CRM Data Management: 3 Steps to Keep Your CRM Data Up To Date

Clean CRM data may not feel like a priority...until you hit an outdated entry or turn up at the wrong office for a prospect meeting. Even when that happens, few sales reps take the time to sit at a desk on a sunny Sunday and scrub through their contact lists to update their phone numbers and addresses on Salesforce.

Even fewer will remember to take the time to update the information in real-time as it’s received.

CRM data management is a necessary hassle. It's vital for high-performing sales teams to have to access to accurate and comprehensive CRM data.

But it takes time and effort to manage, so many teams let it fall to the wayside until they're drowning under a mountain of dated, incorrect information. 

How Does Poor CRM Data Management Impact Businesses?

Do you know all the ways your disorganized data impacts your day-to-day operations? It costs you time, opportunities, and sometimes even potential revenue. 

Some of the top impacts of a disorganized, out-of-date CRM include:

1. Hurting email deliverability: You can't send the right content to the right people if your information isn't correct. Incorrect contact information can impact your email deliverability (hurting your domain reputation) and hurt your open and click-through rates.
2. Wasting sales rep's time: You need your sales team on the phones closing deals. But they can't do that if they're chasing down email addresses, calling the wrong numbers, and missing meetings.
3. Damaging your reputation: We all know how important customer relationships are to a successful business. Bad data can cause all kinds of miscommunications and mishaps that hurt relationships and damage your reputation. Don't get caught calling your customer "Hi first name," in an email automation because you forgot to update the field!
4. Losing revenue: The worst case scenario, of course, is missing an opportunity entirely because outdated customer information means they didn't receive an email, get enrolled in a campaign, or get flagged by your sales rep!

How to Master CRM Data Management

Implementing CRM data management best practices can help you increase efficiency, improve sales effectiveness, and improve overall sales relationships. There are dozens of little things you can (and should do) to improve your CRM data, but here are three steps to help you get started. 

Step 1: Set Up your Salesforce Instance to Make Updates Seamless

The first step to CRM data management is a good, clean setup. 

Default contact profiles have a number of fields that you may never use. We suggest keeping data like addresses out of the contact profiles, since they change too often. Instead, focus on keeping a phone number, email address, account name, and title up to date. 

In addition to the traditional fields, create a Salesforce field for LinkedIn URL. LinkedIn usually has the freshest data for your contacts. When they change roles, move companies, or update their domain or email, you'll be able to find it in their LinkedIn profile. 

Finally, create a “last review date” field. By putting a new date in this field each time the contact is updated, you can easily identify what you can trust and what you might need to review. You can also get a sense of what percent of the CRM database is updated and how often it’s being reviewed.

We recommend updating contact profiles at least once every six months for optimum CRM cleanliness.

Related: Broken Window Theory of CRM Data

Step 2: Take Advantage of Opportunities to Update Your CRM

Even when your CRM is optimized for quick updates, procrastinating on doing the work will still set you back. Putting CRM updates into a massive “deferred” folder on your to-do list will make the task about as desirable as scrubbing toilets.

Instead of seeking them out, identify key points in your workflows where you can naturally work in data updates. Then, make the changes as they occur.

For example: 

1. Mass Emails: When you plan to send out bulk sales emails, set aside time in advance for you or your virtual sales assistant to manage the pingbacks. Any email sent to more than 50 people is likely to garner at least a few responses saying that your contact has either moved or has a new title or email address. Build making the corresponding updates in your CRM into your routine processes.
2. Meeting Scheduling: Whenever you’re setting up a new meeting with someone, double-check the information in their email signature with the information in your CRM. Even if you haven’t made any changes, update the “last review date” field to pull the profile out of your cleanup pile.
3. Viewing a Contact: When looking at a contact or prospect in your CRM, create a shorthand method to mark that profile for updating. We would like to create a “to review” check box for contact profiles. The button would get checked in real time but allow the team to sort records by what needs to be updated when they have time to do it later.

Step 3: Perform Regular Checks on the System

No matter how much you try to avoid this, CRM updates must be done occasionally. The good news is that you won’t need to do this in real-time. The processes below are designed to kickstart the updating process for you or your assistant.

1. Set up a de-duping system to ensure all updates are done to the right contact profile.
2. Spot-check your data by sorting for empty fields. For example, find all contacts missing a title or metro area and create buffer projects for an admin to fill in the gaps.

Stick to these processes, and you should be able to keep your CRM up to date with minimal time investment. You’ll even get bonus points for delegating them all to an admin to handle on your behalf.

What You Should Do Now

If you need help with sales support, here are a few options to help you:

1. Download our eBook "Spend More Time Selling with a Virtual Assistant" to learn how a virtual assistant can handle tedious sales tasks and give sales leaders and teams more time to sell and care for customers.
2. Book a free consultation call with Prialto. We can help you regain more time to sell by offloading repeatable tasks to a fully managed virtual assistant. One of our experts will help you create a plan to delegate your tasks, and we will even train your sales assistant for you.