The Basic Fundamentals of CRM Maintenance

Your CRM, or customer relationship management, technology is most likely an important part of your marketing and sales strategy. Companies like Salesforce, HubSpot, and ActiveCampaign are three of the top CRM platforms that businesses rely on to manage their customer and lead information.

While it’s tempting to assume that your CRM is an autonomous machine that you can set on the right path and watch it work, the reality is more complex than that. In this blog post, we’ll be reviewing why your CRM needs to be maintained and how to do that on a semi-regularly basis.

Why does your CRM need maintenance?

Just like a house needs spring cleaning and accountants review business finances at tax time, your CRM needs a good looking over every so often to run effectively and efficiently.

The basis of your CRM is customer and lead information and that’s always changing. People get new email addresses, move their residential address, change jobs, and have unexpected life events. Assuming your customer and lead information will stay the same over the time is simply not the case.

But it isn’t just contact information itself that should be consistently reviewed and formatted. The formatting of the field data, standardizations of common field entries, and other common errors all play a part in making your CRM less effective.

While it may sound daunting to go through your entire CRM database, we have a few tips on incorporating information reviews into your daily processes and the other steps you should take to clean up your database on a semi-annual basis.

How frequently does your CRM need check-ups?

Most CRM platforms suggest reviewing your CRM data at least every six months. Putting it off once a year or less frequently than that will turn a minor chore into a major obstacle on your to-do list.

Depending on the size of your CRM database and your buyer persona, you may find that every six months doesn’t make the most sense for your business. Putting a CRM review on your calendar every three months may fit better for your organization. Schedule a review every six months and if when it comes time, going through your database is a major undertaking, then a more frequent review process might be helpful.

You can also incorporate reviewing contact information into your sales and marketing process. Here are a few opportunities that come up frequently to institute a contact info review:

• Mass Emails: If you need to send a mass email to leads or customers, you want to make sure that they actually receive it. This is a great time to do a CRM review before sending out that mass email and getting a high bounce rate.
• Scheduling Meetings or One-on-Ones: If your sales reps are scheduling meetings or one-on-ones with customers and leads, this is the perfect time for them to ensure that they have that contact’s most up-to-date information.
• Customer Service Opportunities: If you have a customer service operation integrated into your business, most consumers are used to validating their email address, phone number, and home address when calling into customer support. Use this segment of the sales cycle to keep information up-to-date seamlessly.

What can you do to keep your CRM running smoothly?

And now for the nuts and bolts of reviewing your CRM database. This process is what we are referring to when we’ve been discussing reviewing and managing your CRM database with a CRM data cleanup:

1. De-duplicate records
2. Identify empty fields
3. Filter by “Last Review Date”
4. Review segmented lists
5. Identify unengaged contacts
6. Delete old emails and unused email templates
7. Identify fields that have inconsistent formatting
8. Maintain consistent casing across fields like names and addresses
9. Adapt consistent formatting across fields like phone numbers, addresses, and emails
10. Remove white space and unwanted characters in fields
11. Standardize job title fields, asset classes, industry specific information, etc.
12. Opt-out or delete contacts that have bounced or unsubscribed

These tasks don’t all need to be completed in a single session at your desk but provide a comprehensive look at all the tasks that should be done within a review cycle to keep your CRM running smoothly. Remember, your CRM is the foundation for your sales and marketing teams. If you have a weak and wobbly foundation, that’s going to affect your entire business.

Too busy to scrub your database? Totally overwhelmed by this list? Don’t even have a database but it sounds like something your small business needs? Four Tens is here to help in each of these situations!​ Get in touch with us today and we’ll help you find a solution to your digital marketing challenges?