Its benefits are unbeatable for any B2B business: CRM software strengthens customer relationships, automates workflows, provides actionable data, improves collaboration, manages sales pipeline, and more.
But there’s a catch. A CRM will not boost your revenue by itself.
It depends on the CRM strategy you implement and what you do with the CRM data you obtain.
And there’s another catch. Around 30% of CRM data become outdated after 1 year. That’s why CRM data maintenance is critical.
In this article, you will learn everything you need about keeping your CRM data up-to-date, and the key maintenance procedures you should do regularly.
What is CRM Data Maintenance?
CRM data maintenance is the ongoing process of managing and updating the data within a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.
This includes ensuring that customer information is accurate, complete, and up-to-date, removing duplicates, correcting errors, and periodically verifying data integrity.
Effective CRM data maintenance ensures the reliability of the CRM system for informed decision-making and effective customer interaction.
Why is CRM data maintenance important?
To put it simply, CRM data maintenance is crucial because it ensures that the customer information within your CRM system is accurate, complete, and up-to-date.
This reliability in data helps you to achieve multiple broader goals, such as:
- Improve Customer Relations: Accurate data allows for personalized and effective communication with customers, enhancing their experience and satisfaction.
- Increase Sales Efficiency: Sales teams can rely on up-to-date information to focus their efforts on qualified leads, reducing wasted time and improving conversion rates.
- Enhance Marketing Campaigns: Clean and segmented data enable more targeted and successful marketing efforts, increasing ROI.
- Support Informed Decision-Making: Managers and business leaders can make better strategic decisions based on reliable, comprehensive data.
- Reduce Operational Costs: Maintaining clean data helps avoid errors and unnecessary processes, thus saving time and reducing costs associated with data correction and missed opportunities.
In essence, CRM data maintenance directly impacts the efficiency and effectiveness of your customer-related operations. This leads to better business outcomes.
5 key steps in CRM data maintenance
The sales operations manager at lemlist, streamlines revenue processes and drives daily growth with tech and workflow automation.
Lucas shared the most important procedures he takes to make sure his CRM data is up-to-date.
Lucas explained that CRM data decays quickly: “People switch companies and job roles. Around 30% of CRM data become outdated after 1 year.”
CRM data maintenance: 5-step framework
1 Step: Have a process to avoid duplicates during import.
“Use email or LinkedIn URL as a unique ID for contact. And domain and company LinkedIn URL for companies.”
He recommends formatting all domains in this format ‘{domain}.{tld}’.
2 Step: Do not hesitate to delete old data.
“If a lead has not been used for more than one year, and there algeria telemarketing list are no interactions with a salesperson, you can delete it from your CRM,” Lucas assured.
3 Step: Verify email addresses before outreach.
“If you are prospecting a list of CRM contacts,” Lucas explained, “make sure to verify their email before sending the sequence. You can do that natively using lemlist.”
4 Step: Create a report to make sure the sales team completes all the fields.
“Usually, sales teams have to fill in info about their prospects. Like the tool stack they are currently using, the pains they have, and so on.”
Lucas said that the best way to ensure all using gmail’s smtp to send emails – what you need to know fields are completed is to create a dashboard that displays records where data is not completed correctly.
“The manager can check it every week and ensure each rep adds the info,” he said.
5 Step: Automate processes.
According to Lucas, manual steps can bring errors.
“You should always automate when possible to avoid facebook users the risk of human errors. Here are the things we automate at lemlist:
- Lead enrichment: we get info like company size, industry…etc. automatically
- Meeting log
- Deal creation
- Lead source completion
- Contact import
- Monitor job changes.”
Neglecting CRM data maintenance leads to lost revenue
If businesses neglect their CRM data maintenance, there will be signs that your CRM data is not in a good state.
Lucas listed some of the most warning signs to look out for:
- A lot of outdated data
- High bounce rate
- Lots of duplicates
- Inaccurate reporting
“They lead to inefficiencies and missed revenue,” Lucas concluded.