5 Easy Steps to keeping your CRM clean
Imagine asking your sales team clean up your CRM data. You probably envision people running from a burning building, taking cover under their desks, or having a sudden case of phone signal loss. It doesn’t have to be that way.
There are steps you and your sales team can take every day to minimize the pain of data clean up. It’ll seem a bit more like sitting on the beach sipping a cocktail than a chore. OK, maybe that’s our day dream and it won’t be quite like that. But, it won’t be met with running and hiding either.
Here are some easy, every day things your sales team to do to make their lives easier, and make your scheduled clean up less stressful.
- Garbage in garbage out. Limit required fields. I’ve seen it time and time again, a CRM set up with all the fields you think may be helpful marked as mandatory. Think about when you are filling out a form online and you can’t go any further until you fill in all of the “starred” fields. You really want to win that snazzy new thing, but you don’t want them to have your home phone number. What do you do? You type in 555-555-5555. It makes that pretty little submit button clickable. Well this is what your sales team is doing by requiring they fill in fields they don’t have data for. They are making it up, and messing up your data. So make it easier for them. Only require the fields you really need for doing business.
- Standardize titles and abbreviations. Having a marketing background, one of my biggest frustrations was developing the perfect campaign, targeted to the perfect target persona, and then beating my head against my desk trying to create my campaign target list. I was continuously unable do a simple sort for title. Or, I’d have to go through and correct all of the “Inc” to “, Inc.”. Train your sales team to enter VP as Vice President if that is the direction you want to go. Better yet, give them a pick list with type-ahead. Save them data entry time, and standardize your data. It doesn’t matter which you choose just make sure your sales team knows the correct naming conventions and sticks with them.
- Do a Lookup before entering data. “Duplicate” is a dirty word in the CRM world. Duplicate records pose tons of issues that are more than just annoying. Having duplicate records can mess up your metrics from sales pipeline potential to marketing ROI. And worst of all it is really embarrassing when one of your top prospects gets 2 mail pieces from you and one says VP and the other says Manager because the marketing person cleaning up the target list (see #2) missed it. Now your prospect feels like you don’t know them at all and if you can’t keep track of his promotion, how can you be the best at what you do? A simple step to avoid this is to teach your sales team how to correctly search the database for a record before adding a new one. It isn’t always as simple as typing the company name in and if it doesn’t come back in your search you are good to go. Give some guidance on a few ways to search: company name, address, phone number, email address. A few extra search points will benefit the sales and marketing team in so many ways.
- Send keep in touch emails. Keep in touch emails are a great way to keep open communication channels with clients and prospects. They are also powerful for keeping your contact data up-to-date. A bounce back should be a clue that you need to reach out and update the data. And who knows, the information you are sending may strike up a new conversation and lead to expanding your sales and relationship. (Hint: Use act! and act! e-marketing, or a template, to send an e-mail campaign of personalized e-mails to each Contact.)
- Stay social. Your clients are on social media. You are on social media. Leverage that data! Today, professionals use LinkedIn as their online resume, networking and lead generation. To be successful at all of these things, your clients are constantly updating their LinkedIn profile. That Social Updates tab in act! that you avoid, that can help! Use that information to update your database and see when a contact gets a promotion or new position before they let you know. Connecting with your clients and prospects will also give you a leg up on what they are sharing and liking. These are great conversation starters. Just another way to stay in front of your contacts.
These tips are just a handful of the tricks we have up our sleeves. There are a lot more than five ways to keeping your database clean. Our years of database experience have taught us a lot of time saving pointers that we would love to share with you and your team. Drop us a line at support@3LeafCRM.com or call us at 410-472-5058 to discuss your database cleanliness!
