Quick Tips to Clean CRM Data While Working Remote (During COVID-19 Pandemic)

With staying remote becoming the new norm across the globe, in the rise of this COVID-19 Pandemic, sales and support teams across the world are trying to stay in touch with prospects and reassure their customers for business growth.
However, while implementing a remote working strategy and holding on to customers, you must make sure that your easy to use CRM is not left on a back-burner with missing data and stale deals.

In fact, in research conducted by a global CRM organization of repute, it has been found that more than even 27 percent of business leaders are not sure how much of data stored in their CRM database is inaccurate.

Therefore, with your sales and support teams now working remotely from several locations across the globe, there are serious chances that some data might remain in your easy to use CRM software’s database, which will certainly make information that you need for your business become useless because of errors in your CRM data which can slow down your sales growth.

This is the reason as one of the most popular Salesforce Alternative CRM for small and medium businesses we suggest you must maintain clean data in your CRM software which is not only required while are staying remote but even should be considered as a regular process so that your teams do not ignore it for too long.

Now since this is an appropriate and very good time to clean data in your CRM software and thereby avoid all incorrect decisions that might occur because of incorrect information in your easy to use CRM database, here are some of the things that you really need to look out for to maintain a clean database in your business growth technology and tool:

• Disorganized Data
• Duplicates
• Incomplete Information
• Dead Deals

Well, if you are still wondering how to begin this seemingly over-burdening process for cleaning data in your CRM, then as an award-winning CRM for SMB, we have got this for you and for your COVID fear-stricken remote working teams:

Clean Data 101
Data Cleaning Tip #1 – Run a check

The information stored inside your CRM is the lifeline of your business, the most valuable asset of your company.
This is because without leads and customers you do not have anyone that you can sell.

Now, considering this, on any given day should you not want a mint condition data in your CRM?

For this set up a sanity check on a fortnightly, monthly basis to find and remove errors in your CRM database.

Some of your sales or support staff can take up this responsibility to clean the database on a round-robin basis by checking entries, correcting wrong value deals, adding surnames that are missing, or for finding and segregating bounced email addresses.

Clean Data 101
Data Cleaning Tip #2 – Avoid duplicates

The primary step to avoid duplicate data in your CRM starts with your data migration process. Therefore if you are migrating data put a pertinent filter at the very onset of your data migration process, so that your sales reps can evade adding leads as new leads that are already there in the software.

Duplicate entries are sure to create confusion among members in your sales teams. Hence it is imperative to check frequently for redundant entries before deleting them from your database.

Now, as a second step, when you import data from any CSV files into your CRM, you can even skip imports for all duplicates information which will prevent the software from updating records that are already present in the software. There are CRM that can even provide you with a summary of all the skipped records once the task is accomplished.

This process of avoiding duplicate entries implies that each time a new lead is added, the CRM will automatically search your records and look for matches for the following fields:

• Name
• Last Name
• Company Name
• Email
• Mobile Number
• Work Number

Subsequent to this action once the system finds similar contacts or leads, it will automatically merge data (if instructed), which can save your sales team a lot of effort, resources, and time.

Clean Data 101
Data Cleaning Tip #3 – Fill out incomplete information

Most sales teams are always in a hurry to add new leads into the CRM and this is where they make errors in their haste to qualify a lead and close deals. Mostly they fail to update the CRM with all the relevant info they have at hand, which gets misplaced on sticky notes or lost in their spreadsheets.

Therefore, one of the key thumb rules for upholding a clean database in CRM software is to diligently update all the info that your sales reps have at hand and when it flows in as needed.
Now an easy way to let information about leads to get collected into your CRM system is through web forms since web forms reduce the risk of accumulating errors as it does not require salespeople to spend time on data entry. Rather any info that the prospect fills up in the web form gets automatically filled in the CRM software’s database.

Nevertheless, you cannot even treat this webform submission even as a fool-proof method, as there may be cases of bot attacks, which might result in creating junk data inside the CRM. Hence, to prevent this set up a re-CAPTCHA security filter on your website that can protect it from spam or abuses.

Clean Data 101
Data Cleaning Tip #4 – Remove dead deals

Even though it is true that most often sales reps put a lot of effort into their job, and so they might always hold on to rotten deals in the sales pipeline for months, in the hope that they will close someday.
Now, as an owner or a sales manager, you should be able to predict when it is the right time to leave a cold lead on the table and walk away.
Therefore, here are some of the red flags to watch out, which shows when a deal will mostly never work out when your contact:

• Is vague about when they want to start or end the project
• Expects a lot of features outside your product’s capabilities
• Does not have the budget and starts low-balling
• Takes too long to get back with a response (this may vary for each industry)

Clean Data 101
Data Cleaning Tip #5 – Create strong rules

Finally, the ultimate key to a clean CRM database is to have the right rules to get data into your CRM. Therefore, if your easy to use CRM is unable to capture the right kind of data, in such a way that the data that you require is accurate and complete for creating automated emails and tasks, here are some of the rule creation tips:

• The name field should never contain special or numeric characters
• The contact number field should be strictly numeric
• Check if the email is coming from a valid domain, for which you can ask users to enter their corporate email addresses to get on your mailing list.

Conclusion

Even though implementing a regular CRM data cleaning process may initially feel tough and might meet with several resistance from members of your team.
Nevertheless, once your sales and support people realize the benefits of a clean CRM database, then you do not have to look back again.

Hence if you have not implemented this process, why not start it right away during this COVID-19 Pandemic induced remote working process, now.