Marketing engages with people (contacts), not just accounts. If those individual contacts aren't programmatically associated with open opportunities in your CRM, you sever the connection between marketing activities and revenue outcomes, making true impact measurement impossible.
Many leaders hire ops personnel to "clean up the mess." However, without a strategic mandate to fix the root data architecture, these hires often get stuck in a perpetual cycle of data cleanup, reinforcing the broken, legacy system they were brought in to solve.
Many leaders enter QBRs seeking praise for their team's activities. The crucial mindset shift is from seeking validation to taking responsibility for the business's health. This means having the courage to present uncomfortable truths revealed by data, even if it challenges the status quo.
The most critical action isn't technical; it's an act of vulnerability. Leaders must stop pretending and tell their CEO/CRO they lack the data architecture to be a responsible leader, framing it as a business-critical problem. This candor is the true catalyst for change.
The frantic scramble to assemble data for board meetings isn't a sign of poor planning. It's a clear indicator that your underlying data model is flawed, preventing a unified view of performance and forcing manual, last-minute efforts that destroy team productivity and leadership credibility.
Contrary to belief, data maturity doesn't always correlate with company size. Large firms ($500M+ ARR) can be worse off due to technical debt, legacy thinking, and management layers that make it harder to change the archaic data models they are hardwired to use.