You have spent countless hours and dollars implementing a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to keep your database structured and business development teams aligned. However, to drive sales, it will take more than just a centralized place to manage contacts and accounts to allow them to drive growth. Without high-quality data in your CRM, your salespeople and marketers will never truly realize the full value of your investment or their potential as a team.
You should have a solid B2B database, an engagement marketing engine, and an analytics engine so you can generate, measure, and optimize marketing ROI and impact on revenue.
CRM systems have become an integral part of the business processes of most businesses. However, to make the most of your CRM, you need to ensure that the data is accurate, you’re able to’ get the right insights from your data, and to keep optimizing your data quality strategy.
Every account, every lead, every contact, every email, every phone number, every customer-related piece of information is crucial. Data is the heart of your CRM and a CRM with inaccurate data can damage your sales pipeline.
How Much Does a Bad Data Hurt a B2B Company?
Bad CRM data leads to wasted time and resources chasing sending emails that bounce, calls that are unanswered to people no longer at the role or even the company anymore. Poor data hygiene affects the business in many ways.
Guidelines to Ensure Your CRM Data Quality
In order to ensure the best CRM data quality, we recommend you follow these five guidelines:
#1: Accuracy
Is your data accurate?
It has to be. Otherwise, you have no reason to trust your segmentation or have faith in your outreach. And unreliable data becomes a vicious cycle. The fewer reps trust the data, the less they will rely on it, and the less they will pay attention to updating and maintaining it, making the data even less reliable and repeating the cycle.
It is crucial to building processes for checking, entering, and updating CRM data right from the start to ensure your information is correct. Maintaining data hygiene relies on company culture since data will never be 100% accurate and is constantly decaying. So everyone has to have a commitment to maintaining data quality throughout the organization This process will help you avoid using a database with any inaccuracies.
#2: Completeness
Do you have all the necessary information for each of your records?
Incomplete data is common, especially during early stages such as prospecting.
However, chronically missing vital data can pose an enormous problem.
It is crucial that you determine what information is relevant to what functions, and build processes to get the information your team needs to do their job efficiently.
#3: Consistency
Is your data consistent across your CRM system?
For instance, do all your email addresses and phone numbers have uniformity? Is there a clear scale of consumer and opportunity ratings presented? Is your data entered in the right fields?
Data inconsistency becomes a concern especially when data is aggregated from multiple sources. Discrepancies in data can create inaccurate, unreliable datasets. Consistency in data will ensure that there are no mismatched data in fields allowing your team to manage and use the information in your CRM smoothly.
#4: Uniqueness
Is your CRM loaded with duplicate data?
If you do not have systems in place to merge and delete duplicate data entries, or better yet to prevent making them in the first place, then finding the information that users need can be incredibly difficult. Even worse it can wreak havoc with automation by syncing or merging fields from the wrong records or sending out duplicate communications.
At the same time, if you randomly remove duplicates, you can end up with missing records as the information you need might be spread over several duplicate records.
#5: Timeliness
Is your data up to date?
Typically, timely data is about ensuring that the information in your CRM is actionable every time. After all, if the information you are monitoring cannot help you to take action, then what is the point of tracking it?
Organizing and cleaning your CRM data periodically is an essential strategy for ensuring it stays reliable, relevant, and up to date.
Improve Salesforce CRM Data Using SalesIntel
If you are a Salesforce user, you can search SalesIntel’s 95% accurate human-verified data directly from Salesforce. You can map fields to leads, contacts, and accounts and push new records directly into Salesforce.
Along with the ability to add new records directly into Salesforce, you can also use SalesIntel to update and enrich your database. You can see when SalesIntel has new or missing information when you are on any lead, contact, or account in Salesforce and quickly update those fields. SalesIntel also allows you to define filter criteria to run updates and enrich specific records and you can even schedule SalesIntel to automatically enrich your entire database on a regular schedule. With SalesIntel you know the data you add to Salesforce is above 95% accurate and no matter what your data source SalesIntel will ensure your data is always complete and up to date.
Improve Marketo Data Using SalesIntel
With the SalesIntel-Marketo integration, Marketo users can push leads, contacts, and accounts directly into Marketo from SalesIntel. Find your ideal accounts and decision-makers, map the data to your Marketo fields and push the data you need directly into Marketo.SalesIntel will even de-dupe records before pushing them to Marketo.
SalesIntel Integration With Hubspot CRM
To add more human-verified data to your HubSpot Data, export human-verified contacts straight to HubSpot from SalesIntel. You don’t need to manually import and export. When sending contacts to Hubspot, you can even select contact owners and even assign exported contacts to a workflow.
SalesIntel will also check to see if you have selected contacts that already exist in HubSpot and will de-dupe any duplicate contacts for you.
Improve Outreach Data With SalesIntel
SalesIntel helps Outreach users to push desired accurate contacts from SalesIntel to Outreach effortlessly, and add them directly to the sequences you like. Additionally, SalesIntel also helps the users to set tags, choose sequences, set sequence owners, and SalesIntel will even check for duplicate records.
Improve SalesLoft Data With SalesIntel
SalesLoft users can seamlessly export our human-verified B2B data to SalesLoft. Users can select industries, departments, and other filter options to find and export contacts. Here’s how it works.
What’s Next?
Take corrective action today! Sell to your dream accounts and power your account-based marketing efforts by accessing 95% accurate human-verified contact data and the highest number of direct dials in the industry.
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