It’s frustrating to call a number and find out that it doesn’t exist. The inability to reach your prospect because of incorrect email address adds up to the frustration. Such situations occur when your organizational data is not maintained accurately in your CRM.
Companies implement a CRM and then forget about it. Being the most essential asset for sales, CRM and the data in it should be given utmost attention. Messed up data results in loss of opportunities. Keeping your CRM database clean is essential for fetching important information.
The below tips will help you in keeping your CRM clean with accurate data-
Maintain Data as a Whole
Incomplete information negatively affects your data quality. Maintaining a CRM account requires you to fill in many mandatory fields which is time-consuming! In a rush for achieving your sales targets, you fill up these fields incorrectly and it piles on, resulting to disastrous outcomes.
Fill these mandatory fields carefully like name, email address, phone numbers, and address. Determine which fields are the most important to maintain a complete information in your CRM and encourage other sales reps to do the same.
Avoid Redundancy of Deals & Contacts
Email addresses are unique for every user, carefully compare the email address of your contacts and avoid the risk of redundant data. CRM solutions offer to compare the data of the email address entered by you. So, when you find such discrepancy it is because the data in the duplicate records are incomplete and proper measures are required to rectify them. Merge the duplicate records, this allows quick comparison of the information in both files and lets you fill the required information without losing it permanently.
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Be Consistent with Your Data Entry
While maintaining the records of your customers, you need to have a certain amount of consistency as it is necessary for the quality of your records.
Example:
A sales rep may enter the detail of his prospect as “Assistant Manager-Business Development” while another rep adds the same detail as “BD — Assistant Manager”. It can be easily avoided by setting standard data entry format for your sales team. This, brings consistency in your records, keeping format and the quality of the data in check.
Automation and the human efforts are crucial for maintaining the quality of your customer data inside the CRM. Having a standard data format also helps you when you generate reports or filter records while searching a data with custom criteria.
Special credential to access the data
Complication increases when too many people access the data. There are chances that individual might make changes or accidentally delete a vital data. Control the security rights by creating special credentials and assigning it to specific personnel, whom you think need the access to customer data inside your CRM. By doing so you narrow down the number of people who can make changes to the fields and records hence rule out the possibility of any human error, keeping the data quality intact.
Archive old data instead of deleting it
As your business moves ahead and experiences growth you will realize that your CRM has information that’s not relevant anymore. Like the contact details of a prospect who refused your product because of his low budget. You might find it logical to delete such contacts but you never know his business might grow and he might be interested in your product in future so instead of deleting such contacts, archive it. Archiving contacts will not only help in maintaining the relevant data but also keep the data that seem irrelevant safe for future opportunities.
The final words
There is no doubt that along with the extreme sales pressure keeping your CRM clean is a cumbersome job. However, the sales depend on it; to successfully execute various sales activities it is necessary to maintain the CRM’s database systematically. Through a quality database you can work seamlessly without any hindrance. We hope the above tips will be helpful in keeping your CRM clean with accurate data and save your precious time for closing more deals. To explore more potential of a CRM, get in touch with our team
We welcome you to Salesmate! 🙂 A subtle yet systematic and intuitive sales intelligence-based CRM that provides high quality service without blowing a hole in your budget. Want to know more? Start a free 15-day trial, today!
