Your data is a goldmine: this is a fact. (We’ve actually written a blog about the importance of data!) We’re certain you have data stored in your CRM–but how often do you clean it? Do you even know how to do that?
If you don’t maintain your data, you should know that it’s costing you money: about $100 for every bad record. And you should know that CRM data organically decays at about 3-4 percent a month. Yikes!
Now that you’re motivated to do some cleaning in your CRM, let’s take a look at five tips that will help your data shine like new.
1. In Depth Analysis
First things first: you won’t know where to begin until you analyze the quality of your data. You’ll want to ask yourself how bad the data is, where the bad data is coming from, and how the data quality stands up against other customers of the CRM you use.
Once you have those answers, you’ll have created a dashboard of sorts that tells you how many leads you have, where they’re coming from, when they were created, and other relevant information! This dashboard can be used as a benchmark for future leads.
2. Clean Up Time
Time to roll up your sleeves and do the dirty work! When you clean up the data in your CRM, you want to focus on three tasks: removing duplicate data, completing missing data, and running data validation.
Removing duplicate data is fairly self-explanatory: sort your CRM by name and see who pops up twice. Then, remove the extra listing.
Completing missing data may require a little extra legwork; we suggest using LinkedIn or ZoomInfo to help fill in the blanks. The missing information may even be on the person’s company website.
Lastly, data validation is a routine check of your data against set validation rules; it ensures your CRM has clean, correct, and useful data. If a phone number or email address is bad, for example, scrap it! It’s not doing you any good sitting in the CRM, and this maintenance prevents your sales team from sending bad emails or making wasteful phone calls.
3. Double Check Your Data
Automation is your friend; use it when you can. Some third-party sources can serve as referential data points for detecting differences in your data and finding records that are no longer valid. It can even update the offending records automatically, improving lead conversion efforts.
4. Use Better Templates
The simplest way to avoid accumulating bad data is to ensure it never enters your CRM in the first place. One helpful way to accomplish this is by creating better CRM templates; make sure all the data you want to collect from prospects is required, and when it’s entered, double check the record’s spelling (and for any other signs of human input error).
Prospects should also be segmented and categorized in the CRM based on their stage in the sales cycle. Overall, CRM processes should be constantly innovated to ensure that stale data goes into the trash.
5. An Ounce of Prevention…
You’ve got it: it’s worth a pound of cure. Although data cleaning should be regularly done, be sure to incorporate a quarterly cleanse into your routine to ensure the most up-to-date data. Prevention starts with good templates, but it certainly doesn’t end there.
One trick to ensure good data is to create and enforce a set of guidelines that establishes a consistent and organization environment for entering data into your CRM. That way, you likely won’t have to do a huge clean up of data since the information entered will already meet your company’s standards.
Final Thoughts
A recent survey found that 41% of participants stated that inconsistent data was their biggest roadblock in maximizing their ROI. That said, good, clean data is an essential part of any business. If you don’t maintain your data, you’ll be looking at a host of unfortunate consequences, including lower ROI.
For more tips and tricks on cleaning data in your CRM, don’t hesitate to reach out to us!
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