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CRM Data Cleaning

CRM data cleaning requires some hard work but it’s important to avoid the nightmare of incomplete, messy, or inaccurate information. According to Zoominfo, between 10-25% of contacts in a B2B database contain errors. Your CRM is a tool to manage and keep your contacts. For it to be successful you need to regularly update the data so it’s accurate and fresh. The best solution is to use your CRM software to clean out any outdated or inaccurate contact info. The sales and marketing departments are always working together to make sure the data in their respective CRM systems is being used effectively.

What Is Data Cleaning?

When removing imprecise or corrupt information from a database, Data cleaning is performed.One such set of data, when discussing sales and marketing, would typically be stored in a CRM system as customer or prospect information. It can be difficult to track your sales when you’re not using a regular CRM data cleansing strategy. This leaves a lot of potential sales opportunities unseen that would otherwise be noticed, especially if the data you’re tracking is either unreliable or outdated. If your sales cycles lengthen, you can be assured there are problems with your existing processes. Inefficient or missing processes will make reaching out to prospects difficult and useless, so it’s best to find healthy CRM data and use the most up-to-date opportunities.

Why Do You Need To Clean Up Your CRM Data?

Companies are shifting their focus to CRM data cleaning for two reasons: when they migrate from one CRM system to another, or when they first implement a CRM. Data can be automatically migrated in the first case. If you have a lot of records to move, custom-designed migrations are available to discuss. We can perform a wide variety of CRM data cleansing and CRM Data cleaning tasks, including de-duplicating copies of records for your benefit. All companies using a CRM should conduct a CRM data cleaning process regularly. Use an application that provides CRM data cleansing to allow for automated, fast and accurate data input.

Steps to Perform CRM Data Cleaning – CRM Data Cleansing

1. Analyze Your Data Before Cleaning Up

To get started, you need to check the state of your data and identify what you’ll want to keep. If it’s missing or outdated, address it before moving on to the next steps. Duplicates will also be addressed by this step, so take care of that one first. The data is caused by human error, so that’s something we’ll look into after this point. It’s important to remove hard bounced or unsubscribed contacts and filter those who have not been engaging with your site.

2. Clean Up Your Data

Data errors come in many different forms. Not only can data be erased, it can also get filtered, duplicated, and fudged when it’s not necessary. Let’s take a look at three examples: deleting contacts, filtering contacts, and duplicating data.

Remove Contacts

If contacts have already been removed, you can use this feature to remove them from your database.

Find and Remove Duplicates

Duplicate-removal is perhaps the most significant task. This can be accomplished by cleaning out any duplicate data beforehand and then avoiding it in your CRM going forward.  Can you imagine how long it would take to identify, manage, and merge these duplicates manually? For the same company, your data could contain two different entries but each entry has factual errors in their data. This can be incredibly time-consuming. The best solution is a duplicate detection program.

Filter Contacts

Dates on marketing emails such as the last open date, a recent conversion date, or a replied-to date are indicators of how much your contact are engaging with your communications. You can filter contacts based on the date they have been engaged with most recently, and if they haven’t had any recent commitments, you can remove them in bulk by using the bulk workflows removed campaign.

3. Standardize Data

Human error can often lead to incorrect data that negatively affects businesses. If you want to keep your data organized and consistent, the solution may be data standardization, or creating a regulated, organized, and consistent environment in which to enter your company’s customer data into its CRM system. One way to standardize this is by setting custom fields that will appear when contacts or companies are created manually. This may help create consistent data when entering new information into your CRM. Additionally, you can also use custom fields inserted into your forms to extend valuable information for those who initiate contact through submissions. We understand that not everyone is successful at integrating synced data, which can lead to inconsistencies. To ensure your data is running smoothly, you may need to create a list of contacts for any key fields for which contact may no longer have value.

4. Filling In Missing Data

There are multiple data markers that you can use to fill in missing details within your CRM. For example, if only 100% of emails for a particular company has the Firstname.Lastname@domain.com email format, then you can probably fill in those missing emails with confidence for other contacts, You could also fill in missing websites by using a data marker that says “Website” or other website type-based information if necessary.

5. Proceed With Data Validation

Ensuring data validity is a must. Without it, you’re left with useless information. One way to ensure data validity is through validation of rules and constraints. This ensures that your system has clean and accurate data that can be useful for your team!

6. Set Up Ground Rules

In order to keep your data clean and healthy, one way to do it is through restricting information according to separate policies. For example, you can set up a CRM policy that says only people with a title of “sales rep” can have access to certain types of data. CRM Data cleaning is not about deliberately removing data in order to make space for new data. It’s about finding ways to preserve and optimize the reliability of a data set without necessarily having to remove data. CRM Data cleansing is the process of verifying, validating, and organizing information so that it can be used effectively.

7. Use An Integrated Platform

If you have to conduct data analysis, the results need to be stored in a place other than your CRM. This is typically done on a spreadsheet or in an email message. The trick is to keep everything together and reevaluate it so that it’s useful across all departments, like marketing and sales. If you have a robust and integrated technology suite, then whenever a lead or customer talks to your team it records data that’s stored in single place. Whether it’s a phone call or an email, all the contact data is synchronized in one place and can be accessed and analyzed across the board. In light of the business-to-consumer (B2C) retail trend, understanding and collecting information about your customers is crucial to maximizing revenue and closing leads.

CRM data needs to be made consistent and comprehensive. To make this happen, it’s important that you define what the data should be, think about the compilation process and review process, enrich the data with insights from outside sources as needed, and eliminate anything that is redundant in your database. If you are looking for CRM data cleaning or CRM data cleansing then drop us an email at info@datacleaningservices.com.