The data in your CRM provides critical insight into your customers, leads, and sales. Having the ability to document your team’s communications with contacts, automate sales processes, and track leads through your pipeline is vital for implementing successful business strategies. Trying to accomplish those same goals without high-quality data may feel like working with one hand tied behind your back.
Ensuring the quality and accuracy of your CRM data is one of the most critical best practices for using your CRM system. Fortunately, you can ensure your CRM data is accurate by implementing a few helpful strategies.
Flawed CRM data isn’t just a headache—it can derail your operations, waste valuable time, and even cost sales. The more information about your customers, prospects, and leads gets entered into your CRM incorrectly or becomes duplicated, the more time you have to spend resolving issues when you’d rather be doing more important tasks—and the more likely you are to make decisions based on faulty information.
Maintaining accurate CRM is critical, and luckily your team can implement some best practices to make the process go more smoothly. Follow these steps to ensure your CRM data is always accurate and usable:
Data reviews look for outdated, incomplete, duplicate, or inaccurate data that could cause your team to make decisions without having all the facts. It’s essential to conduct regular data reviews to prevent dirty data and ensure you can trust what you see in your CRM.
Regular data review is much simpler if you and your team follow a few critical steps:
The second step in ensuring your CRM data is high-quality is cleaning it. Data cleaning is the process of going through your data and solving any obvious issues that you see. These issues might be duplicates, inaccuracies, or obsolete information.
Datasets often include these kinds of errors, whether due to poor data input practices or data becoming outdated. During data cleaning, you examine all the data in your CRM, find any problems, and correct them to ensure your data is usable.
You may also have heard of data scrubbing, a more in-depth version of data cleaning involving an exhaustive search of your data for errors. Think of data cleaning as a casual wash and data scrubbing as an intense cleansing. Data scrubbing could be a part of your yearly data cleaning process.
Understanding how to clean your CRM data before you begin the process is crucial. Follow these best practices for cleaning CRM data:
After reviewing and cleaning your CRM data, you may be in a hurry to get back to utilizing your data—but don’t rush the process! The final strategy for ensuring data quality and accuracy is data validation.
Data validation is the step after data cleaning that guarantees your data is accurate and ready for use in your CRM. Validating your data’s accuracy is the most crucial step for ensuring your team has accurate and updated data for decision-making.
Data validation verifies whether the data cleaning was successful and whether the information meets your company’s and industry’s standards. Essentially, data validation is the time to perform final checks before putting your data into use!
Here are a few best practices for validating your CRM data:
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Working with clean CRM data is a must if you want your team to have access to the most relevant, current, and helpful data. By reviewing, cleaning, and validating your data regularly, you can ensure that your team has all the information they need to optimize their sales and marketing efforts.
With Nutshell, ensuring your CRM data is accurate is simple. Our CRM system gives you access to useful data collection and analysis tools that help you make sure you’re dealing with the highest-quality data. See how you can accomplish more with your CRM by signing up for a free trial of Nutshell today or contacting our team to learn more!
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