We've Got Too Much Data: What a Pub Group's IT Director Just Admitted About Hospitality
Heartwood's IT director says hospitality has too much data. The same failure kills outbound: unverified volume isn't pipeline, it's a research job.
At MCA's Hostech conference last month, Rob Trippett, IT director at Heartwood Collection (the group behind Brasserie Blanc and Heartwood Inns), said something most operators think but rarely admit on stage:
"We've got too much data."
His point was about KPIs. Throw too many numbers at a team and they stop reading any of them. They get blinded by the volume of information they have to wade through, and the metrics that actually matter drown in the ones that don't. His fix was a less is more philosophy: give each team only the information that's important to them.
He was talking about running pubs. But if you sell into hospitality, this should sound familiar, because the exact same failure happens on your side of the table.
The sales version of the same problem
Most vendors selling into UK hospitality are not short of data. They have scraped lists, bought lists, exported lists, a CRM full of records nobody trusts, and three different tools that each claim to know who runs which site.
That is the "too many KPIs" problem wearing a different outfit. The cost isn't the data itself. It's what your reps do with it:
- They spend selling hours deciding which records to believe instead of calling people
- They burn dials on closed sites, wrong numbers, and businesses that were never a fit
- They stop trusting the list entirely, so even the good records get ignored
Volume feels like progress. A bigger list looks like a bigger pipeline. But an unverified record isn't an asset, it's a decision your rep now has to make before every call. Multiply that by 200 records a week and you've built a research job, not a sales job.
What "less is more" means for outbound
Trippett's fix translates cleanly. Teams perform when they get a small amount of information they can act on without second-guessing it:
Fewer records, all verified. A few hundred records you'd bet money on beat ten thousand you wouldn't. Hospitality data decays fast. Sites close, owners change, numbers go dead. Anything older than a few months is a coin flip.
Only the fields that change the call. Who owns it, how to reach them, what type of business it is, whether you're legally allowed to call them. Everything else is decoration.
Compliance baked in, not bolted on. TPS and CTPS screening isn't a nice to have in the UK. A list that hasn't been screened isn't a sales asset, it's a fine waiting to be issued. Removing that question from the rep's head is itself a form of "less."
The uncomfortable conclusion
Heartwood's answer wasn't more dashboards or a smarter analytics layer on top of the mess. It was curation. Someone deciding, upstream, what the team actually needs to see.
Outbound works the same way. The teams winning in hospitality right now aren't the ones with the biggest lists. They're the ones whose reps never have to ask "is this record real?" before picking up the phone.
If your data needs deciphering, it isn't intelligence yet. It's just volume.
Source: MCA / The Morning Advertiser, Hostech Conference coverage, June 2026.