The Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool is vital for all companies, whatever the size, the sector, the activity...
The CRM is the heart 🫀 of Sales and Marketing teams, and sometimes even of the customer support.
Having up-to-date, organized, standardized, and correct data is essential... and yet, it's not that simple! Over time, errors or inconsistencies appear in the contact data of all CRMs, making them obsolete and unusable.
Fortunately, we are about to give you all the best practices to clean your CRM and keep it up to date 😘
What is clean CRM data?
Contact data is at the heart of growth! Yet, it is often the weak link in the sales and marketing team's chain.
Why? Obsolete, outdated, sometimes false, and often non-standardized data.
Time to roll up our sleeves and identify all the best pratices in order to avoid any possible cause of "deteriorating" data quality in your CRM.
Do not have duplicate contacts and companies in a CRM
Have you ever noticed that a good part of your database contains duplicates, triplicates... and sometimes more 😱, both in terms of contacts and companies?
A duplicate is a person or a company that is present at least twice in your CRM.
Several reasons explain the presence of duplicates in a CRM:
- Several teams use the CRM of the company, and due to lack of time, it is common not to look if the contact already exists in the CRM before creating a new record.
- A contact or company entered in the CRM with a spelling error.
- A customer or prospect who changes company may be "reinserted" in the CRM as a new contact instead of updating the record.
The risk is therefore to contact a single person several times... The credibility of the personalization of your messages will then be affected.
Do not have wrong and old data in your CRM
When you enter data manually in your CRM, an error is possible: bad civility, inversion of first name and surname, wrong or obsolete email.
It is also possible to have unwanted characters because of format incompatibility issues between the collection source and the database, or the insertion of emojis following a scrap from LinkedIn for example, and to import this directly into the CRM.
Erroneous data can have heavy consequences on your business strategy: high bounce rate, and loss of credibility if the personalization is not right. (Saying "Hello Mr." when addressing a woman can be somewhat offensive 😉)
Discover more about data cleaning
Enrich incomplete data in your CRM
A CRM is not a gruyere 🧀 : there should not be any holes. However, databases often contain incomplete fields due to lack of time, or simply because the information cannot be found manually.
For each new entry, you should add the civility, the job of the contact in order to be able to target, the nominative business phone number, as well as the verified, qualified, and up to date email address...
Manually, it is true that it is complicated and a bit boring!
Discover more about data enrichment
Standardizing the non-standardized data in your CRM.
Whoever has never entered data in a CRM quickly without making the effort to capitalize, without making a mistake between first name and last name, or forgetting to fill the civility, better raise their hand.
Capitalizing the first name, putting the first name in the "first name" field, and the last name in the "last name" field are the foundation for hyper-personalizing your Cold Emails and marketing campaigns.
Do not update obsolete data directly in your CRM
Obsolete data means that a contact has not been updated following an important change: company change, company reorganization that leads to a different adress, change of position, or transfer... Without any automated tool, it is almost impossible to identify them in real-time...
This is sometimes the job of interns during the summer, imagine the difficulty of the task... Having clean, standardized data in your CRM seems a bit difficult...
That was before Dropcontact was integrated into the biggest CRMs on the market like Hubspot, Pipedrive and Salesforce.
It has become so easy to maintain your CRM and keep it up to date.
How to keep your customer and prospect database up to date in your CRM in 7 steps
Understand your contact data sources before integrating them into your CRM
The very first thing to do before entering the data into your CRM is to ask yourself one question: Where is my data coming from?
✅ From a landing page, my emails, a webinar, an organized event, a business card received at a trade show...
❌ From a purchased database, from a "recovered" database that was lying around in a corner...
The GDPR is a key element, not to be underestimated.
According to the Data Protection Regulation and the CNIL :
In cases where the processing is based on consent, the controller can demonstrate that the data subject has given his consent to the processing of personal data concerning him (Article 7 No. 1 of the General Data Protection Regulation).
"The subject of the solicitation must be related to the profession of the person being canvassed (e.g.: message presenting the merits of an HR solution at paul.hochon@nomdelasociété.com, human resources director.)"
If your target is B2B, then it is quite possible to prospect and enter new contacts in your CRM as long as this person has a legitimate interest in being targeted.
Also, it is essential to give your contact the possibility to unsubscribe easily and quickly.
⚠️ However, it is formally forbidden by the CNIL and the GDPR to store a nominative database and resell it... and therefore to buy a stored database...
🔎 Learn more about the GDPR in B2B
Standardize your data in your CRM
Standardized, classified and updated data are the foundation for 100% personalized and effective Cold Email campaigns! The first name in the first name field, the last name in the last name field, etc... but how? Dropcontact, integrated into a CRM, will automatically detect the content of the fields and classify them if necessary, as well as standardize them and make them usable.
- Standardizing the capitalization of the First Name and Last Name
- Adding the civility
- Detecting the inversions First Name / Last Name
- Removing the special characters or emojis
- Adding and standardizing the business phone number
- Standardizing the company address
- Standardizing and cleaning the LinkedIn URLs (profile and company)
Everything is... automatic, adding or updating a contact or company record automatically triggers Dropcontact.
Detecting and deleting duplicates in your CRM
Detecting duplicates is not an easy task... Dropcontact has developed its algorithms in order to identify contact and company duplicates, even if they have no common fields.
Automatic merging goes even further by managing information conflicts, and allows you to consolidate data from multiple contact records.
As soon as a new record is added, Dropcontact increases the power of your CRM by detecting and especially merging automatically and without any manual action the duplicates, before it can be sent in an automatic workflow or an emailing campaign.
Discover more about duplicates detection and merging
Correct data entry errors automatically in your CRM
One of the worst things about filling out your CRM is spending time completing everything but.... making data entry errors 😱
Dropcontact integration instantly corrects potential typing or data entry errors.
It's automatic, you don't have to think about anything 😘
Error detection and automatic correction as soon as the record is completed frees up the mind and time of your Market & Sales teams.
Enrich and update your data regularly and automatically in your CRM
A complete contact record is:
- Civility
- First name
- Last name
- Function
- Business email validated, up to date, and even better if qualified
- Professional phone number
- Linkedin profile
- Company
A complete company record is:
- Company business name
- Legal name
- Company website
- Standardized postal address
- Standardized phone number
- Company LinkedIn page
- VAT Number
- SIREN number
- Industry
- Size of the company
All these elements are essential in order to create your targets and segments, and hyper-personalize the communication campaigns, Cold Emails... or simply to save time before calling a prospect.
Once again, when creating a contact form, you just have to fill in the first name + last name and the company of a person, or only their LinkedIn profile, so that their form and that of their company are automatically enriched and updated.
As for the company form, the name of the company (if it is discriminating enough) or even better the website is enough for Dropcontact to automatically enrich its form with all the updated legal data
💡 Don't wait until it's too late! The best practice is to enrich, correct, standardize, detect a potential duplicate and merge it as soon as a contact or a company is added to the CRM or when a record is updated.
With the automation of the enrichment in its CRM, the Market & Sales teams save on average more than one hour per day. That's more time spent on sales than on less exciting tasks such as copying and pasting contact information.
Synchronize your data between your mailbox and your CRM
Have you ever wondered which data you have in your possession is the most up-to-date and the most certain to be correct?
By connecting your email inbox to your CRM, your contacts are updated according to the activity of your team's email inboxes:
- Update email addresses that are bouncing around
- Centralized activity tracking for all teams: Marketing, Sales, Customer Success...
- Recovering nominative phone numbers present in signatures 🪄
🔥 Dropcontact automatically detects if a person has changed company, then updates the person's record and immediately alerts the teams
Involve the entire Sales team in CRM management
An up-to-date, clean and optimized CRM cannot be without the involvement of all teams: Marketing, Sales, Customer Succes...
Involving all your teams induces a pooling of all the contact data of each one and thus avoids multiple points of contact, doing things several times... and guarantees an up-to-date CRM!
🎯 To go further and reach your goals!
-> Clean your Hubspot CRM
-> Clean your Pipedrive CRM
-> Clean your Salesforce CRM
