CRM Data Management: Six Best Practices to Improve Data Quality

Not satisfied with your CRM data-quality? Check out these data improving practices to enhance your CRM data management and quality.

For both short and long-term growth, CRM data management is extremely crucial to ensure your company maintains optimal success. With an adequate CRM software platform, marketing and sales teams are backed with necessary customer data to further increase efficiency.

However, lost opportunities due to ineffective CRM data management may just be right around the corner and it can result in a devastating financial loss for companies.

IBM Big Data and Analytics Hub reveals how bad data can cost US businesses as much as $ 3.1 trillion in a year. This means, the success rate of organizations essentially depends on a continuous flow of smarter and innovative data-driven decisions.

If you want your business to last, you’ll definitely need reliable strategies to move forward. Having poor data impacts your business in terms of ROI. Hopefully, these 6 practices for improving B2B data quality can help manage your CRM data and make it investment-worthy.

1. Outline Your Business Plan/Goal

There are numerous things you’re able to plan out with data but before diving right into it, it’s essential to first outline your goals. This will help direct data management processes to keep you from piling up irrelevant data.

Furthermore, planning out how to utilize your data collection helps keep the company’s data management software from overcrowding and disorganized. Some business goals include:

• Creating/improving automation & processes
• Improving decision-making
• Identifying customer purchase patterns/habits
• Audience targeting/creating buyer profile

A lot of companies continue to store an excessive amount of useless data. This could often equal bad data and for B2B businesses, bad data would eventually breed bad leads. Hence, by storing only relevant and reliable data, you’re able to keep the data management software much more manageable.

2. Keep Those Existing Data Clean and Updated

An efficient start in implementing appropriate CRM data management is cleaning out the existing data.

There are numerous processes to utilize when cleaning your existing data, such as:

• Data filtering – This helps in pinpointing records with important missing data. You can filter out the records for any blank spaces such as a contact number or an email address.
• Running exception reports – Once you get on with data cleaning, make sure to run a monthly exception report. This will also help in uncovering records with incomplete or missing data.
• Utilize bulk editing – By editing records in bulk, it will help save up time, especially during those instances where data is cleaned manually.
• Merging or deleting duplicates –When you determine any occurrence of duplicate records, start filtering those according to their record owner and appoint the right person with the task to either delete the duplicate or merge it.

3. Establish a Mobile-Friendly CRM

A huge problem often faced by companies is increasing user adoption for their CRMs. So, what’s the key to all of this? It is, of course, observing your CRM from where the user stands.

The inability to add & update data in an instant can be extremely problematic. This causes increased occurrences of incomplete data along with losing valuable time in the office as a result of moving back and forth into your CRM via a desktop.

EY Executive Director, Randy Batson states, “Take a glimpse at your CRM from the perspective of the salesperson. Examine how they proceed with managing daily business activities and what is required of them to be successful.”

Keep in mind that when your company starts utilizing/adopting a mobile-friendly CRM, the employee count of using such a platform increases, leading to more accuracy in data management.

4. Get Your Data Automated as Much as You Can

Automating those data that enter your CRM platform goes beyond saving valuable time for your company (especially for sales reps) and it can effectively increase your company’s probability of managing clean & complete system data.

Today, numerous leading CRM platforms include built-in automation capabilities. This is because CRM data automation can immensely improve your data by:

• Reducing instances of inaccurate, missing, and/or duplicate data
• Ensuring updated data any time

By reducing the amount of time utilized by your teams in manually operating administrative processes such as CRM data entry, it helps ensure employees are managing their time where it matters the most – scoring new prospects & potential customers, which is followed by selling to the prospects.

5. Don’t go Overboard and Keep Data Collection Relevant 

Yes, data is important, however, be extremely cautious with the amount of user input when creating new accounts, contacts, and opportunities as excess data entry is harmful. So, what should you do? Learn to prioritize and separate by determining when and what is required in your CRM.

Enable CRM users to easily create contacts by asking only the required information to effectively manage your customer relationship – just like that, once the contact is created, you can revisit and add more input to increase its quality.

For instance, after allowing users to create contact with the required standard fields, you can utilize data enrichment tools (such as Introhive) to detect other required relevant data. Introhive can also detect data changes which help provide users with an up-to-date CRM.

6. Keep it Secure

With your data cleaned up, updated, and optimized, the remaining puzzle piece is asking whether the information is secure or not. CRM security serves to be something that ensures the right audience with the right access & privileges from within your database.

As much as certain users may hate hearing this, the general rule associated here is giving each user the right amount of access to perform their job and nothing beyond that as it can help ensure better security.

When users are provided with too much access along with increased privileges, it enables a sort of free-for-all database creation. On another note, too little access can make it difficult for people to perform their jobs – so balance it out properly!

Final Thoughts

For a company, CRM data is extremely valuable, however, companies should properly utilize their time to enhance and augment its quality. In the end, effective and efficient CRM data management is exactly what sets apart profitable opportunities falling behind and lucrative stable customer relationships.

We hope by utilizing the above data quality practices, businesses can ensure their marketing, sales & management teams are secured with valuable information required to optimize sales processes and perform them in an efficient manner.