CRM Data Hygiene Best Practices for Sales and Customer Success Teams

Having a CRM helps sales and customer success teams with customer acquisition and retention.

It facilitates your access to relevant insights that enable you to engage the intended audience at different touchpoints in the buyer’s journey and ensure lasting relationships with your customers.

A CRM is your source of customer intelligence and makes it possible for you to make data-driven decisions.

However, to make the most of the data, it’s essential to ensure that it’s relevant and up-to-date. Data collection may lead to a build-up of outdated information over time, which may prevent you from making informed decisions.

There are a number of things that may cause anomalies in your CRM data, such as duplication, information inaccuracy, obsolescence, missing information, and so on.

It calls for a periodic clean-up, ensuring the hygiene of your CRM data and the quality of the information at your disposal.

In this article, we will cover the CRM data hygiene best practices that may come in handy for you.

So, without further ado, let’s start.

What is CRM Data Hygiene?

CRM data hygiene encompasses the cleanliness of the information accessible to you through your CRM.

When you have access to error-free and up-to-date information, it becomes easier for you to segment your audience and engage them better by offering them an experience tailored to their interests and preferences.

Around 80% of people say that they prefer doing business with companies that offer them personalized experiences.

Access to clean data enables you to create highly targeted sales strategies, acquire new customers, and build lasting relationships by offering efficient customer support.

CRM hygiene ensures that you have access to the latest and highly relevant customer information.

The decluttered customer information streamlines your sales process, making CRM data hygiene essential for growing businesses.

Benefits of CRM Data Hygiene

CRMs are essential because 72% of sales come from your company’s existing customers. You can reach out to them and generate more profit by leveraging upselling and cross-selling opportunities. However, that’s only possible when you can access accurate customer data.

The cleanliness of your CRM data is of the utmost importance, as it makes it easier to harness business intelligence.

The following are the key benefits of CRM data hygiene that you may want to know:

1. Improved decision-making

One of the biggest advantages of keeping your CRM data clean is that it significantly improves your decision-making capabilities.

The more accurate and up-to-date your CRM data is, the better the results you get from your decisions.

Imagine estimating the demand for the solutions you offer based on the buying history of your customers and the data giving you erroneous insights.

It will have a devastating impact on your operations, costs, and revenue-generating capabilities.

2. Enhanced customer experience

The cleanliness of your CRM data helps you know your customers better and get acquainted with their preferences.

Around 78% of brands are unable to offer personalized experiences due to insufficient customer information.

You can overcome this challenge with clean data at your disposal, making it easier for you to efficiently segment your customers based on their demographic and psychographic characteristics.

You can effortlessly engage your customers at different touchpoints throughout their buyer’s journey by leveraging content tailored to their interests and highly targeted marketing campaigns.

It fuels your sales funnel with quality leads and helps you acknowledge a noticeable growth in your conversion rate.

3. Increased operational efficiency

Having access to clean and accurate data improves collaboration among different teams, improving operational efficiency.

With accurate information accessible across the board, your teams can perform above expectations in the assigned roles and make better decisions.

The numbers appearing on everyone’s screen are the same and have zero discrepancies, improving teamwork and better utilizing available resources.

Thanks to better alignment among teams, managing the sales pipeline becomes easier. It complements your sales process and amplifies the after-sales experience you offer to your customers.

CRM data hygiene saves time. Rather than spending time trying to clean the data, your teams can focus on the tasks that generate value.

As a result, your sales teams are likely to acquire more customers. Plus, you ensure high customer retention by catering to their queries and concerns swiftly.

4. Better reporting and analytics

It goes without saying that CRM hygiene significantly impacts the insights you extract from your data.

The errors in your findings not only disrupt your sales process but also compromise your reporting capabilities, leading you to share inaccurate information with key stakeholders.

Imagine your data containing a ton of duplicate records encompassing purchases for the quarter, and you share this information with your partners and investors. It can tarnish your reputation and may likely lead to trust issues in the long run.

5. Higher ROI on marketing campaigns

Clean CRM data leads you to segment your customers the right way and create accurate profiles based on their characteristics.

As a result, you are able to effortlessly create tailored marketing messages and engage the intended audience through your targeted campaigns.

Accurate audience segmentation also improves the performance of your ads and enables you to utilize your lead-generation budget effectively.

You are able to convey your messages to the right people in the right way through the right channels, leading to high engagement and conversion rates.

Risks of Poor CRM Data Hygiene

Data inaccuracy and anomalies may have a catastrophic impact on your business operations. They disrupt your sales process and significantly affect your ability to generate revenue.

The following are a few of the noteworthy risks associated with poor CRM data hygiene:

1. Missed sales opportunities

Poor CRM data hygiene may severely affect your ability to generate more revenue. It may hinder the process of customer acquisition, causing you to miss sales opportunities.

Imagine reaching out to your prospects just to find out that their email or contact information you have is inaccurate.

Your sales representatives will be unable to connect with your potential customers, costing you a chance to grow your revenue.

2. Decreased customer satisfaction

Not having up-to-date CRM data may cause a significant decrease in customer satisfaction. The poor quality of data makes it difficult for you to stay up-to-date with the changing needs and preferences of your customers.

Over 65% of people expect businesses to adapt to their needs and preferences. So, to ensure lasting relationships with your customers, you have to meet their expectations consistently and offer solutions tailored to their interests.

Clean CRM data helps you know your customers better and paves the way for you to acknowledge continuous improvement. 

3. Wasted resources on ineffective campaigns

Poor CRM data hygiene may lead to ineffective targeting when designing marketing campaigns to boost your sales.

Imagine creating campaigns based on inaccurate demographic information accessible through your CRM. 

It may lead you to end up conveying your message to the wrong people or attracting junk traffic to your website.

You may end up burning your marketing budget on campaigns that drive you an extremely low return on investment.

Since most businesses often struggle to create effective campaigns due to a lack of resources, ineffective data management may end up adding more problems to your bucket.

4. Compliance and legal issues

Customers respect businesses that honor their preferences and consent choices, steering their marketing efforts accordingly.

Yet, we often see businesses struggle with consent management, which may often lead to compliance issues and legal complications.

Poor CRM data hygiene may be one of the major contributing factors. If your CRM records comprise outdated or inaccurate customer information, it may cause consent management problems.

As a result, you may end up reaching out to people without their consent, which may lead you to encounter compliance or legal issues.

5. Damaged brand reputation

Poor CRM data hygiene may end up compromising your brand’s reputation and have a devastating impact on your goodwill.

Since the data accessible to you contains errors, the reports you share with investors and key stakeholders may contain inaccurate information.

It may lead them to believe that you’re intentionally misleading them, significantly affecting your relationship with them and reputation in the industry.

CRM Data Hygiene Best Practices

Now that we’ve covered the benefits of CRM data hygiene and the risks associated with poor data management. Let’s discuss a few noteworthy CRM data hygiene best practices.

1. Establish standardized processes

Standardizing your data collection and entry processes is the most effective way to keep your CRM data clean and error-free.

If all teams in your company follow the same format when collecting customer information, data errors will be minimized.

Imagine a discrepancy regarding the date format when entering customer information: Some teams follow the D/M/Y format, whereas others prefer M/D/Y.

It may compromise the effectiveness of your campaigns where you reach out to your customers on their birthdays, offering them best wishes to build strong relationships or special discounts to fuel your conversions.

By ensuring that all your teams follow a standardized process for collecting, entering, storing, and analyzing data, you will be taking preemptive measures to keep your CRM data clean and fit for analysis.

2. Train team members on proper data hygiene

Just creating standardized data management processes isn’t enough to ensure CRM data hygiene. You should consider educating your teams to ensure they have hands-on data handling and management experience.

Human error is the top factor leading to data inaccuracy. Therefore, it’s best to train your teams and ensure their contribution to data hygiene.

You can consider different training methods, such as workshops, coaching by data management experts, online course enrollments, and so on.

You can also create a self-paced learning environment by making guides, tutorials, and other learning resources readily accessible.

Ensuring CRM data hygiene is a collective effort, and educating your teams will take you a step closer to achieving your goal.

3. Break down data silos

When you’re a small company, customer information is easily accessible to everyone onboard. However, as you grow and have different domains like marketing, sales, and customer success, access to data becomes troublesome.

Each domain may end up having its database, where information is accessible to concerned personnel only. It creates data silos, making it difficult for businesses to ensure data hygiene.

As each domain has its repository of customer data, establishing standardized processes may become challenging.

Each department may have its definitions of the variables representing the customer information and data management guidelines, causing huge discrepancies and poor CRM hygiene.

4. Conduct regular audits

No matter how careful you are, anomalies in your data are inevitable. So, to ensure the hygiene of your CRM, you must conduct periodic audits to identify the errors and remove such records.

Reviewing your CRM data to detect inaccuracies helps you keep your data clean and ready for analysis.

You should not only audit the data already stored on your CRM but also make it a practice to review information before entering it.

It’s a preemptive approach to keeping your CRM clean and minimizing the likelihood of errors or anomalies.

5. Automate

Leveraging automation helps you keep your CRM clean and free from erroneous data. Whether it’s at the time of data input or validation, automation tools give you overall better results and help you cope with problems caused by human error.

You should consider using tools for data collection that seamlessly integrate with your CRM. As a result, you will be able to fetch the data directly into the system without any error once you’re through with the data collection process.

By doing this, you not only keep your data clean but also make the most of available resources by saving time incurred on manual data entry and review before analysis.

6. Remove duplicate data

Having duplicate records compromises the quality of your CRM data and often leads to catastrophic outcomes.

The problem may be caused by data entry negligence or when fetching customer records from an old CRM.

It may seem like a harmless error, but it has a tremendous impact on the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and report-building capabilities.

So, you should always keep an eye on duplicate records of information and remove the anomalies to ensure CRM data hygiene.

7. Build a reliable user feedback loop

One of the most efficient ways to identify and remove errors in your CRM data is to collect user feedback.

Different members of your sales and customer success teams leverage your CRM to score more sales and build lasting relationships with your customers.

Each of them must come across data anomalies occasionally when trying to access relevant information.

Reaching out to the users for their feedback on how you’re handling or managing the CRM data is a proactive approach to fixing the errors.

It is a collaborative effort where you engage users from different teams to help you maintain a reliable information hub that can fuel your customer acquisition and retention initiatives.

Final Thoughts

There you have it: the seven CRM data hygiene best practices for sales and customer success teams.

Having clean CRM data allows you to make informed decisions, offer a personalized customer experience, ensure increased operational efficiency, report accurately, and acknowledge a high ROI on your campaigns to attract the right audience.

With high-quality customer data, you become better equipped to cash in new sales opportunities, ensure high customer satisfaction, make the most of available resources, evade regulatory or compliance issues, and maintain a good reputation in your respective industry.

Consider following the best practices recommended in this article to make informed decisions about acquiring new customers and maintaining lasting relationships with them.