CRM Data Management

CRM is a vital tool for the success of your sales and marketing efforts. The data contained in your CRM when taken care of and used properly can fuel up your business with effective sales. Left unattended, it becomes an impediment to growth.

If you’re facing any issue with your CRM data management like most companies. You’ve invested countless hours and dollars implementing a CRM system to help keep your database organized and business development teams aligned, but this alone would not bear any results. Having a centralized system that enables your team to sell in a way that has a positive impact on growth and manage your contacts and accounts is necessary.

Your CRM should have high-quality data for your team to fully understand the potential of the CRM investment. Your sales rep should not be involved in non-selling administrative tasks. So, if you want to see the maximum return from your CRM spend, focusing on reducing non-selling administrative tasks and data collection for users’ needs to be your top priority. Free up those hours your people spend on CRM data management so they can spend them on something better, such as building stronger relationships and closing more deals.

You need to deploy CRM data management practices to help your team overcome the two most common CRM challenges: increasing CRM user adoption and improving overall data quality.

Here, are tips to keep your CRM data healthy and improve your user adoption.

1. UNDERSTAND YOUR CRM END-USER NEEDS |

Each week, the average user spends 5.5 hours on CRM management, either entering data or logging activities. A significant portion of that time is spent on meeting preparation, administrative activities, proposal generation, or manually entering data into CRM.

The administrative commitment raises the cost of CRM for both your organisation and the users who are responsible for data maintenance. That is a lot of time to ask lawyers, accountants, and other business professionals who want to maximise client-facing billable hours, especially in the professional services industry.

So, how can an organisation relieve its users of the burden of data entry? First and foremost, your CRM must be designed to accommodate your users’ individual preferences. A well-designed CRM can simplify the process for users, making it easier for them to interact with the platform and removing unnecessary click paths for adding or updating data.

2. DEFINE A STANDARD CRM DATA MANAGEMENT PROCESS FOR TEAMS |

Leadership plays a pivotal role in the implementation of a successful CRM system. Clear instructions and directions around how to use the technology by sales and business development teams, should come from leaders. A natural outcome is to see data quality erode due to incomplete contact records, duplicate data, and out-of-date information.

User workflows and CRM data management processes that are clearly defined can help streamline data collection. For example, all the business-critical data required by our sales organisation to create new records are required fields on our lead, account, contact, and opportunity records. We have established a standard for the level of data quality required to create new records as an organisation, and our technology process supports this effort.

When entering data into CRM without following a set process, vital contact information or account details may be overlooked. Your organization’s data will be more accurate and detailed for sales and marketing campaigns if you require a specific set of demographic and firmographic information in CRM.

3. DON’T GO OVERBOARD WITH DATA COLLECTION |

When creating new contacts, accounts, and opportunities, be wary of requiring too much information from your users. Keep the CRM users at ease and give them a free hand for creating new contacts by only asking for the information you need the most to effectively manage customer relationships.

You can always go back and add more information to improve the quality of the information once the contract has been created. You can go for any data enrichment tool to add relevant customer data on accounts or contacts in the CRM. These tools also identify when data changes over time, which allows users to keep their CRM up to date.

You can always have your CRM team or data keepers work on a cleaning update over time if you don’t have CRM automation software or data enrichment services. When manually managing data integrity, the risk of human error and incomplete data is much higher.

4. ENABLE USERS TO SEE THE VALUE OF CRM |

The success of your CRM system largely depends on the quality of data. The system won’t have any data if users don’t use it. User adoption is one of the largest challenges of successfully deploying CRM. So, your employees must take ownership of their data management and data quality? And how would you ensure that?

You can eliminate the heavy lifting of meeting preparation and research by providing users with valuable intelligence from CRM systems and practices when and where they need it.

Use the pre-meetings digest reports that come equipped with insights into recent company news, meeting notes, historical email interactions, CRM information, relationship intelligence, social intelligence, meeting attendees, and more.

Another effective strategy for increasing motivation and engagement is to create training programs that include positive reinforcement such as rewards, gamification, or prizes. Gamifying training allows you to create a fun learning environment that helps users get over their fear of new technology.

Lastly, a simple rewards-based approach works, as well. Create dashboards and scorecards that showcase which users are the “leaders” in adoption. These types of scoreboards help create healthy competition across sales teams.

5. NEVER STOP TRAINING AND COACHING USERS |

You open the opportunity for questions from the team by hosting a monthly open forum training session for users. Creating a library of educational assets that address common user adoption issues can also help users who are having trouble adjusting.

If using additional software to integrate training isn’t an option at your company, I’ve seen customers set up a pop-up support desk similar to an Apple Genius Bar. They could provide users with a convenient place to receive one-on-one, face-to-face training by putting their CRM support staff in central locations like the cafeteria, lobby, or a designated conference room.

6. AUTOMATE MUNDANE DATA ENTRY FOR USERS |

Organizations that have implemented a CRM system and want to increase user usage and engagement will need to turn to automation to help them feed cleaner, more accurate data into the system. CRM data automation not only saves users time by eliminating tedious data entry, but it also helps to fill in blanks, eliminate duplicates, and keep contact, account, and opportunity records up to date.

Summing-up

A Great CRM Starts with Great CRM Data Management!

As you can see, effective CRM data management is what makes the difference between profitable opportunities falling through the cracks and lucrative long-term customer relationships. By utilizing the data management best practices above, you can ensure your marketing, sales, and management teams are armed with all the valuable information they could need to optimize the entire sales process and do it in a streamlined manner. If you still need help or want to get a CRM system in place for your business get in touch with Shergroup today.

Find out how Shergroup can save your company money and ensure long-term growth by implementing optimized data management of the beneficial information held in your CRM platform. To know more on how we can help you contact us via our website www.shergroup.com.