Here’s a question for you: Why should you care about your CRM data? 

At first glance, that may seem like a ridiculous question. Your self-generated CRM data holds enormous value for your organization, from important prospect, lead, and customer records to contact details, purchase history, even demographics. The data in your CRM is what helps your business manage relationships and improve your customer service. 

Of course you should care about CRM data. 

Still, many businesses also purchase access to external data sources—think GWI Database and Target Group Index—for deep dive information on hundreds of thousands of respondents. This is by no means a bad tactic, but no purchased data will ever beat out the insights you can generate from your own CRM.

Which is why you need to care about your CRM data. 

CRM Data’s Immediate Value

The first question you’re probably asking is: Why will nothing else beat the insights from my own CRM data? 

Glad you asked. Here’s what your self-generated CRM data lets you do that purchased data does not: 

• Lets you know exactly who you’re talking to. The contacts in your CRM are real people with unique names, preferences, and behaviors.
• Provides real-time data. Ideally, your CRM is being updated every day (we can come back to that point later) so you’ve got in-the-moment intel on what’s going on so you can make the right decisions at the right time. 
• Gives you power. External data can be purchased by anyone, including your competitors. But your CRM data is only accessible to your organization and you can leverage it any time to collect more information from your contacts.
• Get as specific as you need. Depending on how well you collect data in your CRM, you can actually get some pretty specific information with details down to who opens your emails, who clicks on them, and who hasn’t engaged in months. 
• Tweak and improve. Your CRM data will help you uncover what’s working and what’s not so you can make adjustments, collect more data, and continually refine.

This is all well and good. It’s important to know what your contacts do on your website or with your newsletters and products. We’d never say that wasn’t important. 

But wait, there’s more.

Digging Deeper

Opens, clicks, subscribes . . . they all tell you what you need to know about how your contacts are interacting with your specific business. But it’s not telling you specifics about them. What are they doing with the other 23.75 hours of the day that they’re not interacting with your content or clicking “purchase” on your website? 

That human element, the insight into what makes your customers and contacts tick, that’s real gold within your CRM. And if you’re not using it, you’re really missing out. 

So what is this human element? You ask great questions. Let’s put it into a real-world scenario. You’re sending an email blast out to everyone who has purchased your Widget A in the last year. They may have purchased one, they may have purchased twenty. They may have purchased once, or repeatedly over the course of 12 months. 

You’ve got one customer who bought Widget A for a school project. Another that bought it for their organization and it’s used once or twice, while a third bought it for their business and now everyone wants one so they’ve purchased twenty more. You might even have someone who bought Widget A just because it looked cool. (Hey, we’re all guilty!)

And they’re all getting the same email. Which means there’s a very likely chance that the email you’re sending will only resonate with one subset of customer. The rest will find it irrelevant and will either delete shortly after opening, delete without opening, or worse: unsubscribe because you’re no longer meeting their needs with your Widget A content. 

Adding Human Segmentation to Self-Generated CRM Data

This is the gold mine of your CRM data: You can actually segment your customers with lifestyle information that helps you understand how they buy, why they buy, and how to better market to them. 

Remember, your self-generated CRM data gives you power. You can leverage it any time to collect more information from your contacts. 

Consider short surveys that give you a more exact overview of the human attached to the contact record. Anything that gives you insight into how and—more importantly—why your contact behaves as they do. In just a few minutes, you’ve got enough information to attach contacts to specific segments that will make a tremendous difference in the success rate of campaigns because you know exactly who to reach with what message. 

Adding human segmentation to your CRM data takes your CRM from just a list of information to a powerful resource full of valuable insights on your contacts. You’ll get a full 360-degree view of your customers and contacts, which in turn drives tailored strategies that improve customer satisfaction and of course, boost that bottom line. 

Final Thoughts on CRM Data

Remember how we said we’d get back to that “ideally your CRM is being updated every day” point? If you read that point and laughed, yeah, we get it. But updating your CRM data every day (so that you have accurate starting points for that human segmentation) is actually possible. 

And it starts by connecting the app where you get a lot of customer and contact information to your CRM so data flows effortlessly and even automatically. 

Consider how much easier it would be to segment your data if you could easily pull said data into your NetSuite CRM right from, say, your inbox. Contact updates their email? Gets a promotion and sends you details on the new person you’ll be working with at their organization? No problem. Open up the ExtendSync integration tab right in your inbox and edit an existing record, add a new one, or delete the one you no longer need. Attach one-off email messages to contacts for an accurate paper trail, or set messages to sync to records automatically based on email address or subject thread. 

Then take all that information and start adding in your human segmentation. It’s as easy as that—and you can try that email to NetSuite integration absolutely free for two weeks. Get started here.