Every startup is looking for exponential growth.

The hockey-stick graph is the dream of every founder, which means it’s also the dream of every C-level, every operations manager, every data engineer, every marketing head…

The professional and financial futures of everyone at the company are linked to increasing growth levels.

But exponential growth isn’t just a business imperative. It’s a fundamental characteristic of the digital world, and the quantity of data available on the internet is no exception.

‍

Exponentially increasing data is a boon and a curse for operational teams.

Whether you’re specializing in product management, marketing and sales, growth, or revenue, you’re facing two opposing forces:

1. The data you need to grow more faster is out there 🥳
2. It’s harder and harder to sift through oceans upon oceans of data to find the quality, up-to-date information you need 😵‍💫

So: Have you been getting a sneaking feeling that your company’s data game isn’t delivering the results it should? 

Are you looking at your product-market fit and thinking that your growth numbers could be moving up more quickly?

Here are 5 signs that you’re right, indicating that data is becoming a problem at your company.

1. Your data is coming from more and more sources.

A growing company will quickly find itself using a growing number of tools.

Sales Navigator, Lemlist, Salesforce, Hubspot… After 10+ years of intense SaaS development focused on solving the pains of company building, the list goes on and on.

Mid-sized companies and large enterprises today often deal with dozens of tools related to data management, many of which emerged to handle increasing data loads.

But the more tools you use, the harder it is to aggregate and integrate your data.

The result? Irrelevant, jumbled data.

That leads directly to sales teams spending too much time trying to find and manage leads.

f the quality of those leads trends downward, your conversion rates will trend downward, too.

And to add insult to injury, you might then realize you’re paying a hefty monthly sum to access a bunch of tools that aren’t delivering the results you need.

2. Your data appears to be more and more outdated.

We’re in a world where people change jobs often (in the U.S., the average time spent in one job is now hovering around 4 years) and global economic trends are changing even faster (anyone want to talk about crop yields or port logistics or manufacturing geographies…?). 

That means having fresh, up-to-date data is difficult.

But it also means that if your data operation delivers the goods, you’re going to have a big competitive advantage.

Getting there means moving away from blackbox solutions, which provide little visibility on data integrity.

It means moving away from data platforms that don’t give you API access, which is the key to automating your processes and pulling fresh data when you need it.

It means moving away from anything that doesn’t leave you in control of your data processes.

3. You need to access more sources of web data.

Not so long ago, a business could grow by finding data via Facebook or LinkedIn and then sending it to your preferred CRM.

oday, though, the sources of data have multiplied and they’re used in many different sections of the company.

Importantly, lots of web data sources are most valuable when they’re working together.

This is one of the benefits of using Captain Data, since it lets you create custom workflows that fit your needs.

For example, you could get an initial set of data from LinkedIn, and then enrich that using Crunchbase and national business registries, before finding pertinent contact information and sending it all to your sales team.

Doing this by hand or by trying to code the waterfall yourself is a big hassle; Captain Data lets you automate your data easily.

4. Your experimentation process is slowing down.

Even after finding product-market fit, accelerating growth is usually a result of accelerating experimentation.

It’s all about refinement, pulling in more information about your targets and ICPs in order to find and convert more of them.

But if your data processes aren’t keeping up with your increasing data, your experiments are going to slow down.

Those waterfall enrichment workflows mentioned above are key: pulling primary data from X, Y and Z, enriching it with data from A and B, sending it all (in the right format) to tool C, filtering the relevant data into the hands of your individual team members… 

If each step isn’t properly constructed and optimized, it’s a big waste of time and resources, to say nothing of the costs of lost opportunities.

Plus, any experiment implies learning and making adjustments.

If your workflows need to be re-coded each time you want to change or add a step, you lose control of your experimentation pace.

You need to be able to modify your data processes quickly and independently.

5. You don’t have the internal resources to handle data maintenance.

At Captain Data, we’ve found that our clients’ tend to have similar issues:

• A large Ops team can require multiple full-time developers, but finding good developers on a reasonable budget isn’t that easy. The alternative is asking the IT department for more engineering time, but that can be hard to come by as well.
• Even when developer time is available, creating custom workflows takes time, to say nothing of changing them as new lessons come in. The result is a general lack of agility and independence within the Ops team.
• Most automation platforms don’t offer the sophisticated workflows that larger teams need.

‍

Any of these issues can cause giant headaches for an Operations Manager; when you’re facing them all every day as you stare at waves of increasing data, you’ve got the makings of a real nightmare.

The good news is that web data automation isn’t just a dream anymore.

Captain Data is here to build a reliable sales platform that scales with your company, consistently providing the quality data your teams need.

Using Captain Data can help you to:

• Generate 10x more leads in 10x less time, letting your sales team focus on selling instead of sourcing
• Convert opportunities with stronger buying intents and hyper-personalization driven by web signals
• Deliver the best ROI you can get, saving you thousands of dollars on development and maintenance

How do we know? Our customers tell us!

To talk with us about how Captain Data can help solve your data problems, just reach out for your free demo here.

‍