With each new year the value of data continues to rise for marketers, and 2016 will be no exception. The data you capture in your CRM database is now mission critical, which means you need to be doing it better, and cleaner, than you did in 2015. With important decisions such as campaign budgeting, targeting, and overall strategy being made based on the data captured in your CRM records, you can’t afford to have dirty or incomplete data. It is crucial to start off next year with flawless data and have the right tools in place to ensure you are capturing all of the data your marketing team needs. To get you started, here are 5 ways to sharpen your CRM data before 2016:
1. Mark Your Old Leads and Opportunities Dead While You Still Can
Salespeople don’t like to give up. It’s just not in their nature. This means they don’t like to mark their leads and opportunities as dead before they are absolutely sure they will never win that deal. Eventually, they are forgotten about and you wind up with a bunch of bad data in your CRM system. This misrepresents valuable metrics such as lead generation, win rate, or pipeline value, making it hard for marketing decisions to be made. These numbers are measured on a regular basis to evaluate marketing campaign success, and it is important to start off the new year without them being skewed by bad data.
2. Deduplicate, Deduplicate, Deduplicate
Having duplicate records is an issue that causes headaches for both sales and marketing. Salespeople hate having to figure out which record to use and live in fear of contacting another rep’s contact. With heavy adoption of marketing automation, marketers have to be extremely careful about who gets pulled into their marketing campaigns (imagine sending a nurture email to an existing client!). Duplicates will artificially inflate your marketing and sales data, which makes it hard to be confident about your data-driven decisions.. It’s never a fun task, but it is better to go through the deduplication process now than carry all of those dupes over to the new year. You will start 2016 with cleaner data and have made life much easier for both marketing and sales.
3. Update Your Reporting for 2016 Objectives
CMOs are hard at work planning for next year. This usually means new, lofty objectives for your marketing team, as well as the strategies and campaigns you will implement to achieve them. Any type of strategy change needs proof of success as soon as possible to ensure everyone it was the right direction. This means you need reporting ready to go for January 1st to start measuring the success (or failure) of these new marketing efforts. Setting these reports up early also allows you to evaluate the data you currently capture and fill in any crucial holes before January 1st rolls around.
4. Implement New Validation Rules
It’s a pretty well known fact that sales reps don’t exactly enjoy entering data into their CRM system. It’s understandable, considering that the time spent entering data is time not spent selling. However, this data is critical to understanding what is happening to the marketing leads to generate, how your marketing is advancing deals, and who your ideal customers are. If you aren’t capturing enough data, or maybe just not the right data, then it is likely time to introduce new validation rules. These are rules that require a field to be completed before the record can be saved and can be implemented at different stages of the sales cycle. These rules will ensure your sales reps are filling out the fields necessary to your marketing optimization efforts. Just make sure not to overdo it with the validation rules as this has been known to incite rioting on the sales floor.
5. Introduce New Automation Tools
Capturing the right data to satisfy marketing in addition to not overburdening your sales reps with required fields is somewhat akin to walking on a tightrope between skyscrapers. Pleasing both sides often seems impossible. But alas! There is a way to achieve both increased data capture and decreased burden on your sales reps! The secret to data capture nirvana is automation. With new technology advancements come new automation tools that will make everyone happy. Now, you can implement tools to record the emails your reps are sending, automate the sharing and data capture for marketing content, and automatically capture phone calls in activity records. The list goes on. All of these things allow your reps to spend more of their time selling while simultaneously increasing the amount of data being captured.
It’s crunch time: we only have 41 days left in 2015 and the holidays reduce that number even further. Make sure you have taken the appropriate steps to clean up your CRM data and prepare your database for the year ahead. Data has become more valuable than ever – make sure your company is setup to take advantage of it. One of the most valuable ways to set yourself up for data success in 2016 is to capture inbound call data in your CRM. This kind of technology gives marketers valuable insight into how their campaigns are driving offline conversions. If you want to see this kind of solution in action, request a personal demo today.
