Prospect and customer contact data are critical to maintain in a CRM, which leads us to loudly exclaim:
Accurate CRM data isn’t king…it’s the whole kingdom!
Imagine a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool — like HubSpot — with a contact list full of stale information. Does the CRM have phone numbers? No? That might be because they haven’t been updated in over a year. Do you have email addresses for your contacts? Even if you do, it’s possible that one or two are old and not active anymore.
This is just one example of why CRM data falls short after being implemented into your company CRM system, something that happens often due to under-maintenance from the CRM administrator. Though CRMs offer many benefits in terms of effectiveness in sales and marketing efforts, they can fall short in terms of accuracy when contact lists aren’t regularly maintained.
If your CRM data isn’t updated, aligned, or accurate, this lack of maintenance can not only hinder business growth in many ways, but it can injure a company’s otherwise sterling reputation.
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The Importance of Maintaining CRM Data for Sales Success
A CRM is a key tool to collect prospect information, enact activities to turn prospects into customers, and to help delight those customers into becoming evangelists in your business growth.
Think of how you would feel receiving a birthday card from your financial advisor… when your birthday was six months ago. It might have you wondering what other personally identifiable information in the advisor’s CRM is incorrect; Or being addressed by the wrong name in an important email…or even requesting information multiple times from a business…only to be sent the wrong information.
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- A single source of sales truth for capturing prospect and customer information to share across your team – including personal information, activities, email communications, signed sales documents, and more
- Insight into customer and prospect activities that help sales to understand the needs and differences between marketing qualified leads and sales qualified leads
- A CRM can help increase sales through task management, contact owner alerts and internal notifications – such alerting a sales team member on the ideal time to follow up with a specific lead who has taken a key action
- A CRM can more accurately forecast sales using data and reporting and can integrate with accounting software, so an account has the most up to date information (this is essential to conversations with the customer)
- A CRM can empower a sales manager with oversight into all sales team members’ activities and help manage and hold team members accountable
The Importance of Maintaining CRM Data for Marketing Success
CRM data is a marketer’s lifeblood, so its obviously important that the data be up to date and correct for marketing efforts to be on target. From contact list hygiene, to knowing when a customer is nearing the end of their contract (read: time to kick renewal efforts into drive), to understanding what content is most important to show them, CRM data sets the directional course for marketing. Have inaccurate data and disaster can ensue — like a ship that is off course by just a few degrees – those few degrees matter and data accuracy matters!
- A CRM like HubSpot can automatically nurture contacts through sequences and workflows that, for example, can trigger drip emails over the course of 30-60-90 days or automatically move a contact from one list to another using rules around their activities
- Sales can engage in timely and meaningful conversations with contacts using pre-determined pieces of marketing content
- A CRM like HubSpot with robust marketing functions can help sales and marketing understand which channels your prospects and customers engage with the most as well as understanding which topics, types of content, and when and how to deliver this content is key.
7 HubSpot Tools That Turn Data Into Action
The Importance of Maintaining CRM Data for Support Success
CRM and customer support don’t automatically go together in the minds of many, but nothing could be further from the truth. A well-maintained CRM is not only useful in informing a team when a prospect is primed to buy – but it is instrumental in providing necessary customer support and data to continuously improve both the prospect and customer’s experience as well as extend the lifetime value (LTV) of the customer.
Examples of how a CRM can inform support include:
- The ability for a CRM to track support requests, volumes, agent response times, and times to close a support ticket.
- A CRM can be equipped to support a user’s self-service experience on a website through CRM tools like chat flows and knowledge base articles designed to help triage requests and enhance the user’s experience to get immediate answers.
- A CRM with clear paths on addressing support issues can help improve operational efficiencies, so team members do not drop the ball on addressing requests or duplicate efforts.
Basic Tips to Help Maintain CRM Data
So how can you ensure that you’re utilizing CRM data to its fullest potential? Here are some tips :
Set up regular CRM maintenance processes. This cannot be overlooked!
- CRMs have many built-in capabilities for keeping your CRM data current, but it is ultimately the responsibility of CRM administrators to set up these processes. HubSpot’s CRM contains automatic list updates that can help an administrator ensure information is accurate.
- Set and share processes on just how contacts should be entered into the CRM system by teams — to ensure everyone is aligned in how data is input into the system. (It’s easy for new employees to enter contacts incorrectly if they don’t know exactly what the expectations are when adding a contact.)
- Train your CRM users so they know exactly how to use the system and foundationally understand the CRM’s true value from a sales, marketing, and support perspective. This training will help them input contacts correctly since CRMs have a unique way of looking at data.
Need CRM maintenance assistance? Check out our HubSpot Audit Services
Get Expert Help with Your CRM Maintenance!
To learn more about your CRM options and CRM best practices, contact us! In addition to HubSpot CRM services, we can advise and help connect and integrate other CRM systems as well as provide expert insight into marketing automation software that can help you reach your lead generation goals.
Already have HubSpot but need someone to look under the hood to ensure your CRM is optimized? Explore our HubSpot Audit Services and let’s connect to see how we can help.
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