95% of C-Level executives claim data to be a critical part of their business strategy. And in today’s digital world, data is undoubtedly a company’s valuable asset.
From associates to team leaders to C-Level Executives, everyone within an organization uses data for different purposes, including:
- Finding new customers
- Increasing brand awareness
- Improving customer service
- Revamping and refining business operations
- Creating new revenue streams
- Making better strategic decisions
- And more!
You can always collect petabytes of data. But the big challenge isn’t data collection. Instead, 50% of businesses have reported that they struggle with their CRM data management and maintaining high standards of data quality.
Poor data quality can often lead to:
- Less Productivity & Growth
- Expensive & Ineffective Business Processes
- Poor Decision Making
- Redundancy
- Poor Customer Relationships
We’ve seen businesses invest countless hours, resources, and dollars to implement a CRM system. Despite that, they struggle with being able to harness the full force of their CRM investment.
66% of a sales representative’s working hours are spent on administrative activities like:
- Downtime
- Researching prospects
- Internal meetings/training
- Manually entering sales/customer information
- Gaining approvals and generating quotes
This means that your sales representatives are able to spend only 34% of their working hours building stronger relationships and closing deals.
That’s insane.
This blog post lists out the five CRM data management tips that’ll help you improve your data quality.
But before that, let’s look at what CRM data quality actually is.
What is CRM Data Quality?
When people talk about data quality, most of the time, they mean data integrity or data accuracy.
But it’s so much more than that.
The main goal is to ensure that the data in your CRM is highly valuable.
If you are going through the hassle of adding data into your CRM, then you need to make sure that the data you get in return is valuable. Also, it’s equally important to ensure that you are able to get your hands on this data at the right time without facing any system issues.
Poor quality data will result in poor analysis. This will, in turn, result in a bad process. People within your organization will face a hard time painting a clear picture of what’s to come and what they’ve done.
Your CRM data should be:
- Accurate
- Complete
- Uniform
- Unique
- Timeless
- Secure
Now, to make sure that the data in your CRM follow these guidelines, let’s look at the five top CRM Data Management tips.
5 CRM Data Management Tips Businesses Should Consider to Improve their Data Quality
Our team at OBT Creative personally implement these CRM best practices:
- Familiarize Yourself with the End-User Needs
- Automate Time-Consuming Data Entry Tasks
- Deal with Data Duplication
- Identify the Most Important Fields
- Prioritize CRM System Training
Let’s look at each of these points one by one.
Familiarize Yourself with the End-User Needs
An average user spends nearly 5.5 hours every single week on CRM data management. That’s about 5.5 hours of logging activities and entering data in the CRM.
But what if your employees could spend this time managing customer relationships and closing deals?
And that’s not all.
Professionals like accountants or lawyers that charge on a per-hour basis are always looking forward to maximizing the client-facing billable hours.
So, if you are not focusing on your CRM data management, you’re probably losing thousands of dollars already.
The solution here is to build your CRM such that it caters to different professionals’ unique preferences.
For instance, you should ensure that your lawyers don’t come across screens that don’t matter to them. Otherwise, they won’t be hesitant sending thousands of dollars of invoices your way.
Automate time-consuming activities like creating new accounts and contacts for your sales representatives. Make sure that the CRM works perfectly on their smartphones, as they’ll be on the road most of the time.
In short:
- Make sure that your CRM is user-friendly.
- Make sure that the end-users can easily access it on their smartphones.
- CRM system should save and load quickly. Most importantly, it shouldn’t crash, no matter whether your internet connection goes down or your train goes through a tunnel.
Automate Time-Consuming Data Entry
Like we discussed already, your sales representatives are spending too much of their valuable time on administrative activities. So, if you’re planning to or already have deployed a CRM system, consider automating time-consuming data entry tasks. This will help you drive cleaner and accurate information into your CRM system.
Automation will not just eliminate time-consuming data-entry tasks. But it’ll also help you fill in the missing information. This will help you make sure that the data is complete. On top of this, you can also keep your contacts and accounts up to date.
Deal with Data Duplication
You can’t talk about CRM data management if you don’t mention data duplication.
Duplicate data will not just make it hard for everyone to traverse records. But, at the same time, it’ll even have a negative impact on forecasting and insights.
Your CRM software will never return good results if you don’t deal with duplicate data.
Schedule frequent data cleaning routines. This will allow you to eliminate duplicate records.
Apart from this, look up any existing records while adding new ones.
You may even train your CRM to perform the task. Your CRM software will automatically look for any existing similar records.
This will require more processing power. But it’ll save you the hassle of eliminating duplicate records at a later stage.
On top of this, you need to also audit your existing CRM data to avoid:
- Inconsistency
- Incorrectly Formatted Data
- General Low-Quality Customer Data
- Invalid Entries
- Missing Data
Identify the Most Important Fields
If you have recently deployed a CRM within your organization, you’ll be shocked to know how error-field your CRM database is. As a result, CRM data management may get overwhelming and tedious.
And you may find it to be so overwhelming that you may end up not dealing with it altogether.
That’s because fixing all of those errors and inconsistencies is time-consuming.
But that’s not the right approach.
You don’t need to focus on every single data field. You can break down the cleanup task into chunks.
And the first step is to identify the most important fields. These are the fields that matter the most to your sales and marketing operations.
These fields include names, addresses, phone numbers, emails. In short, these are the ones that will help you level up your personalization efforts.
Some other important fields may include:
- Lead Scoring
- Social Profile
- Personality Traits
- And more!
Basically, it depends on your business model.
Don’t target multiple fields all at once. Instead, take one step at a time.
Alongside this, you need to make sure that you have the right data collection and validation processes in place. This will help you ensure that the new data entering into the system is standardized and cleansed.
Taking this one-step approach will help you avoid overwhelming different teams within your organization.
Prioritize CRM System Training
Your team may not be using all the features of the CRM. In fact, they may not even be aware of most of them.
The biggest mistake most organizations make is not scheduling regular knowledge-training sessions on CRM data management.
These sessions will help the end-users understand:
- Features of the CRM system
- How efficient they can be
- Best Practices
- How the CRM systems can make their lives a whole lot easier
- The reason behind you purchased a certain CRM system
- Feature updates and more
Build training programs that offer prizes and rewards upon completion. This will increase engagement and motivation. Gamify the training to create an engaging learning environment. Create scorecards and dashboards that list out the “leaders” in CRM adoption. This will result in healthy competition.
If your employees aren’t aware of how the CRM system can make their lives easier, they probably will prefer sticking with those old-school tools like spreadsheets.
They will consider the CRM system to be just another useless tech stack.
So, to boost user adoption, it’s critical to prioritize CRM system training.
Why is HubSpot the Best CRM in the Market?
In today’s digital era, businesses can’t afford to miss out on a CRM. After all, it’ll help them build a strong foundation for their business.
But, with the market flooded with so many CRMs, choosing the right CRM for your business may get confusing.
And the reason why we claim HubSpot to be the best CRM in the market isn’t that we are biased. Yes, we are offer premier HubSpot customization services.
But, the reason behind our offering is that we believe in the true potential of the HubSpot CRM.
From logging emails to managing your data, HubSpot CRM will deal with every little detail automatically. And the best part is that you won’t find it hard to access your data. But that’s not the case with other CRMs. We have found other CRMs to be extremely complicated to use. But at the same time, HubSpot is easy to use.
Their outstanding pipeline management tool will allow you to keep a track of your deals. On top of this, it allows you to find and focus on the warmest leads in your contact list. Their pre-built email templates will help you personalize your marketing efforts at each step of the buyers’ journey.
HubSpot CRM has incredible potential.
And our experts at OBT Creative believe that the platform can ace marketing efforts when used right.
Improve Your CRM Data Quality with OBT Creative!
These days, a CRM system has become a company’s vital asset. When used right, it’ll help you effectively nurture leads, build long-lasting relationships, and close deals.
But, while using CRM, you need to focus on the quality of data.
Poor quality data will undoubtedly ruin your sales processes and marketing efforts.
Whereas high-standard data will achieve your goals and also make informed business decisions.
Irrespective of the CRM you use, always make data cleanup your top-most priority.
And that’s the secret to unlocking the unbelievable potential of CRMs.
At OBT Creative, we offer world-class HubSpot customization services. Alongside this, we help businesses eliminate their poor-quality data with our top-notch CRM data management services.
And to further boost your automation efforts, don’t forget to read our “5 World-Class Marketing Automation Software to Sharpen Your Marketing Tech Stack” blog post.
So, what are you waiting for?
