Industry-leading companies always seem like they are a step ahead. They are proactive rather than reactive. They are faster when responding to issues and more innovative when expanding into new markets.
It’s almost like they have a crystal ball. The truth is that they kind of do!
The data they collect — whether it be in their CRM, accounting, or ERP system — is chock-full of key insights they need to make accurate predictions and forecasts.
The problem is that most companies are collecting so much data that managing it can quickly become overwhelming. This leads to disorganization and less focus on data quality. Low-quality data can paint a skewed picture of reality. If your data has issues, at best you are just slowing down progress, at worst you are moving in the completely wrong direction.
You need a data cleaning stategy to help your sales reps get access to clean CRM data.
Benefits of a Clean Sales System
One of the objectives of your sales system is to make sure sales can do their job efficiently and effectively. When your sales team has confidence in your CRM data and a reliable single customer view, they will be able to speak more directly to each customer’s biggest concerns and close high-opportunity deals more regularly. Your contact data is gold.
Imagine being a sales rep spending countless hours sorting & filtering bad data or inaccurate data to narrow down the best leads to follow up on. Not exactly how you’d probably like to be spending your time, right? Sales reps (and especially those with commission incentives) want to spend their time building relationships with prospects and selling your product.
Now imagine that process from an executive standpoint. To do their job effectively, they require reliable forecasting. Low-quality prospect and customer data makes those ends impossible. Your reports won’t paint an accurate picture if your sales team is too frustrated to use the system. Bad data kills confidence. Clean contact data builds confidence that empowers your sales teams.
Your sales system is an enablement machine that allows your sales team to do better homework on their prospects before their calls. With a clean sales system, your sales reps will have a full picture of every prospect and lead. Your lead scoring initiatives will be more accurate. Every touchpoint will feel like a continuation of a long-term conversation they’ve been having with your brand, rather than disjointed touchpoints. The customer experience will improve drastically.
Data cleaning improves customer success, your sales process, and your overall ability to deliver a consistent experience. There are few things as vital to a company's success as clean and reliable CRM data.
A clean sales system is a system that helps your sales teams sell more efficiently. But that requires a data cleansing process that helps to alleviate common data quality issues.
Critical Insights Beyond Sales
A primary objective of any marketing department is to deliver the right message, to the right people, at the right time. To do that effectively, they need to segment customer records properly using a variety of data points as their criteria. If contact properties aren’t populated with accurate and standardized data, you may have customers that are included in the wrong segment, fall outside of defined segments, or generally receive messaging that is not relevant to them.
After the sale is complete, the new customer is handed off to the customer service team. Their primary objective is to support the client during the onboarding process and towards a successful adoption of their product or service.
The data passed from marketing to sales to customer service plays a critical role in the buyer’s journey and turning new customers into lifelong evangelists.
Data cleanliness affects more than just sales. It will cause inefficiencies in any team that touches the CRM — including marketing, sales, support, success, and operations. It’s important to look at the bigger picture when analyzing your data.
If you were to pull a report using the data in your CRM, how confident would you be in using that data to make a strategic decision? In most companies, the answer is “not very confident.” But luckily, there are some simple steps that any company can take to drastically improve their data quality without a major investment of their time.
Data management can open up many doors for companies that invest in it.
Consider the Future
Finding opportunities to improve your data overtime is critical to the health of your entire sales system. Think of your sales system as a living and breathing organism. It requires constant attention to stay healthy, starting with a focus on quality of the data (food) that you put into it.
If your sales system is in an unclean state where you’re not sure you can confidently say anything about its current mechanisms or automation, you’ll never be in a strong position to optimize it. Improvement relies heavily on clean data.
Beyond a systematic standpoint, a clean sales system can help you identify new ways to cross-sell and upsell to prospects and existing clients and provide key insights into your existing processes. Knowing this information can open the floodgates to new ideas to adjust your marketing and sales strategies.
How Insycle Can Help
For your CRM to provide the best results, it's imperative that your data is maintained. If you don’t already have a customer data maintenance schedule and plan, create one. This is one of the greatest benefits a tool like Insycle provides. It’s a complete customer data management and maintenance solution that will work to your sales team’s advantage.
The ability to schedule consistent data maintenance that solves common data problems — formatting issues, identifying and merging duplicate data records, improving data consistency — is a tremendous time-saver. Your customer data the most important asset to your company.
As your sales process evolves, chances are your data collection and segmentation processes change over time as well. This results in inconsistencies in field values and formats along with a ton of archived data. Using Insycle, you can audit your entire database to identify and remedy data issues throughout your CRM. You need a complete data management and data cleansing solution.
More complex business models typically result in more integrations within your CRM. This also results in a higher probability for things to break and for inconsistent data to be added to your CRM.
For example, a HubSpot-Salesforce integration that transfers marketing analysis to sales teams can help close deals if HubSpot insights seamlessly flow through. However, small misalignments like the State and Country fields which may read as a single line text in Salesforce versus a dropdown field in HubSpot can cause big problems. Using Insycle’s Cleanse feature you can clean up those pesky sync errors that are easily overlooked, and enact an effective data cleaning strategy.
Clean data is only as valuable as your team’s willingness and ability to actually use it. Check out our website to learn how to supercharge your sales system and empower your sales teams.
About the author
Revenue River does strategy, system design, and industry-leading execution for those in pursuit of the cutting edge. We build modern sales systems to help teams win more business, but we’re more than just a sales system development team. We pride ourselves in standing beside sales teams through their journey to modernization. We believe those who are willing to learn new tricks and tactics just need a little help to succeed.
