Jason, the psychology is visibility. Marketers and Sales reps have a limited view and, thus, a limited understanding of the data available to them in CRM and marketing automation systems.

Although they might be able to extract just about anything that is in the back-end, they rely for the most part on canned reports or pre-set queries to draw the data that they tend to analyze often as disaggregated lists through spreadsheets. These dynamic extracts return data in various stages of decomposition.

First impressions matter and, often, what the eye first captures is what colors the rest of the batch.

Reps and marketers are not known for being statistically minded. They’re not interested in random sampling, distribution curves and two-tail analysis. They get a first taste of data; it tastes sour and they curse the whole barrel. Give them a chance to recommend a solution to it, and they will say ‘Dump it all and fill the wine skins with new wine!’

So, the key to data reuse and moderated data acquisition is to measure the quality of production data across multiple dimensions and track these metrics within a model that can easily demonstrate to the data users the true significance of those first impression concerns about quality.

Typically I use 4 dimensions to track data quality: 1) Timeliness, 2) Accuracy, 3) Completeness and 4) Consistency. Together they define Integrity, and an integral data set is a sweet libation to the lips of any user.