It’s 2024. You know by now that storing information in your customer relationship management (CRM) tool is the smart way to keep updated records, improve customer service, and drive sales and revenue. But did you know that a recent HubSpot study found that only 45% of companies actually use CRM to store their lead and customer data? An astounding 55% are still relying on spreadsheets or text documents . . . even paper. 

While the thought of managing customer information without a CRM is overwhelming enough, just having a CRM isn’t going to solve all your problems. That’s because you also have to keep all that CRM data clean and organized.

Like cleaning out your closet, keeping your CRM data clean might feel like an overwhelming project, but it doesn’t have to be. And if clean CRM data is crucial to your organization’s success, it’s probably something you should be doing. 

Why Does Clean CRM Data Matter?

First let’s look at why it’s so important to regularly update your CRM data and keep it clean. 

For starters, if you’re not paying close enough attention, your CRM data will quickly become obsolete. If your data is too bloated, it won’t do your organization any good. Consider how long it could take team members to find the correct info if they have to dig through a lot of old, inaccurate data. 

But it’s not just about saving you time, although that is important. Improving your CRM data hygiene so it stays clean results in improvements in:

• Data accuracy
• Targeting
• Customer retention
• Precise sales forecasts
• Analysis and data-driven decisions

All of those are likely contributing factors to why you got a CRM solution in the first place. So make sure you’re getting a good return on that investment by keeping the data clean.

Steps to Keep Your CRM Data Clean

Now that you know why you need to keep CRM data clean, let’s look at the how. Since experts estimate that as many as 25% of B2B CRM contact records have a critical error, make a point to audit your data and look for errors like duplicates, inconsistent data, missing data, invalid data, or low-quality sets of customer data. 

 

Clean
Clean CRM data starting with updating email addresses and phone numbers. Did you find duplicate customer records in the system? Figure out which is the most recent and delete the other(s). If the overall health of your CRM database is what keeps your lead generation moving forward, plan to run regular audits of your customers’ contact details, then update the CRM accordingly. Be sure to remove unresponsive leads or those who have opted out of receiving information from you—continuing to send emails to those contacts will only hurt your business, tempting as it may be to keep reaching out “just in case.” 

Add
Adding new data to your CRM? Make sure it’s clean from the get-go and aligns with your existing data fields. Consistent formatting and import processes will help ensure that new data will align to existing storage methodologies. 

Maintain
Once you have your CRM data cleaned up, you have to keep it clean. Gathering new data? Better check the quality. Especially if the data came from a form fill, double check for typos to ensure email addresses are correct and names are spelled right. This is also known as data enrichment: correcting contact-based inaccuracies, spelling mistakes, and any missing details. 

 

But all this can’t be a one-person job: It has to be the responsibility of the entire team. Brief your current team on how to roll data management into their everyday tasks and work on stamping out those bad habits—like putting information in a spreadsheet or email folder to update “later.” Onboard any new CRM users with the set expectation that they will help maintain data health, and how. And, make sure higher-ups have CRM data management training, too. The more leaders realize how important leveraging accurate data is, the more it will roll downhill to the rest of their team.

Maintain Data Cleanliness with CloudExtend

All of that may sound great, but there’s still the actual work of keeping your CRM data clean, which feels like a tall order. Updating your CRM data doesn’t have to be as daunting a process as it sounds. Rather than filing a customer email away to update their new address later, or writing yet another sticky note to put on your desk, or dropping info into a spreadsheet to add to your CRM when you get that magical thing called “free time,” there are automatic solutions designed to help keep your contact records up to date. 

Consider first that 124.5 billion work emails are sent and received every day. Your average employee alone will exchange 125 emails per day. Many of those emails will contain important customer information that would go great lengths toward clean and accurate CRM data, but how much of it actually gets into the CRM? 

What if it could end up in your NetSuite CRM automatically? 

That’s why CloudExtend built ExtendSync, an email to NetSuite CRM integration app that works with two fo the most popular business emails solutions, Microsoft Outlook and Gmail, to allow users to create, edit, and delete NetSuite contact records as well as automatically attach emails to records by thread or email address, all without ever having to click out of their inbox. 

Surveys are showing that less than half of sales professionals use their CRM on a daily basis. Not only that, 40% of them rely on Excel and email to store client information. Whichmeans that CRM data is incomplete, data quality suffers, and the business as a whole pays the price. It’s clear: Organizations that want to thrive need to have robust and accurate data in their CRM. And you can do that easily and automatically with ExtendSync. 

>>Here’s how Noon International saves 100 hours / year with email and CRM integration

Try inbox integration for yourself with two free weeks of ExtendSync for Outlook or Gmail. Get started here.