Use of unique domain

This field is vital. It would help if you made it mandatory. Some companies use company names to identify records. Unfortunately, it is a flawed approach. CRMs are machines. If there is a slight difference in spelling, it will believe that it is a different record. The same applies to domains. You can have businesses operating in multiple countries and have domains ending with ".co.uk', '.com", and so on. The best way is to use the unique domain. Remember that it will not be one hundred per cent bulletproof, but it will avoid a lot of duplications.

Validate form data at source

Validating the data at the entry point is crucial to prevent any bad data from entering your database. There are lots of tools available that can help you validate email addresses, phone numbers and domains. Ideally, it would help if you flagged the bad entries on submission to enable your website visitor to make any changes, as it could be a typing error. Another way to do it is by implementing automation to validate the data before it enters your CRM. Companies such as Data Made Eazy can help you implement this process.

If you are reading this article, you already have a lot of data that needs cleaning. Here is what you should do:

Remove duplicates

We need to ensure that every single record is unique. To do this, we are going to use the unique domain approach. You can do this using Excel or creating a field in your CRM. We are including a link to one of our templates. After identifying the duplicates, we need to merge the accounts.

Data standardisation

The data needs to be consistent. For example, you need to decide whether or not you want the company name to include the legal entity such as "limited" or "ltd". If you are going to run some email campaigns and refer to the company name, consider not having the full legal name or creating a separate field in your CRM. The same applies to phone numbers. If you are doing business internationally, you may want to include the country code and ensure that all the numbers have the first "0" removed. If your sales team uses diallers, it will save them a lot of time. Some fields, including website address, company name, postcode and phone number, should be mandatory. It will prevent the creation of duplicate accounts.

Identify accounts with missing values.

To help increase the productivity of both your sales and finance teams, we need to ensure that all the accounts have the minimum information required, such as an address, web address, postcode, phone numbers and all your killer values.

Data enrichment.

The quickest way to append the missing value is to use a data provider such as Zominfo, or Cognism, to name a few. Some CRMs, including Salesforce and HubSpot, have plugins that will help you keep the data current. Some of you may be reluctant to use those providers because you fear some data will be inaccurate. Hundred per cent accuracy is unachievable. They all source the records from the same places, and nowadays, the quality is much better than ten years ago.

Once you have completed the steps above, it is essential to maintain the quality. Data can go obsolete very quickly. Two final steps will help you do that:

Automation

If you use a mainstream CRM and one of the providers mentioned earlier, their plugins will do that for you. Otherwise, you can use an API integration to get the same results. Data can become obsolete very quickly and need to be updated regularly. It is more than just a yearly audit. Implementing some internal processes to monitor the data quality would be best. For example, you can add a date field in your CRM to check the last time somebody updated the account. You can check how many accounts have some missing values through automated reports.

Finally, communicate with all your team members. Explaining the importance of data quality and its impact on your business will make a big difference. As many departments use CRM for different reasons, only some people realise the financial consequences poor data can have on a business.