CRM Data Management
High-quality data is the key to any company’s decision-making process, strategy, and analytics. However, not everyone understands how poor or inaccurate data in the CRM (customer relationship management) system can have a negative impact on many aspects of business operations.
The wrong approach to CRM data management could lead to serious consequences, including high marketing costs, ruined reputation, high churn rate, inadequate sales, and much more. Eventually, this data can affect the company’s entire bottom line forcing it to lose market share.
According to IBM’s research, bad data costs businesses in the United States upwards of $3 trillion per year.
When it comes to CRM systems, problems that arise from working with bad CRM data can cost the company 1,000% of the prevention price. That’s why it’s imperative to work on the quality of data that enters your CRM system by implementing proper CRM data management techniques.
Research shows that every 30 minutes, 120 business addresses and 75 phone numbers change. Meanwhile, 20 CEOs leave their jobs and 30 new companies are formed. Failing to stay on top of these occurrences causes the data in your CRM system to decay.
Why Bad CRM Data Needs to Be Addressed ASAP
The impact of bad data in your customer relationship management system can be severe. Among other things, it can:
1. Cause Potential and Existing Customers Slip Through the Cracks
A customer relationship management system doesn’t just help you get sales through. It allows the company to build a fruitful and long-lasting relationship with the customer. Regardless of the stage of the buyer’s journey, you can use this data to gain a full picture of your customers’ needs and learn how to help them achieve their goals.
If your CRM system doesn’t contain the right data about your prospects, you can miss the opportunity to turn them into customers. Meanwhile, faulty contact data can keep you from contacting the client at the right time and through the right channel.
Eventually, both existing and potential customers start slipping through the cracks, hindering your marketing and sales efforts in the process. With time, poor CRM data management could lead to serious disruptions in the sales cycle.
2. Force You to Create Low-Quality Content
Personalization is the key to successful sales and marketing efforts. CRM data can help you achieve high personalization levels but only if it’s in top shape. When you need to create personalized content for your customers, losing crucial information could cause you to make serious mistakes.
For example, when it comes to email marketing, you may make the wrong offer or send it to the wrong person. Doing so would immediately lower your marketing ROI and take a toll on your reputation.
To achieve the desired results, you need to beef up your CRM data management with address, phone number, and email validator tools.
3. Waste Your Time
Time is one of the most valuable assets owned by the company’s employees. Poor CRM data forces your experts to waste their time on dead-end leads. Armed with outdated or invalid data, your sales and marketing departments will spend valuable resources without getting anything in return.
As a result, they won’t have sufficient time to focus on customers with high potential, wasting money in the process. Eventually, such an approach will affect the company’s reputation, reducing its profitability.
4. Lower Employee Satisfaction
Your sales and marketing experts are geared toward increasing the company’s output. They are armed with the necessary tools to get things done in line with the most efficient strategy. When all of the above doesn’t work out simply because the data is outdated or invalid, it results in substantial frustration.
Frustrated and unhappy employees lose their passionate approach, thus hindering their chances of achieving conversion. Just imagine calling 50 prospects and bumping into “wrong number” messages half of the time. Meanwhile, bounced emails are even more frustrating, considering how much effort is invested in creating them.
5. Disrupt Marketing Automation Strategies
Automation has become an integral part of any company’s marketing campaign. It takes care of many manual tasks, allowing your teams to focus on what they do best. However, the majority of automation tools depend on the quality of CRM data. As soon as poor data enters the system, the output falters.
You may not notice the problem immediately. However, with time, entire segments of your marketing automation strategy can be rendered useless.
6. Ruin Your Digital Reputation
If you work with poor CRM data, you are bound to ruin your digital reputation. For example, sending emails to the wrong addresses ups your bounce rate. If emails sent to the wrong address end up in the spam folder, you could be blacklisted, and the sender’s reputation will falter.
The same may happen if you keep calling the wrong people with your offer. They can eventually blacklist your number, thus raising a red flag to the phone service provider.
Working with clean data is integral to proper digital reputation. Fixing errors caused by improper and invalid data is usually costly and time-consuming.
Main Causes of Bad CRM Data
Proper CRM data management begins with discovering and eliminating the key causes of bad CRM data. Such causes include:
1. Duplicate Data
If you aren’t using high-quality CRM and data validation tools, you are bound to face data duplicates. When data duplicates occur, you waste time on duplicate efforts like sending a message to the same email addresses twice or calling the same clients repeatedly. This doesn’t just take a toll on your sales team, it ruins your company’s reputation.
Duplicate customer data also affects reporting. When the sales team works with the same contacts over and over again, it can lead to inaccurate analytics and poor decision-making.
With time, duplicate customer data can cost your company thousands of dollars, lowering marketing ROI tremendously.
2. Invalid Email Addresses
If you enter an invalid or undeliverable email address in your CRM software, your CRM data management suffers. So does your sales and marketing team.
Invalid email addresses show up when customers intentionally give you the wrong address or make typos when entering contact information into an online form. Additionally, your sales team can make a typo when entering the information into CRM software.
Each invalid address on your list hinders your sender’s reputation, forces your teams to work with inaccurate data, and demands extra expenses.
Dealing with invalid email contacts is easy. You simply need to run your list through an email validator regularly.
3. Temporary Addresses
Many customers and decision-makers in large companies don’t like sharing contact information. One of the tactics they employ is creating temporary email addresses for interacting with sales reps or downloading useful materials online. When some of these addresses make their way into your CRM database, your customer data suffers.
With time, these addresses become invalid or abandoned. If your sales teams continue using them, the expenses rise while ROI decreases.
4. Data Decay
According to Gartner, every month, 3% of data in the world gets decayed. The B2B data decay rate is over 70% per year. These numbers are impressive. For example, if a decision-maker in the company is promoted or chooses to retire, their old contact data decays. By continuing to use their data, your sales teams are losing time and money.
It’s imperative to know your data decay potential and monitor contact details closely. You can fight data decay by:
- Eliminating manual data entry.
- Engaging with your target audience regularly.
- Using email, phone number, and address validators.
- Asking customers to update their contact details regularly.
By minimizing the consequences of data decay, you can improve your company’s profitability and raise marketing ROI.
5. Bad Forms
When setting up forms that integrate with a CRM system, companies often forget to check how well these forms actually interact with the software. A poorly designed form ends up sending incomplete data to the system. You may be facing missing data and inaccurate contact information.
It’s imperative to beef up your forms and make sure they are clear to the customer. Data entry is always prone to errors. Even if the customer genuinely wants to share information, data fields that are hard to decipher force them to make unfortunate mistakes.
Data management starts with making it easy for users to provide contact records, be it in web forms, on social media, or over the phone. By focusing on data quality, it’s possible to streamline your marketing campaigns.
How to Fix Bad Data and Streamline Your CRM Data Management
To make sure you have access to accurate data when working with a CRM system, you need to design a good data hygiene strategy. Here are a few tips to consider for improving your data management practices.
1. Control Your Data Collection
While a big volume of data can be good for the company, overwhelming data collection practices may cause problems. Focus on collecting information you need to improve customer relationships. Anything extra can only confuse your team instead of assisting it.
When you create contacts, add only the most necessary data. You can always add more as you go. This can eliminate tedious manual data entry and improve your data quality.
2. Clean Your Data
With data decay in mind, it’s imperative to clean your data regularly. This involves taking care of such contact information as email addresses, phone numbers, and postal addresses. While it’s possible to do the cleaning manually, it’s less time-consuming and tedious to use validator software.
Validators are designed specifically to catch bad contact details and make sure your CRM databases contain the right tools to build customer relationships.
Maintaining high data quality by cleaning it is an integral part of the data management process.
3. Train CRM System Users
To make sure your data management for your CRM system is always in top shape, you need to train its users. Regular training sessions can help your team understand how to keep data clean and usable for different sales processes.
Employees that use CRM systems must excel in high-quality data collection, cleaning, and distribution. Anything from data entry to analytics must be done with data quality in mind.
4. Automate Data Entry
Manual data entry is the key enemy of proper CRM data management. If you want your CRM database to have top chances of containing clean data, you need to automate the entering process.
Numerous tools exist that allow your team to avoid continuous data entry. Most importantly, your programs must interact with each other to share customer data.
5. Communicate Your Goals
When it comes to CRM data management, your entire team should be on the same page. Make sure your sales reps and marketing experts understand the importance of data accuracy and know exactly what to do to maintain it.
The Takeaway
The accuracy and quality of CRM data are the keys to your company’s success. It’s hard to build strong customer relationships, create marketing campaigns, and push clients through the sales funnel unless you are working with top-notch data.
Take the time to design a CRM data hygiene system for your business and make sure everyone on the team knows how to maintain it.
