunity, nurturing it to a positive conclusion.

Digital sales channels can support this brilliantly, offering organisations the potential to personalise their marketing and sales activities like never before. Each marketing channel can be configured to appeal to different target audiences or formulated to work together to create an unmissable incentive and call to action to buy.

Weaving this all together in a structured and sustained way means generating up to the minute insights and having absolute control. Only then can your entire organisation – including inbound marketing teams, sales personnel and call centres – be orchestrated effectively.

This is far from straightforward, without a single source of truth to measure and analyse leads from beginning to end.

&lt;b&gt;Anaytical and data gathering – the lead tangle&lt;/b&gt;

Among the marketing channels available to UK businesses are Google AdWords, paid for content on social media and, of course, their own website enquiry forms and other calls to action.

Each offers its own analytical tools and opportunities; such as Google Analytics and LinkedIn Analytics. Don’t be fooled by the fact that some of these metrics have similar names – they are potentially measuring data for very different perspectives.

Marketing automation software such as HubSpot and Marketo have made it easier to orchestrate all marketing channel activity and to engage with prospects and create actionable insights. Granular data can then be extracted and stored in your CRM.

The problem with that is that each CRM system defines a lead in a different way. The most commonly used is Salesforce. However, there are around 100 to choose from, including, for example, NetSuite, Zoho, SugarCRM, Microsoft Dynamics, Pipedrive and Oracle.

Then, of course, you may have leads stored both in your marketing automation system and CRM, at different points of the buying cycle. How this lead is qualified may also be different according to its origin. When, where and how the data was collected could affect its categorisation, as well as the fields, settings and processing of each of your marketing and sales tools.

A conversion tracking pixel tool could measure every engagement as a lead. A form submitted via your website could be classed as a lead. Each may have different filters to qualify these.

Also, as each of these enquiries and engagements go off to the sales team, they apply their own sets of criteria for how valuable these leads are in terms of conversion potential. In fact, within your own company, different owners and departments can easily slip into using different sources or criteria to chart leads. You could even face a situation in which teams are pulling in different directions using partial or out of date data.

You may end up with partial information on numerous systems, and trying to analyse data from various angles, using inconsistent data fields. Multiple sets of data across multiple systems are not conducive to an accurate and actionable sales pipeline.

Alongside the difficulty in setting qualification criteria comes the problem of attribution. It is not always clear-cut how you should assign revenue impact to leads from different sources.

Having more than one version of “truth” in your company clearly leads to confusion, but the worse case scenario is that it will also result in paralysis or even bad decision making.

&lt;b&gt;Duplication of leads&lt;/b&gt;

The systems you can use to sift through and measure lead generation, include, for example, Google Analytics, Facebook Insights and LinkedIn Analytics and your own CRM software - each has its own purpose and values. However, duplication between the different tools is also entirely possible.

For example, a customer responds to a Facebook ad with a click. To check your credentials as a company, they may also research you on LinkedIn. Then later, they decide to take things further and visit your website. Potentially they give your product some thought, before returning - as a separate process – to complete your enquiry form on your website or place an order.

Every one of those interactions with your marketing channels could well be measured as a unique lead and then a conversion.

This can inflate your numbers and lead to confusion in measuring your pipeline efficiency. Double or multiple counting can also distort the analysis of how effective each marketing channel is proving in lead generation and qualification. It also makes it even harder to be accurate in attributing revenue.

This is another way in which having no single source of truth for marketing and sales data can devalue the effectiveness of all of your analytics, which in turn makes it harder to create growth strategies. How can you create the right marketing mix, when you can’t be sure which channel is working the most efficiently?

How can you create a single source of truth, to deal with these issues?

&lt;b&gt;The attribution solution&lt;/b&gt;

The terms single source of truth and single version of the truth are complementary concepts.

In a nutshell, sales and marketing teams need to create one system to collate and store data, that renders it entirely accurate and actionable. Anyone can extract what they need from this single source of truth.

The view each separate company department and team then has of marketing and sales data, from any location, is a single version of the truth. Trusted insights can be a relied on by decision makers, as a basis for business strategies.

Having one single storage system is not always easy to build, without it collapsing under the weight of the data it needs to hold and sort. And many attempts to collate and manage disparate data can fall far short of their aims.

For many organisations, the single source of truth is having a CRM system sophisticated enough to close the loops and get data streamlined and efficiently sorted with their marketing automation system.

Your organisation certainly needs technology that gathers together information from all marketing channels, including all offline and online marketing and sales activity, pulling leads into a centralised attribution solution. Every email click, Live Chat engagement, telephone call and social media response should be funnelling through this one system, alongside analytical input.

This single source of truth would cut through all levels of your marketing funnel, and be able to show outcomes and revenue in one streamlined process. It would also eliminate duplication and double counting.

This means your whole organisation would be speaking in the same data language, rather than having myriad different systems and criteria. Each team would then be working from the same baselines and attribution fields, creating a far more effective pipeline and clearer revenue mapping.

It would be far easier to see which channels are being the most productive in generated qualified leads, and the absolute sources of completed transactions. Each customer journey would have a clear beginning and end, from first contact to transaction or disengagement.

This can all be particularly vital if your organisation is working across multiple marketing channels and running numerous campaigns at once.

Being able to drill down on what is and what isn’t working – and how much revenue that equates to - is a commercial imperative. Otherwise, marketing and sales spend can quickly get “out of control” and resources can be wasted on ineffectual activities.

To find your organisation’s single source of truth – and get your teams and business strategies tuned in to a single version of the truth – contact Ruler Analytics. Our systems close the loop between leads and revenue, putting your organisation in firm control of its own data.