Somewhere along the line I got on a mailing list as “Bread Shorr”. When I get a piece of mail so addressed, I throw it away unopened whether I’m interested or not.

Another time, we were doing a big proposal for a fine company named Burgess-Norton. One of the manufacturers we were considering sent us pricing, referring to our customer as “Burgers Norton.” Needless to say, we didn’t consider them much further: if they couldn’t get the company name right, what would happen if there was a real problem?

Misspelling a company or an individual’s name spells disaster. It is off-putting to the reader and suggests an inattention to detail that instills doubt about you in the client’s mind. This goes not only for business letters and proposals, but for emails, text messages, and other less formal types of business communication.

When entering new customer information into your ERP and/or CRM, try to use a client’s business card as the reference. You can usually count on it to be accurate. Business cards will also tell you the proper spelling and punctuation of the client’s title. If you don’t have a business card, at least look at the company’s Web site. The spelling and punctuation of a company name can be tricky, because it won’t always follow standard grammatical rules. Companies put an enormous amount of time and money into promoting their identity, so getting it right won’t score you any points, but getting it wrong could eject you from the game.

Re-check customer data for accuracy. No matter how careful your data entry process, mistakes happen. Plus, company names change frequently (think about telecom and banking), and the last thing you want to do is use an old name in your correspondence. You can use an outside service to cleanse large databases, which is useful for updating company names, addresses, and phone numbers. It might not help much for individual contact names, however.

Stress the importance of data integrity in your organization. Make everybody feel accurate information is everybody’s job. 100% accuracy is impossible for any database. Having employees pay attention is the best way to spell success.