If your company uses a CRM, it can make a huge difference to your operations, sales, and wider business decisions. CRMs that offer additional features can help with revenue forecasting, marketing, and even automating workflows.
But there’s a catch. It doesn’t matter if you choose an expensive CRM system packed with flashy features, if it’s not set up to match your processes, the technology won’t be worthwhile. Ultimately, your CRM is only as good as the data you put in it.
That’s exactly why it’s important to maintain the cleanliness of the data in your CRM. We’ll look at what that means, the consequences of poor data hygiene, and how you can maintain a clean CRM.
What is a clean CRM?
Data hygiene refers to the practices and processes that ensure your CRM is kept clean, accurate, and up-to-date. What does ‘clean’ mean in this context? Clean CRM data is:
- Correct: The information stored correctly matches the field it’s entered into. Populating a field for ‘Last contacted’ with the contact’s date of birth would be an example of incorrect data
- Accurate: The value remains up-to-date and is accurately filled out
- Uncorrupted: This may happen when data is lost due to a system malfunction, or human error when added to the system
- Correctly formatted: If you work with international customers and suppliers, they may use different formats such as addresses or dates. This may mean sending incorrect birthday promotions or invoices. Depending on your business, there may be many other unique fields that need to be formatted in a specific way.
- Complete: Phone numbers, post and email addresses are great examples of data that is susceptible to being incomplete in your system. Incomplete values for these fields cause delays in outreach and could be a blocker to sales
- Not duplicated: When you have numerous records for the same person or organization, the lead may be worked by multiple people. It’s an inefficient use of time, causes internal and external complications, and can quickly irritate the person on the receiving end. It also uses up unnecessary space in your CRM which could cost you more.
Why do I need to maintain my CRM hygiene?
Whether it’s you utilizing your CRM or a whole team of people, data points can easily be corrupted, grow outdated, or simply input incorrectly. The harm comes the next time someone accesses that record, or when someone filters your larger data set.
Let’s look at some example errors and the challenges they pose to your business.
The consequences of poor CRM data maintenance
Damage to your brand reputation hurts sales
Imagine you’re a sales rep and you cold-call a lead in your CRM. The lead tells you that they’re not interested in your product or service and the call ends. Whether it’s simple forgetfulness or poor organizational skills, you don’t record the lead’s disinterest. The contact record is then susceptible to filtering and then added to marketing lists.
This causes harm in two ways. The unhappy recipient could flag your marketing emails as spam, impacting your entire company domain’s ability to send emails from your sales and marketing teams.
What’s more, people who feel pestered by emails visit review websites to leave poor ratings for your company citing unsolicited emails and disrespectfully contacting you against your wishes, ultimately damaging your brand’s reputation.
Missed sales opportunities
With huge volumes of contact records in your CRM system, the most efficient way to work your leads is usually by narrowing your dataset using filters like ‘Last contacted’, ‘Job title’, and ‘Company size’. Let’s say you wanted to create a list of contacts who work in specific job roles for a new campaign.
If values for ‘Job title’ are incomplete, inaccurate, or empty for any of your records, they won’t be returned when your contacts are filtered. Instead, they may become missed sales opportunities.
Operational efficiency
CRMs can be used by teams across the business. So, when there’s information missing, it can affect sales reps, marketing managers, and customer support agents. If you’re setting up a small business and find yourself juggling various roles, your work becomes less efficient.
Let’s imagine you’re a sales rep working through an assigned list of contacts. It can take five to ten minutes per record to find relevant information like company size, phone number, or simply the relevant person to contact. And with hundreds or thousands of records in your CRM, that time quickly adds up.
You might make a sale and pass this new customer to your onboarding and support team. But when they begin setting up invoices, they don’t have the information they need, causing them to chase their colleagues or even the customer for the relevant information resulting in further delays and potentially harming your brand’s reputation.
Data compliance
Secure and well-maintained data helps you to meet regulations around data protection. Failure to look after your prospects’ and customer data can lead to non-compliance. Not only is this poor for your reputation, but it can land you in hot water, incurring fees and penalties.
Forecasting revenue
Clean data doesn’t just apply to your contact records, it applies to your sales pipelines too. Many CRM systems predict your forecasted revenue based on the open opportunities in your pipeline and how close they are to closing.
Perhaps you’ve talked with the key decision maker of a qualified lead who has asked to pause negotiations or has chosen an alternative provider altogether. If this isn’t reflected in your CRM, your monthly or annual forecasted revenue won’t be updated. Similarly, leaving stale opportunities in the pipeline can obscure your expected revenue.
Inaccurate and inefficient decision-making
Keeping an accurate understanding of how many leads, opportunities, and customers can impact your larger strategic decisions. And since CRMs offer a centralized system to house this data, an unclean dataset can significantly impact the choices you make.
For instance, believing you have more expected revenue can lead to wider business decisions like hiring further sales and customer support employees which may, instead, damage revenue.
How to keep a clean CRM database
With so many risks to your business, ‘dirty data’ quickly becomes a problem – but one you can correct and prevent.
If you’re thinking about using a CRM for the first time, or have just purchased one, it’s worth starting off on the right foot.
CRM expert, Julia Blake, offers a guide on how to implement a CRM in the right way for your business.
Here’s some of our data management best practices:
Periodic data cleansing activities
To avoid these risks, set reminders to clean your CRM. For instance, get rid of duplicate data, purge clutter and low-value records, and update outdated records.
It can be an overwhelming task to update your CRM data record-by-record. We recommend exporting your data and examining it, looking for records that have gone long periods without contact. Searching for fields containing errors or missing data is a quick way to update or delete records.
Depending on your provider, you can re-import your data without duplicating the records, bulk updating your CRM in the process. Similarly, you can bulk delete Opportunities and projects in Capsule to clean out the clutter in no time.
Training and documenting your internal processes
As your company grows, it can be difficult to ensure each new hire maintains your processes. Establish a standard way of data entry and updating your records following contact. Then, document the process to ensure consistency when you train new hires in your expanding organization.
Anyone who regularly updates your CRM takes on some level of responsibility. However, it’s best practice to assign clear ownership to one person or a small team who is responsible for the overall health and maintenance of the system. This ensures greater consistency through responsibility and ownership. Make sure to set expectations from the outset and keep your processes documented so everyone can do their bit to maintain a clean, organized CRM.
Identifying and standardizing critical information
Similarly, before your company grows, you should decide what information is key to carrying out the tasks of different departments of your organization. Once you’ve identified what needs to be recorded for future use, make this clear in employee onboarding and training.
Keeping good data hygiene: a summary
Good data hygiene is just as important to your operations as the CRM provider you choose. Ensure the data kept in your CRM is up-to-date, accurate, and complete for greater workplace efficiency, more sales, and a better understanding of your team’s productivity.
Maintaining CRM data hygiene requires regular cleansing and review, standardized work practices, and data management training to avoid harming your sales and reputation or even breaking data compliance laws.
Get started for free or try Capsule’s 14-day free trial of any plan to discover our powerful but straightforward CRM.
