With staying remote becoming the new norm, sales teams across the world are trying to stay in touch with prospects and reassure customers. While implementing a remote working team structure and holding on to customers, ensure your CRM is not left on a back-burner with stale deals and missing data. In fact, 27% of business leaders aren’t sure how much of their data is inaccurate.
With your salespeople staying remote, there’s a chance that some duplicate entries are in the system. The information you need becomes useless due to errors in your data and slows down your sales process. This is why maintaining clean data in the CRM software is not only necessary while staying remote but should also be a routine process so that you do not ignore it for long.
This is a good time to clean data in your CRM and avoid incorrect decisions.
Here are some things you need to look out for to maintain clean data in the CRM:
- Disorganized Data
- Duplicates
- Incomplete information
- Dead deals
If you are wondering how to begin the data cleansing process in your CRM, then we have got this covered for you.
Clean Data 101: Tip 1 – Run a check:
Data in your CRM is the most valuable asset of your company. Without leads, you have no one to sell to. In this case, shouldn’t your data be in mint condition, on any given day?
Set up sanity checks on a monthly or weekly basis to identify any errors within the CRM database. Your salespeople can take responsibility on a round-robin basis to clean the database by checking entries, adding missing surnames, and correcting wrongly valued deals or bounced email addresses.
Clean Data 101: Tip 2 – Avoid duplicates:
The first step to avoid duplicates starts with your data migration process. When you put a filter at the start of your data migration process, then your salespeople can avoid adding leads that already exist in the CRM.
Duplicate entries cause confusion among the sales teams. Therefore, it is necessary to check frequently for redundant entries and eliminate them.
As a second step, when you import data from a CSV file, you can opt to skip import for all duplicate records. This will prevent the CRM from updating records that are already present in the CRM. You will also receive a summary email containing all the skipped records.
Some CRMs have powerful AI capabilities—for instance, Freddy, the AI robot within Freshsales CRM—for performing a deduplication function. This means every time a new lead is added, the CRM will automatically search your records and look for matches for the following fields:
- Last Name
- Name
- Company Name
- Email
- Work Number
- Mobile Number
Once it finds a similar lead or contact, it automatically merges data, saving your sales team a lot of time and effort.
Clean Data 101: Tip 3 – Fill out incomplete information
Salespeople are often in a hurry to add leads into the CRM and they tend to make errors. In their haste to qualify a lead and close deals, they fail to update the CRM with all the information they have at hand. Often, this information gets lost in sticky notes and spreadsheets.
A thumb rule for maintaining clean data in the CRM is to update all the information your salespeople have at hand as and when it flows in.
An easy way to let information about an interested lead flow into your system is through web forms. Webforms eliminate the risk of errors as using webforms does not require your salespeople to spend time on data entry. Any information that prospects fill up in your website can automatically flow into your CRM.
Of course, this may not always be a boon as there may be cases of bot attacks—resulting in junk data in the CRM. You can prevent this by setting up a reCAPTCHA security filter on your website that protects it from spam and abuse.
Some CRMs like Freshsales also offer domain exclusion to help you prune the list of emails that are received in your sales inbox, thereby refining the quality of leads generated.
Clean Data 101: Tip 4 – Remove dead deals
Since your salespeople have put in a lot of effort, they might hold on to rotten deals in the pipeline for months, in the hope that they will close in the future. As a sales manager, you should be able to predict when it is time to leave a cold lead on the table.
Here are some red flags to watch out for. A deal will never work when your contact:
- is vague about when they want to start or end the project
- expects a lot of features outside your product capabilities
- doesn’t have the budget and starts low-balling
- takes too long to get back with a response (this may vary for each industry)
Clean Data 101: Tip 5 – Create strong rules:
The key to a clean CRM is to have the right rules to get data into your CRM. If the CRM is not capturing the right data, ensure the rules are set in such a way that the data you need finds its way to you—for instance, by setting up automated emails and tasks.
CRM rule creation tips:
- The name field must not contain any numeric or special characters
- The contact number should strictly be numeric
- Check if the email entered comes from a valid domain. If you are a B2B enterprise, you can ask users to enter their corporate email addresses to get on your mailing list.
Implementing a regular CRM data cleansing process is tough and may be met with resistance initially. But once your salespeople realize the benefits of CRM database clean-up, then there is no looking back!
Thanks to Sharon Rose and Joseph Kenneth for some lovely inputs!
