In 2022, 91% of businesses with 10 or more employees use CRM systems. Huge, right?!
Interesting fact: 65% of companies start using a CRM within their first five years in business.
That's why it's vital to configure and adapt your CRM with great tools that can clean, keep up-to-date, and process all data in the long-term.
Long term: it's the keyword to keep your CRM healthy
Why cleaning and keeping your CRM database up-to-date is necessary?
Once you have the key indicators from Neil Patel in mind, you will understand why keeping your CRM clean is SOOOOOO essential!
Outdated and obsolete data is one of the most common forms of bad data in CRM and marketing databases.
- 40% of email users change their email address at least once every two years
- 15% change it once or more times per year
- 20% of all postal addresses change every year
- 18% of all telephone numbers change every year
- 21% of all CEOs change every year
- 25-33% of email addresses become outdated every year
- 60% of people change jobs within their organization every year
That's so much data that becomes erroneous and outdated every year 😱 and… without realizing it you use them in your marketing campaigns, Cold Emails… That's a bad snowball effect. Your message is not relayed to the right audience, leading to a decline in the efficiency of your marketing efforts.
Messy CRMs cost a lot to your Sales Team, Marketing Team… and impact your brand's image in a bad way!
If you want to clean your CRM data and keep it up-to-date daily… you will spend more than 1 hour every day identifying changes, searching and (maybe) finding new data, and copying and pasting it.
Be honest, it's so boring! Your real value is elsewhere: Selling your amazing product is far more interesting.
How to clean up my CRM and my data
Normalize data and rewrite incorrectly formatted data
Normalization is the key to automating processes, in particular, Cold Email campaigns or other Marketing bots.
Try starting an email with "Hello {LastName}"… If your CRM data is not correctly filled in, all of your efforts will be ruined with only two words.
Writing your leads' and prospects' first and last names correctly (and in the right order 😉) is the first step to getting a clean CRM!
You can normalize your customized fields like:
- Gender
- Address (City and country included)
- Date (birthday, important event…).
💡The main goal is to write all these data with the same code and normalization.
Detect and merge duplicate data in your CRM
A duplicate data is a contact or a company present at least twice in your CRM.
Think about it… if there are several people in your Sales and Marketing team (probably 😉) or if you have some automated processes, you have duplicate data in your CRM for sure.
It's useless and you risk contacting the same person several times… Your credibility will suffer.
So it’s important that whoever finds the duplicate records updates them accordingly. To avoid this, each member of the team has to check if the lead or contacts is already in your CRM before adding a new record…
Don't panic, one (and only one) tool detects and merges all duplicate data: Dropcontact.
We will explain more.
Update outdated leads as soon as they change
Remember, between 25 and 33% of email addresses become outdated every year. And this percentage is going to grow.
So, having outdated data is more than common in business CRMs. You absolutely have to resolve this issue.
You have 2 possibilities:
- Check each contact every month, every semester, or every year manually.... and your CRM will drive you crazy
- Automatically identify (thanks to an email alert or a notification) when a lead, a prospect, or contact has changed to update it.
Of course, please choose option number 2 using a tool like Dropcontact 💚 or another below.
Keep your data thorough
Getting a new lead is more than just entering an email address. All of your CRM fields have to be completed.
The more information about the lead you have, the better your segmentation will be and the better your prospection will be.
Once more, keeping your CRM data clean and up-to-date manually takes a lot of time. You have better things to do 😘
Which tool to clean my CRM data and keep it up-to-date?
Dropcontact
The "All-in-one tool". Dropcontact is the only tool that meets at least 12 features to grow the performance of your CRM 🔥
- Email Finder
- Email Verifier
- Email qualifier
- Email correction
- Email addresses extraction to complete your CRM cards
- Business phone numbers enrichment
- Signature recovery (with an official Google certification)
- Job enrichment
- LinkedIn Contact finder
- LinkedIn Company finder
- Job change alert in real-time
- Detection and merging of duplicates
- Website finder
- Legal information finder
Moreover, Dropcontact is 100% GDPR-compliant because the tool doesn't use any database: only algorithms.
➡️ Discover the Dropcontact integration with most popular CRMs
Uplead
Uplead is a B2B lead generation tool that provides you with B2B contacts and company data.
UpLead has a database made of over 85 million contacts and over 14 million global companies, which refreshes its data every 30 days.
UpLead is integrated with Salesforce, Hubspot, Pipedrive, Zoho CRM, and Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM.
Tool integration allows you to find contact and company data and inject it directly into your CRM.
👉🏼 See UpLead vs Dropcontact comparison
Clearbit
Clearbit is a data platform using a database composed of over 200 million contacts to enrich your CRM data.
Clearbit allows you to get detailed inforomation about a company or a person from an email address, in order to better know your customer and prospects and personalize your marketing campaigns.
Clearbit can be connected with Salesforce and Hubspot to enrich data directly into your CRM.
👉🏼 See Clearbit vs Dropcontact comparison
Fullcontact
FullContact is a tool that allows you to enrich your contacts' professional and personal data, verify emails and identify duplicated contacts. It collects data on multiple online platforms (such as social media, messaging systems, Google Contacts, etc.), stores it in a database, and uses it to clean and enrich your own contacts lists.
👉🏼 See FullContact vs Dropcontact comparison
Million Verifier
Million Verifier is a tool that verifies your email addresses in your CRM.
Million Verifier checks your email addresses and removes bad emails from your database or CRM. It can include invalid emails or catch-all emails (according to your choice).
That is the one and only feature of Million Verifier… but it does it well 😉
👉🏼 See Million Verifier vs Dropcontact comparison
Dedupely
Dedupely's main feature is to detect duplicates in your CRM and merge them in bulk.
👉🏼 See Dedupely vs Dropcontact comparison
Nomination
Nomination is a french lead-generation platform, which gives you access to 400.000 B2B contacts info and allows you to filter your search with 50 criteria. With the nomination integration, You can connect the tool to CRMs such as Hubspot, salesforce, or Microsoft Dynamics 365.
The tool also allows you to create email campaigns with the B2B contacts you found through its database.
👉🏼 See nomination vs Dropcontact comparison
DiscoverOrg by ZoomInfo
DiscoverOrg is a B2B intelligence platform that provides contact enrichment thanks to database matching. The platform also allows you to find new leads and identifies matching contacts to avoid duplicates.
👉🏼 See DiscoverOrg vs Dropcontact comparison
LeadGenius
LeadGenius delivers exclusive B2B contacts and accounts data.
👉🏼 See LeadGenius vs Dropcontact comparison
Demandbase
Demandbase is an advertising, sales intelligence, and data company that provides multiple products. One of them is Demandbase Data Cloud, a service that allows you to clean the data in your CRM.
👉🏼 See Demandbase vs Dropcontact comparison
Debounce
DeBounce is a tool that allows users to check a lead's email addresses within a CRM. This is the main feature of the tool, but DeBounce also offers other features such as data enrichment and lead finding.
👉🏼 See Debounce vs Dropcontact comparision
ZeroBounce
Zerobounce is the tool that verifies your CRM email addresses thanks to an official integration with Hubspot or its third-party integration with Zoho CRM.
👉🏼 See Zerobounce vs Dropcontact comparision
Neverbounce
Neverbounce allows you to identify incorrect email addresses in your CRM or database. Neverbounce is integrated with Hubspot and Salesforce (Pardot).
The main purpose of Neverbounce is to increase your deliverability rate.
👉🏼 See Neverbounce vs Dropcontact comparision
Snov.io
Snov.io is a lead-generation platform, which finds and verifies your email addresses by collecting data through multiple data sources. The tool uses cloud-based data storage services, such as Amazon, MongoDB, and Hetzner, to store personal data.
Snov.io is integrated into Pipedrive CRM to push new Snov.io contact additions into your Pipedrive CRM!
👉🏼 See Snov.io vs Dropcontact comparison
My CRM is now clean 🔥 What's next?
Train your Sales team
Now that you have perfectly clean data in your CRM, you have to keep it up-to-date.
It's necessary to onboard your team with your new tool during your tests and before its full installation.
Your success will be determined by your team.
- Presentation of the new tool that will clean your CRM
- Benefits: your team will gain so much time and will be able to focus on its real value and passion: selling your amazing product or service
- How to use it and use it well
- Define rules for everyone on offers, quotes, and the conversation funnel. It's important to get everyone onboard 🤗 to maximize your effort.
Keep in mind, your CRM is the heart of your business, feed it !
- Don't forget to complete a report after calls, meetings, or other leads' interactions.
- Define the customized fields with your team. They have to be vital, pertinent, and useful for your business.
