How many times have you or a sales rep called a client or lead only to be told " you have the wrong number" or "She doesn't work here anymore"? Have you or your marketing team ever exported a list from BluWave for an email campaign only to see a number of email addresses bouncing and have your campaign produce poor performance results?
This means your data is dirty and it's time to clean it up! It’s that time of year where things start to slow down for most of us - This is the perfect opportunity to go through your CRM data and clean it up for a successful 2021.
Data can become quickly outdated or recorded wrong due to human error that is why it is essential to regularly clean up your data. Dirty data can clog up your CRM system - you could lose important clients, waste your sales time by calling incorrect numbers and have ineffective marketing campaigns. Dirty data also costs you money, according to Harvard Business Review
Bad Data Costs the United States $3 Trillion per Year.
Here are a few tips on how to clean up your data: Firstly, you will need to analyse your data
At this stage of the data cleaning process, you will analyse your data to get an understanding of the overall state of your CRM database and to see how “dirty” your data is. This will include duplicate records and inaccurate, incomplete or outdated data records.
Take action: cleaning up your data Remove duplicate data This is a critical step in cleaning up your CRM data. Once you have removed the duplicates you need to prevent duplicates from entering your system again. You can reduce the number of duplicates through standardisation.
Standardisation Many bad data entries come from human error. A company should have a set of standards or policies to articulate how the data is entered into their CRM system. This is because data could be entered into the CRM system based on the users’ individual interpretations.
Here are a few examples: - BluWave vs BluWave Software CC
- Apple vs Apple Inc.
- Dave Brown vs David Brown
Update, validate and complete missing data - Make sure you have all the details you require such as contact details and physical locations for all your clients and if you do have these details make sure they are all still valid.
- Remove all contacts that no longer work for a certain company.
- Update contacts who has a new position in the company or whose contact details have changed.
