Clean up your CRM data for better optimisation

Abe Dearmer

Mar 11, 2020

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6 min read

CRM

In this article, you will learn about the importance of regularly cleaning and maintaining your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. A clean CRM ensures accurate and complete data, avoids duplicates, removes dead deals, and establishes rules for data entry. Following these tips will help you optimize your CRM's capabilities and maximize the effectiveness of your sales efforts.

Key Takeaways:

• Comb through your data regularly to identify and correct any errors or missing information. Encourage sales representatives to take turns inspecting the database and rectifying unfinished entries, bounced email addresses, missing names, and inaccurately valued deals.
• Check for duplicate entries in your CRM database to avoid confusion and ensure the accuracy of information. During the migration process or when importing data, use filters to prevent the addition of leads already present in the database.
• Complete missing information promptly to avoid missed opportunities. Encourage sales reps to input information into the CRM as they receive it to prevent it from being misplaced or forgotten.
• Remove dead deals from your CRM system to maintain a clean and relevant database. Look for signs such as unrealistic expectations, delayed responses, vague closing plans, and incompatible budgets to identify dead leads and remove them.
• Establish rules for your CRM database to ensure consistent and accurate data entry. Utilize automation features to enforce rules such as disallowing special characters in names, accepting only numeric phone numbers, and verifying email domains.
• Regularly cleaning and maintaining your CRM system may seem mundane, but it is essential for effectively utilizing your data and maximizing the benefits of your CRM. Once you recognize its importance, you will reap the rewards of a well-maintained database.

When you first implement a Customer Relationship Management system in your company, everything is new and pristine. But over time as you add more and more customers to the database you may find the CRM is left with incomplete data, unfinished deals, duplicate entries, and other errors that can be remedied with a simple and routine cleanup.

Cleaning your Customer Relationship Management system is important to ensure you are using it to its optimal potential. Your CRM software can work only as well as the data you feed into it, which is why routinely cleaning it becomes the need of the hour. Unfortunately, most sales reps don't see things that way and your CRM keeps getting clogged with unwanted data that needs to be rectified.

Here are some quick tips to help you clean out your Customer Relationship Management system to make sure you are making full use of its capabilities. These tips are simple enough but they only work when you use them regularly!

Table of Contents

• Comb Through the Data
• Check for Duplicates
• Complete What is Missing
• Remove any Dead Deals
• Create Rules for Your Database

Comb through the data

Data is the bread and butter of sales - without leads and their information how will you make sales? So it only makes sense to keep the data in your system in mint condition without any errors. Run a check through your whole data and find out what's missing or incorrect. Doing this on a weekly or monthly basis can help you run a smooth sales machine all year round and take advantage of the CRM's features.

Train your sales representatives to understand the importance of cleaning up data and create a system where they all take turns inspecting the database. They should check for and rectify unfinished entries, bounced email addresses, missing names, and wrongly valued deals.

Check for duplicates

Duplicate entries can create a lot of confusion for your sales teams and can cause unnecessary problems with deals. You must check for and remove duplicate and redundant entries from your database to make sure you've got all the right information.

This can be rectified from the start of the CRM migration process. There is an option to add a filter at the start of the data migration process that avoids adding a lead's information that is already present in the database. When importing your data from a CSV file, you also get the option to avoid importing entries that are already present.

Complete what is missing

Nothing is worse than missing information right when you need it. Many times when entering the information, sales reps are in such as hurry that they don't complete the entries or miss out on important information that gets left out written on notepads and sticky notes somewhere in a drawer or file cabinet.

The best way to avoid this from happening is by putting the information into the database as and when they get it so they don't forget or misplace it. Remembering or finding it later may prove difficult and can lead to a missed business opportunity.

Remove any dead deals

Some sales representatives may want to hold on to deals that are past their time and are dead just because they put in so much effort into nurturing them in the hopes that they still may work out. But that seldom happens and it is important to recognize when a deal has gone dead and you should move on from it completely, including removing it from your Customer Relationship Management system.

There are a few points that can help you recognize a cold or dead lead to take the step and remove them from your database.

• When the prospect expects many more features than you offer and aren't a part of your product's capabilities.

• When they take too long to get back to your calls and emails.

• When they are being vague about closing the deal and keep pushing it back.

• When they don't have the budget to match and start to decrease the price.

Create rules for your database

Customer Relationship Management software provides various ways to enter and take in data that you can import from various sources. To ensure that the data is finding its right place, you can create automated rules that allow correct and complete entries, that too without sales reps having to spend time on doing so!

Set up automated tasks and rules that ensure all the data coming in is stored in a clean and systematic manner. Some examples of helpful rules include -

• Name field can't contain any special or numeric characters.

• Only numerics in the phone number field can sometimes work.

• Verify if the email id comes from a working and valid domain.

Making sure that your Customer Relationship Management system is kept clean and maintained may seem boring and mundane, but doing so regularly can be the most effective way of using your collected data. Once you realize how important it is to clean up the database, there's no looking back!

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