How to clean your CRM data?

Customer relationship management is vital for all businesses, regardless of size, sector, or activity. The CRM is therefore the nerve center 🫀 of Sales and Marketing teams, and sometimes even customer support. Having up-to-date, organized, standardized, and accurate data is crucial... yet it's not that simple!

Over time, errors or inconsistencies appear in contact data in all CRMs, making them obsolete and unusable. Fortunately, we're giving you all the best practices to clean and maintain your CRM. 😘

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What are clean and accurate CRM data?

Contact data is at the heart of growth! Yet, it's often the weak link in the Sales and Marketing team chain. The cause? Outdated, expired, sometimes false, and often non-standardized data.

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Avoiding Duplicate Contacts and Companies in a CRM

Have you ever noticed that a significant part of your database contains duplicates, triplicates... sometimes even more 😱, both at the contact and company levels? A duplicate is a person or company that appears at least twice in your CRM. ‍Several reasons explain the presence of duplicates in a CRM:

• Multiple teams use the company's CRM, and due to lack of time, it's common not to check if the person already exists in the CRM before creating a new record.
• A person or company is entered into the CRM with a spelling error.
• A client or prospect changes companies and may be "reinserted" into the CRM as a new person instead of updating the original record.

The risk is contacting the same person multiple times, which affects the credibility of your message personalization.

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Avoiding Incorrect Data in Your CRM

When data is manually entered into the CRM, typos or errors can occur: incorrect title, reversing first and last names, incorrect email, or outdated email. It is also possible to have unwanted characters due to format incompatibility between the source and the database, or the insertion of emojis from a LinkedIn scrape, then direct import into the CRM. Incorrect data can have severe consequences on your sales strategy: high bounce rates, loss of credibility if personalization is incorrect. (Saying "Hello Sir" when addressing a woman can be somewhat vexing 😉).

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Enriching Incomplete CRM Data

A CRM is not Swiss cheese 🧀: it shouldn't have holes. However, databases often contain incomplete fields due to lack of time or simply because the information is not manually available. With each new entry, you should add the title, job position to target, business phone number, verified and up-to-date email address... Manually, it's true that this is complicated and somewhat tedious!

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Standardizing Non-Normative Data in Your CRM

Anyone who has never quickly entered data into their CRM without making the effort to capitalize names, or confusing first and last names, or forgetting to specify the title, raise your hand! Adding a capital letter to the first name, placing the first name in the firstName field, and the last name in the lastName field are basic steps for hyper-personalizing your cold email and marketing campaigns.

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Updating Obsolete Data Directly in Your CRM

Obsolete data refers to a contact that has not been updated following a significant change: change of company, reorganization leading to an address change, a change of position or transfer... Without any automated tools, it is almost impossible to identify these in real-time... It's sometimes the interns' job during the summer, and you can imagine how tedious that task is...

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Keeping Your CRM Data Clean, Updated, and Standardized

Having cleaned, standardized, and updated data in your CRM seems laborious... But that was before Dropcontact integrated with the biggest CRMs on the market like HubSpot, Pipedrive, and Salesforce.

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How to Keep Your Customer and Prospect Database Up to Date in Your CRM in 7 Steps

Understand Contact Data Sources Before Integrating Them Into Your CRM

The very first thing to do before entering your data into your CRM is to ask: Where do my data come from?

✅ From a landing page, emails, a webinar, an organized event, a business card received at a trade show...

❌ From a purchased database, or a "recovered" database that was lying around somewhere...

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GDPR is a key element not to be underestimated.

According to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the CNIL:

In cases where processing is based on consent, the data controller can demonstrate that the data subject has given consent to the processing of their personal data (Article 7(1) of the GDPR).

“The purpose of the solicitation must be related to the profession of the person being contacted (example: a message presenting the merits of an HR solution to paul.hochon@companyname.com, HR Director.)”

If your target is B2B, it is quite possible to prospect and enter new contacts into your CRM as long as the person has a legitimate interest in being contacted. It is also crucial to provide an easy and quick way for your contact to unsubscribe.

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⚠️ However, it is strictly forbidden by the CNIL and GDPR to store a personal data database and resell it... Therefore, buying a stored and resold database is not allowed.

🔎 Learn more about GDPR in B2B

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Normalize and Standardize Your Data in Your CRM

Standardized, organized, and up-to-date data is the foundation for 100% personalized and effective cold email campaigns! ‍First name in the first name field, last name in the last name field, etc... but how?

Dropcontact, integrated into a CRM, will automatically detect the content of the fields and classify them if necessary, standardize them, and thus make them usable:

• Standardizing the capitalization of First Name and Last Name
• Adding the salutation
• Detecting first name/last name inversions
• Removing special characters or emojis
• Adding and normalizing the business phone number
• Standardizing the company address
• Normalizing and cleaning LinkedIn URLs (profile and company)

Everything is automatic, the addition or update of a contact or company record automatically triggers Dropcontact.

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Detect and Remove Duplicates in Your CRM

Detecting duplicates is no easy task... Dropcontact has developed its own intelligence to identify duplicates of contacts and companies, even if they have no common fields.

Automatic merging goes even further by managing information conflicts and allowing you to consolidate data from multiple contact records.

As soon as a new record is added, Dropcontact enhances the CRM's power by automatically detecting and merging potential duplicates without any manual action, even before they can be sent into an automatic workflow or email campaign.

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Automatically Correct Typing Errors in Your CRM

One of the worst things when filling out your CRM is spending time completing everything only to make typing errors 😱. Integrating Dropcontact instantly corrects potential typos or input mistakes. It’s automatic; you don’t even have to think about it 😘. Error detection and automatic correction upon completing a record frees up the minds and time of Marketing & Sales teams.

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Enrich and Update Your Data Regularly and Automatically in Your CRM

A complete contact record includes:

• Salutation
• First Name Last Name
• Job Title
• Validated, up-to-date professional email (even better if qualified)
• Business phone number
• LinkedIn profile
• Company

A complete company record includes:

• Trade name of the company
• Legal name
• Company website
• Standardized postal address
• Normalized phone number
• Company LinkedIn page
• VAT number
• SIRET number
• Industry sector
• Company size

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All these elements are essential for creating your targets and segments, thus hyper-personalizing communication campaigns, cold emails, or simply saving time before calling a prospect. All useful information must be present in the CRM and, above all, kept up to date!

Again, when creating a contact record, simply entering the person’s first name + last name and company, or just their LinkedIn profile, ensures that their record and that of their company are automatically enriched and updated.

For company records, the company name (if sufficiently distinctive) or even better, the website, is enough for Dropcontact to automatically enrich the record with all up-to-date legal data.

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Synchronize Your Data Between Your Email and CRM

Have you ever wondered which of your data is the most up-to-date and most likely to be correct? Your email and those of your collaborators. Connecting your email to your CRM allows your contacts to update based on your teams' email activity:

• Updating email addresses that bounce
• Centralized activity tracking for all teams: Marketing, Sales, Customer Success...
• Retrieving personal phone numbers from email signatures 🪄

🔥 Dropcontact automatically detects if a person has changed companies. The tool then updates the person's record and immediately alerts the teams.

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Involve the Entire Sales Team in CRM Management

A CRM that is up-to-date, clean, and optimized cannot be achieved without the involvement of all teams: Marketing, Sales, Customer Success...

Involving all your teams means pooling all contact data, avoiding multiple points of contact and redundant actions, and ensuring a CRM that remains current!