The Ultimate Guide to Contact Data Cleansing

Your sales and marketing software is only as good as the contact data that fuels them.

Inaccurate email addresses compromise your sales process. Missing critical demographic or behavioural data skews your customer analyses. And if there’s a misspelling of a client’s name, awkward mispronunciations await during your cold calls!

The solution?

Automated contact data cleansing.

Read this blog to:

• Learn how to clean your B2B contact data.
• Find out about the tools that can automate the process.
• Discover how clean data enhances your CRM and other sales tools’ performance.

What is contact data cleansing?

Contact data cleansing is the process of updating, removing, and correcting the contact information in a business’s database, such as a CRM database.

The aim is to create a more complete and accurate contact database that powers data-driven decision-making and helps sales reps and marketers run more effective campaigns.

Here are some of the everyday tasks involved in the contact cleansing process:

• Removing duplicate records.
• Deleting bounced email addresses from your marketing platform.
• Standardising data structures in your CRM (for example, fixing first names starting with lowercase).
• Enriching your sales software with third-party data to fill in missing data points.

Manual data cleansing is possible, but it’s time-consuming and prone to human error.

Therefore, many businesses use third-party tools to automate these tasks through features like deduplication, record auto-completion, email verification, inconsistent data flagging, and data enrichment.

For example, companies use Cognism to automatically populate their CRM with up-to-date contact information about professionals and businesses.

With an automated data cleaning process, your sales team will have the data they need to spot opportunities, reach out to leads, and analyse processes — without spending time scrubbing that data.

Why is data cleansing vital for B2B companies?

Poor-quality CRM data hinders the performance of your marketing and sales tools, which in turn hurts your team’s ability to nurture, close, and retain customers.

It’s like using a skateboard with rusted wheels. It rolls slowly, causes wipeouts, and makes it difficult to achieve the kickflips you envisioned when you bought it.

Now, how exactly does dirty data negatively impact sales and marketing teams?

Validity ran a survey asking CRM database administrators what their companies were losing due to poor CRM data quality.

Here are the results:

How does poor data quality lead to each of these issues?

• Losing existing customers: Incomplete customer profiles cause your customer success team to misunderstand customer needs, and incorrect contact information results in missed opportunities to connect with buyers and grow the relationship.
• Missed sales opportunities: Without accurate data, marketers and salespeople might segment leads differently, causing some leads to receive emails containing irrelevant marketing content and offerings.
• Employees leaving for better data: High performers expect the best tools. No sales rep wants to make a cold call and then discover the lead left the company years ago. Likewise, no marketer is happy when their email campaign reaches just 60% of their contact list.

By having a strong data cleansing process, you prevent the above from happening. You arm your team with accurate information and well-functioning tools that help them drive successful sales and marketing outcomes.

5 steps for cleansing your contact data

Check out these five crucial steps for cleaning your contact data and ensuring it stays clean!

1. Remove or merge duplicate entries

Imagine you place a cold call to a lead named Cindy Loohoo.

She sounds confused and says, “Thanks, but I’m already a customer.” After hanging up, the rep checks the CRM and finds a second Cindy Loohoo in the customer database, confirming her claim.

What a waste of time!

When multiple records exist for the same contact, critical information such as call history, contact details, or transactional data gets split across different profiles.

Reps might be working from only half the picture, causing serious inefficiencies and uninformed, unsuccessful customer interactions.

Avoid these situations by merging or removing duplicate contact records.

Use de-duplication software to streamline finding and fixing duplicates (your CRM may already include this feature).

These tools automatically identify duplicates and ensure you keep only one accurate version of the CRM record. They do this by merging the records and keeping the most accurate data or removing the invalid records from the system.

Through fuzzy matching and machine learning, these tools can even find duplicates that aren’t precisely identical but look similar — for example, Cindy Loohoo and Cindy Luhu.

Best of all, you can configure these tools to run automatically on a scheduled basis or alert your staff when they’re uploading a new record that might be a duplicate.

Overall, de-duplicating your contact records will improve team efficiency and improve the customer experience.

2. Fix inconsistent data structure

Inconsistent data structure occurs when data is formatted differently — for example, different capitalisations in company addresses or varying phone number structures.

These inconsistencies can hurt your ability to find, group, and analyse your data easily.

To address them, data administrators should use the following tools:

• Normalisation tools: These software platforms automatically reformat data into a consistent structure according to your preferences, thus eliminating inconsistencies.
• Find and replace operations: In your CRM or spreadsheet tool, conduct bulk find-and-replace operations to standardise common discrepancies (e.g., replacing “Ave.” with “Avenue”).

Most data cleansing tools will offer a feature to ensure consistent data structure.

Some will even use machine learning to identify inconsistencies, automate fixes, recommend options for a new standardised structure, and make appropriate alterations.

3. Fill in missing data points

When key B2B data points are missing from contact records, it’s hard for salespeople and marketers to do their jobs effectively.

For example, they can’t send email campaigns without accurate email addresses. Without data about their audience’s companies and locations, they can’t segment them geographically and create targeted outreach.

Perhaps this is why respondents to the Validity survey cited “missing or incomplete data” as the number one data quality issue “seriously impairing” their ability to take full advantage of their CRM:

To fill in your missing data points, use a data enrichment tool that automatically populates your missing contact fields with accurate data.

For example, with Cognism’s On-Demand CSV Enhance, you can upload your CSV file containing your list of contacts, and Cognism will enrich it with compliant, accurate data.

Just like that, your contact records are complete! They’ll have the correct phone numbers, email addresses, demographics, and all the other information you need to reach and sell to them.

Watch this interactive demo to see how Cognism Enrich works 👇

4. Invest in software tools to keep data fresh and accurate

After taking these three steps, your data should be in much better shape.

Unfortunately, data tends to go stale.

This is especially true in hectic times like these, where people seem to be switching jobs and locations like crazy, causing their job titles, email addresses, and other info to become outdated.

In Validity’s State of CRM Data Management Report, 70% of respondents said that a rise in employees switching jobs and/or locations during the COVID and post-COVID eras has led to an all-time low in data quality.

Invest in a B2B data enrichment platform to keep your data fresh and avoid having to do a big spring clean in the future.

These tools automatically enrich all the incomplete customer records that enter your system. For example, if a lead enters your CRM through a web form only asking for their name and email address, the tool will fill in the other fields you care about, like phone number or job title.

Cognism also lets you set up rules dictating which new records are enriched. For example, in the below image, only leads from the UK without a mobile number are enriched:

You can also set up scheduled CRM enrichment on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. That way, when a contact in your CRM changes companies or gets a new email address, it’ll be updated automatically in their contact record.

You’ll always be working off the freshest intel.

5. Standardise data input across your teams and customers

Your CRM and marketing platforms likely offer ways to enforce data input protocols.

Whether it’s a New Contact record workflow in your CRM or a free demo sign-up form on your product page, these tools provide an easy way to ensure all the data your business captures is in the same format.

Below are some ways to use your forms to standardise data input:

• Create standardised field formatting — for example, all phone numbers must be entered following this format: 1-222-333-4444.
• Use drop-down menus or picklists to capture key contact data like job title, industry, or location, and avoid inconsistent spelling and capitalisation.
• Establish field validation rules in your cleaning tools to prevent invalid entries, such as using numbers in a First Name field.
• Leverage access controls in your CRM to only allow specific user roles to edit sensitive fields.

If you have some manual data entry tasks you can’t automate with forms, make sure to train your team on standard operating procedures. In an ideal world, everyone in your team must know how to update and add fields on the platforms they use.

The 3 best tools for cleansing your contact data

Contact data cleansing tools offer features like deduplication, error detection and correction, data matching, and data enrichment.

Below are three of the best tools for B2B companies.

Cognism

Cognism is a B2B data enrichment tool that makes it easy to keep your contact data fresh and accurate.

For example, with Instant Enrich, whenever new leads enter your database, the tool fleshes out each profile with mobile numbers, job titles, company financials, and other data points you need to personalise your outreach.

And if that contact gets promoted, Scheduled Enrich can automatically update the outdated record in your CRM.

Cognism offers three ways to enrich your B2B contact data:

1. Instant Enrich: Set enrichment criteria and purify new lead and contact records before they enter your CRM and other marketing tools.
2. Scheduled Enrichment: Create an automatic enrichment schedule to keep specified records up-to-date.
3. CSV Upload: Upload a list with outdated or incomplete contact details, and Cognism will update it.

Best of all, Cognism’s data is GDPR and CCPA-compliant, so you won’t have to worry about accidentally filling your CRM with illegally sourced information.

HubSpot Operations Hub

HubSpot Operations Hub is HubSpot’s CRM for RevOps and SalesOps professionals who deal with lots of data.

It offers many tools for keeping your contact data clean and usable, including:

• Data quality automation to automatically fix format names, date properties, and more.
• Data command center to gain a bird’s eye view of your contact data’s health, spot possible data issues, and keep out poor-quality data.
• Data sync to ensure data transfers across your tech stack and avoid data silos.

It’s a great tool if you want to track the effectiveness of your data cleansing initiatives and protocols since it provides robust data quality reporting, as shown below:

HubSpot also integrates with Cognism, allowing you to take advantage of Cognism’s data enhancement while benefiting from HubSpot’s Command Center and CRM features.

DataMatch Enterprise

DataMatch is a software solution that makes it easy to catch and fix data errors and maintain good CRM data hygiene. It offers code-free data profiling, discovery, cleansing, matching, and deduplication.

A highlight of this tool is its ability to analyse the current status of your data. It then offers suggestions about what work needs to be done. Whether that’s deduplication or increased standardisation, you can do it directly on the platform.

You can also set up real-time API workflows that validate incoming data as it enters your CRM.

Contact data cleansing: the last word

Data dentists don’t exist; no one can shame you into cleaning your data!

But that doesn’t mean you can skip it.

Clean B2B contact data means smooth CRM automation, efficient business operations, and accurate sales analysis.

To improve your data hygiene, remove duplicates and fix errors such as inconsistent data structures. From there, fill in the empty fields with accurate data from a B2B enrichment tool.

Finally, to keep your data from becoming outdated, invest in software (like Cognism!) to automate the cleanup process, from deduplication to automated lead record completion.

Then, you’ll have data you can be proud of — accurate, complete, and up-to-date.