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Talend Data Preparation: Easily Access, Cleanse and Prepare Your CRM Data

You just returned from a week in Vegas staffing another industry tradeshow. You’re exhausted, completely backlogged on email and other projects, and you have boatloads of new leads that need to be validated and entered into your CRM system. Staring at that gigantic excel spreadsheet of names, you know it’s going to take you all day to process the contact data.

Manually entering and cleansing your data is like watching paint dry—mind-numbingly boring and an enormous time killer. It’s right up there with balancing your checkbook, doing dishes and cleaning out the garage.

However, clean data is a critical part of the marketing and sales process. The alternative is garbage-in = garbage-out. Importing and distributing unprepared data can lead to frustrating results and wasted time and money. Well, what if there was a ridiculously easy tool that reduced the time it took to clean and format your data from hours to minutes?

Thankfully the brilliant data minds at Talend feel your pain and have responded with a new solution called Talend Data Preparation. This new, free desktop application enables you to evaluate, cleanse and combine data from different sources in minutes with intuitive, guided tools that walk you through the process. It’s like taking a walk in the park…

That’s right, you read it here first kids! So start planning that afternoon basketball game or manicure/pedicure because you’re about to get HOURS back in your day. Ok, maybe I’m being a tad too optimistic on that front, but in all seriousness, Talend Data Preparation, allows you to stop spending valuable time cleaning and crunching data and focus your efforts on more strategic tasks like analyzing the ROI of the event overall and be able to share that insight back with your team (earning you major brownie points—Bonus!!)

Here’s a look at how Talend Data Preparation can make your job easier. First, let’s consider some of the steps you take when readying data for analysis in order to determine if that recent tradeshow had significant ROI. Starting off, your messy data may look a little something like this:

talend spreadsheet

Now you have to check the data for accuracy; ensure the values used are valid—i.e. Mr. vs. Mrs. or Ms.; ensure the information is complete in all fields; eliminate duplicate entries; transform and standardize the data; load the data into your Marketing Automation of CRM system and finally develop and document a database structure that integrates the various measures.

Are you tired yet? I am…and my eyes are glazing over from looking at this same spreadsheet for the past three hours….

Introducing Talend Data Preparation

Now, with Talend Data Preparation, you can access, cleanse and prepare data in a simple, intuitive way. First, when you enter the tool, it prompts you with a pop-up guide to import your Excel file or other types of data sources. Then you select that same spreadsheet and in just a few clicks you can cleanse, standardize, complete fields and filter the data by region, job title, etc. in order to gain better insight into the quality of your new leads. Your once messy spreadsheet now looks like this:

Talend Screenshot

Now you can easily import the cleansed data into Tableau in order to make the next event perform even better. Additionally, as you’ve been selecting and cleaning up various fields in your spreadsheet, Talend Data Preparation has been saving a record of those selections. The choices you make then constitute a ‘recipe’ that you can keep on file for future reference to avoid rework. So the first time you work with a dataset, you save time. But when the data is refreshed (i.e. at next year’s show), you not only reduce time, but you virtually eliminate the work needed entirely! (Now you definitely have some free time in your day for at least a coffee break or walk through the park during lunch).

It’s Not Just for Marketers

Talend Data Preparation is also perfectly suited for human resource and benefits administrators, business and financial analysts, or any role that spends a bunch of time working with data or ripping their hair out over spreadsheets. So whether you’re cleansing tradeshow leads, calculating the upside of a potential acquisition, analyzing transactions or sizing up the best dental, vision, life insurance and flexible spending plans for your company—now access to insight is just a click away!

You’re bright and good at what you do—so why be spending more time wrangling data vs. sharing your insights with your team? So now, really the only question you should be asking yourself is: where can I get it?!!!

Download your free version of Talend Data Preparation Today!

Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is CMO of OpenINSIGHTS and the founder of the Martech Zone. Douglas has helped dozens of successful MarTech startups, has assisted in the due diligence of over $5 bil in Martech acquisitions and investments, and continues to assist companies in implementing and automating their sales and marketing strategies. Douglas is an internationally recognized digital transformation and MarTech expert and speaker. Douglas is also a published author of a Dummie's guide and a business leadership book.

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