What is CRM Data Maintenance? Key steps and procedures to follow

91% of companies with more than 11 employees use a CRM system, statistics show.

Its benefits are unbeatable for any B2B business: CRM software strengthens customer relationships, automates workflows, provides actionable data, improves collaboration, manages sales pipeline, and more.

But there’s a catch. A CRM will not boost your revenue by itself.

It depends on the CRM strategy you implement and what you do with the CRM data you obtain.

And there's another catch. Around 30% of CRM data become outdated after 1 year. That's why CRM data maintenance is critical.

In this article, you will learn everything you need about keeping your CRM data up-to-date, and the key maintenance procedures you should do regularly.

What is CRM Data Maintenance?

CRM data maintenance is the ongoing process of managing and updating the data within a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.

This includes ensuring that customer information is accurate, complete, and up-to-date, removing duplicates, correcting errors, and periodically verifying data integrity.

Effective CRM data maintenance ensures the reliability of the CRM system for informed decision-making and effective customer interaction.

Why is CRM data maintenance important?

To put it simply, CRM data maintenance is crucial because it ensures that the customer information within your CRM system is accurate, complete, and up-to-date.

This reliability in data helps you to achieve multiple broader goals, such as:

1. Improve Customer Relations: Accurate data allows for personalized and effective communication with customers, enhancing their experience and satisfaction.
2. Increase Sales Efficiency: Sales teams can rely on up-to-date information to focus their efforts on qualified leads, reducing wasted time and improving conversion rates.
3. Enhance Marketing Campaigns: Clean and segmented data enable more targeted and successful marketing efforts, increasing ROI.
4. Support Informed Decision-Making: Managers and business leaders can make better strategic decisions based on reliable, comprehensive data.
5. Reduce Operational Costs: Maintaining clean data helps avoid errors and unnecessary processes, thus saving time and reducing costs associated with data correction and missed opportunities.

In essence, CRM data maintenance directly impacts the efficiency and effectiveness of your customer-related operations. This leads to better business outcomes.

5 key steps in CRM data maintenance

Lucas Perret, the sales operations manager at lemlist, streamlines revenue processes and drives daily growth with tech and workflow automation.

Lucas shared the most important procedures he takes to make sure his CRM data is up-to-date.

Lucas explained that CRM data decays quickly: “People switch companies and job roles. Around 30% of CRM data become outdated after 1 year.”

CRM data maintenance: 5-step framework

1 Step: Have a process to avoid duplicates during import.

“Use email or LinkedIn URL as a unique ID for contact. And domain and company LinkedIn URL for companies.”

“Normalize domain format to avoid having duplicates, like lemlist.com and https://lemlist.com,” Luccas added.

He recommends formatting all domains in this format ‘{domain}.{tld}’.

2 Step: Do not hesitate to delete old data.

“If a lead has not been used for more than one year, and there are no interactions with a salesperson, you can delete it from your CRM,” Lucas assured.

3 Step: Verify email addresses before outreach.

“If you are prospecting a list of CRM contacts,” Lucas explained, “make sure to verify their email before sending the sequence. You can do that natively using lemlist.”

4 Step: Create a report to make sure the sales team completes all the fields.

“Usually, sales teams have to fill in info about their prospects. Like the tool stack they are currently using, the pains they have, and so on.”

Lucas said that the best way to ensure all fields are completed is to create a dashboard that displays records where data is not completed correctly.

“The manager can check it every week and ensure each rep adds the info,” he said.

5 Step: Automate processes.

According to Lucas, manual steps can bring errors.

“You should always automate when possible to avoid the risk of human errors. Here are the things we automate at lemlist:

• Lead enrichment: we get info like company size, industry…etc. automatically
• Meeting log
• Deal creation
• Lead source completion
• Contact import
• Monitor job changes.”

Neglecting CRM data maintenance leads to lost revenue

If businesses neglect their CRM data maintenance, there will be signs that your CRM data is not in a good state.

Lucas listed some of the most warning signs to look out for:

• A lot of outdated data
• High bounce rate
• A lot of duplicates
• Inaccurate reporting

“They lead to inefficiencies and missed revenue,” Lucas concluded.

CRM data maintenance: Main Benefits

Doing your CRM data maintenance regularly gives you a list of benefits:

1. Data cleansing ensures that customer communications are not duplicated and sales efforts are streamlined.

Regularly scanning the CRM database for duplicate entries of the same customer and merging them into a single record to prevent redundancy.

2. Data validation helps in maintaining the effectiveness of communication channels and prevents errors in reaching out to customers.

For example, you may want to double-check that phone numbers entered follow a specific format (e.g., including country codes) and that email addresses are correctly formatted and belong to valid domains.

3. Data enrichment provides a more comprehensive view of the customer, enabling personalized marketing and service.

For example, you may want to add and update additional information to customer profiles.

It can include social media handles, purchase history, or demographic details gathered from public records or surveys.

4. Regular updates help to keep all the contact information in your CRM up-to-date.

They ensure that communications are delivered effectively and reduce bounced emails and delivery failures.

Simple things like updating customer addresses after they move to a new location or changing contact details when they switch phone numbers or emails, can be a game-changer in lead nurturing.

5. Data segmentation helps in targeting specific customer groups with tailored marketing campaigns or sales strategies.

You can categorize all your customers based on specific criteria such as purchase behavior, geographic location, or engagement level in your CRM.

6. Handling inactive contacts will keep your CRM database lean.

It will shift your focus on engaged and active customers, making sure you don’t waste time and effort where you don’t have to.

This will improve overall efficiency and sales performance.

7. Automating workflows in your CRM reduces all the manual efforts and ensures that data maintenance tasks are consistently performed.

Think of setting up automated rules within your CRM to flag incomplete records or send reminders for missing information.

8. Audits and regular reviews help in identifying long-term trends or recurring issues in data entry practices, allowing for strategic improvements.

Performing data integrity checks will help you to identify and correct inconsistencies in your customer data.

Through habitual CRM data maintenance procedures, businesses will maintain the quality and reliability of their CRM data.

In turn, this will ultimately lead to better customer interactions and more informed business decisions.

Key Takeaways

CRM data maintenance is crucial for the successful use of a CRM system, ensuring that customer information is accurate, complete, and up-to-date.

This process impacts customer relations, sales efficiency, marketing effectiveness, decision-making, and operational costs.

It involves removing duplicates and merging records to streamline communications, ensuring correct formats for phone numbers and email addresses, and adding extra information like social media handles and purchase history.

Effective CRM data maintenance leads to improved customer interactions and better business decisions, ultimately enhancing overall business performance.