Last Updated on August 18, 2023 by Rakesh Gupta

Are you sure that no revenue is leaking from your business? Most likely not, and you have reason to think so. Revenue leakage is a common business problem: 42% of companies leak revenue, according to MGI, and EY says companies lose 1% to 5% of realized EBITA to leakage each year.

In its simplest definition, revenue leakage is an unnoticed loss of revenue. However, from a broader view, any issue within your customer life cycle that prevents you from earning revenue counts as a revenue leak.

It’s a simple math equation: the more leaks you have, the bigger the impact on your revenue will be. Unless revenue leaks are fixed, your company will lose money, so understanding what causes leaks is critical

Why revenue leaks happen: The Role of Data Quality

Bad data is among the main reasons behind revenue leaks. According to Gartner, poor data quality costs organizations an average of $12.9M, and further research conducted by Salesforce suggests that an average business loses 30% of its annual revenue due to poor data quality.

When your Salesforce data isn’t complete and up-to-date, you can’t identify opportunities and can’t focus on the right leads. This would cause missed opportunities and unachieved revenue.

Relying on poor data prevents you from seeing the big picture of your pipeline and sales process. As a result, you make bad forecasts and wrong decisions that hurt your bottom line.

Automating activity capture: Is it the way to go?

Manual data entry is a labor-intensive and time-consuming task that sales reps hate. While handling many daily tasks, reps barely have time to enter data. And when they use this time to update Salesforce, the result is mostly unreliable data full of typos, duplicates, and missing values.

Automating activity capture offers an effective alternative to manual data entry. By collecting and saving 100% activity data across multiple customer touchpoints, activity capture solutions eliminate data entry errors and ensure accurate and always up-to-date data in Salesforce.

What’s more, having complete data helps you see the big picture. Seeing your pipeline health and understanding which deals are moving, stalled, or at risk enables you to identify the leaks before they happen.

Last but not least, automated activity capture improves efficiency by giving the time back to sales teams they spend on manual data entry. So, they can focus on selling and prevent revenue leakage due to lost sales.

Investing in an activity capture solution is the first step to fixing revenue leaks. However, not all activity capture solutions are the same, and some of them can come with serious handicaps which can cause additional leaks, let alone fixing them.

Common Activity Capture Issues

The main function of an activity capture solution is to make sure Salesforce data is accurate and complete. But if the data isn’t reportable, disappears in 6 to 25 months, and is totally lost when you decide to migrate, that’s a problem.

Your activity capture tool won’t be flexible enough if it doesn’t offer customizable sync options. For instance, you can’t pick which data to store or stop it from syncing to Outlook if it doesn’t meet the pre-determined criteria. With no control over data, you end up with irrelevant contacts, activities, and emails such as marketing e-newsletters or holiday greetings in Salesforce. Additionally, if there’s no bi-directional sync between calendars, Salesforce changes don’t get reflected in Outlook, causing scheduling issues.

Security is another issue related to activity capture. As data confidentiality remains a major concern, companies implement strict data security policies. They need to host all data-related software on-premises or on private cloud servers to meet standard privacy requirements. So, if an activity capture solution stores data on third-party servers, it’s a security risk.

Fighting Revenue Leaks with Admin Power

No matter how hard you try, you can’t fix revenue leaks if you don’t take care of activity capture issues. With their technical expertise, Salesforce admins can resolve these issues and unlock the power of data.

Since admins can wear many hats in their companies and work closely with departments like Sales, RevOps, and Sales Ops, they know a lot about different business functions. When they combine this experience with their technical know-how and problem-solving skills, they become indispensable players in the revenue leakage fight.

Additionally, when admins get involved in the decision-making process while adopting a new activity capture solution, they can avoid technical issues in advance. An admin can prevent future challenges that would hurt efficiency and productivity by ensuring an organization gets enhanced reporting, unlimited access to captured data, fully configurable sync features, and secure deployment options when choosing an activity capture solution.

Boost Data Quality to Stop Revenue Leaks

Revenue Grid improves data quality by ensuring complete and up-to-date data in Salesforce with automated activity capture. Its fully customizable sync features give you complete control over data. So, you can configure data capture to accommodate any workflow or work with any Salesforce custom object or field.

Conclusion

After taking the first step by having complete data in Salesforce, you can leverage revenue intelligence to identify and prevent revenue leakage. Revenue Grid’s advanced revenue intelligence features fight leaks by analyzing captured data with AI, implementing changes to sales processes with Revenue Signals, and measuring the effectiveness of those changes. To learn more about how you can plug leaks with a revenue intelligence tool that works, try Revenue Grid for free.

Author

Maria Gordienko is Head of Communications at Revenue Grid.

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