CRM Data Management Strategies for Your SMB

Now that you understand the importance of good CRM database health, it’s time to uncover data management strategies!

These strategies are the best way to ensure your CRM system has accurate data your team can rely on.

Let’s take a look at five excellent data management processes!

Assess Your CRM Database Regularly

The most critical aspect of accurate customer data in a CRM system is regularly checking and analyzing your database.

Customer information changes regularly for several reasons, including the following:

• Change in contact information
• Preferences change
• Customer moves or relocates
• Customer’s needs change because of financial reasons

Schedule times to check your existing data and ensure everything is up to date.

Although this may seem time-consuming and annoying, having accurate and complete records is critical.

Remember, unorganized mass data impacts everything from inefficient business processes to lost sales!

When you think about it that way, taking a little time to keep your existing data clean seems worth it.

Create a CRM Data Management Process

Creating and ensuring a data management process is also essential.

It is best to have rules on how different departments contribute customer information to the CRM system.

Ensuring everyone on the team uses the same method for organizing information and customer-related data helps with accuracy and prevents duplicate entries from happening.

When it comes to creating a data management process, there are a few steps you must take.

First, set standards and guidelines for storing customer data in your CRM system.

For example, create a checklist of best practices that all team members should follow when entering or updating information.

Second, ensure team members understand the importance of accuracy, precision, neatness, and completeness.

Scheduling a meeting to review the importance of clean data is always a good idea!

Third, set rules on how frequently your team must update data and who is responsible for this task.

Finally, ensure all team members can access the system and receive adequate training.

Consistently Clean Your CRM Data

Keeping current data clean is another excellent data management strategy.

Data cleaning ensures your information is accurate.

Also, this process ensures your CRM tools are clear of duplicate pieces of information or unnecessary data that your teams don’t use anymore.

While running my company, I had a designated team responsible for data cleaning.

Now, if your business is small, you may not need to add another department to the mix.

Still, scheduling time to review client data and ensure everything is up to date is essential.

How can you ensure your company’s data is clean? Follow these best practices:

• Utilize CRM features to filter their contact information and see if there are missing phone numbers, emails, etc.
• Create monthly exception reports (you can spot missing essential data easily).
• Merge duplicated information

Validate and Enrich Every Lead Data

Validation and enrichment are two great CRM data management strategies, especially when it comes to creating leads.

First, validation ensures the accuracy of your customer’s information.

For example, if someone enters their work email address incorrectly, this could lead to a lost sale opportunity.

Correcting false data is best so your team immediately takes care of it. Otherwise, it can be easy to forget about.

Further, enrichment helps you understand more about your leads.

For instance, you can use various data resources to learn more about a lead’s job title, industry, and other personal information that helps you understand their needs better.

Teams can validate and enrich data manually when necessary.

However, you must consider an automated process when determining the best way to validate and enrich customer data in your CRM system.

Automate Mundane Data Entry Tasks

Lastly, it’s essential to automate mundane tasks.

Manual data entry is at high risk of mistakes and inaccuracies.

Although your sales reps try their hardest, repetitive tasks quickly get tiring, leading to mistakes

There are CRM data entry solutions that can handle these tasks with ease.

Errors like duplicate, inaccurate, or incomplete data are less likely to happen when you use CRM automation.