How long are your sales reps spending correcting email addresses, hunting down correct phone numbers, or otherwise making up for a messy and disorganised CRM?
If it’s been a while since you’ve given your CRM a good clean-out, it could be several hours each month.
That’s several hours that could be better spent identifying new target accounts, searching for intent signals, or on the phone with a prospect moving that deal down the pipeline.
In this guide, we’ll explain how a robust CRM cleaning process can improve sales pipeline velocity, reduce churn, and give your reps extra time back in their day.
Then, we’ll dive into seven straightforward steps for cleaning your CRM.
CRM cleaning is the process of:
The end goal is to enhance the sales process and improve your ability to serve customers.
CRM cleaning allows marketers to deliver more accurate and relevant messaging, prevents salespeople from wasting time on error correction, and can even support customer retention efforts by allowing for more personalised engagement.
A messy CRM with bad data can have serious consequences for an organisation, including:
Taking the time to clean your CRM, from identifying and removing duplicates to enhancing your CRM with additional customer data, helps resolve many of these issues.
It improves productivity, as it prevents reps from correcting data points and chasing down phone numbers or email addresses.
It helps you capitalise on sales opportunities by integrating real-time buyer intent signals that tell you who is ready to buy now.
And it helps improve marketing performance by opening up better segmentation and targeting capabilities.
CRM cleaning doesn’t have to be a daunting task. These seven steps are practical and easy to implement.
Data governance is the foundation of CRM data cleanliness. It’s all about how your organisation manages the data it collects, stores, and uses.
This is an important first step as it sets up the framework for deciding what data to keep and what to remove, among other things.
Defining your data governance rules involves:
Compliance with regulations like the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) should be a priority here; your data must be processed lawfully.
Now that you have clear guidelines for what your CRM data should look like, turn your attention to your existing data. You must determine what needs to change.
Look for:
Here’s where most of the actual cleaning takes place.
This is mostly about culling data, but it also includes some updates. Here’s what you should focus on:
This doesn’t have to be a cumbersome manual process. Several helpful tools support faster CRM cleaning.
Many CRMs have a deduplicate function built-in. From there, you can use a solution like Cognism to clean your CRM.
By integrating your CRM with Cognism, you can automatically update outdated contacts, enrich incomplete data records, and replace incorrect data points that are slowing your reps down. More on that later.
Now that you’ve got your CRM looking fairly clean, it’s time to start thinking about how you’ll keep it that way.
Creating standardised data formats and data entry guidelines is a good step to take.
For standardising formatting, some best practices include:
Your guidelines can be a simple one-page document that outlines your data entry process, including the key fields and required formatting.
Make sure the document is distributed and accessible to anyone responsible for entering data, from SDRs to IT implementation teams.
Tools like Cognism, which can automate data entry and validation during CRM enrichment, are a great way to ensure these guidelines are followed accurately.
Cleaning up your CRM isn’t just about getting rid of old or outdated data points.
It’s also about making sure that the data you do have in your CRM is providing as much value to your revenue team as possible.
Now that you’ve standardised your data formatting, you need to look at data validation and enrichment.
Data validation is the process of ensuring new and existing records remain accurate and usable. Enrichment is about adding missing data points, such as additional contact numbers or the company’s industry.
The best solution here is to integrate Cognism’s CRM enrichment feature.
Here’s how it works:
First, you set up the native integration between your CRM and Cognism.
Then, Cognism automatically scans your CRM, fills in any data gaps, validates that data is correct, and updates any incorrect or outdated records
The end result?
High-quality data that helps you identify target accounts faster, improve lead scoring and routing, and accelerate pipeline velocity.
You can also use our Instant CRM Enrichment function to automatically enrich new accounts as they enter your database (e.g. via a lead form), ensuring sales has the information they need to follow-up quickly.
Now that you’ve cleaned and enriched your CRM, you can better categorise and segment data to fuel marketing and sales campaigns.
You’ll want to focus on ensuring that:
One last step here.
Even with the best data cleansing process, CRM data still becomes stale over time. People leave companies, contact details change, and some organisations just straight up go out of business.
That’s why you should have a CRM cleaning cadence in place.
A smart way to automate this is to use Cognism’s Scheduled CRM Enrichment feature to regularly scan and analyse existing data points in your CRM. Cognism automatically updates stale data points and corrects data entry errors, keeping key fields accurate and actionable.
The frequency with which you perform a full CRM clean depends on the size of your company, the data you store and process, and how well your team abides by data entry and governance practices.
A good idea is to perform different levels of cleaning at different intervals, such as:
Some of the most common challenges revenue teams face when cleaning their CRMs include
Yes, CRM data cleaning can be automated.
Solutions like Cognism’s Scheduled Enrichment feature can help you automatically identify duplicate records, update out-of-date contact details, and fill in blank data fields.
The best practices for maintaining CRM data hygiene include:
Cognism Enrich is the best CRM cleaning tool.
Outdated and unreliable CRM data hinders your team’s ability to succeed. Cognism Enrich solves this by automatically:
With a clean, refreshed CRM, your team will make smarter decisions and achieve better results.
By leveraging Cognism’s Enrich, our internal revenue teams achieved a 1.5x increase in booked meetings. With clean data, they could automate workflows and run more effective campaigns.