Having worked with several sales teams, I’ve come to understand there is an almost unanimous hatred for entering data into CRMs. Sales, I get it – if you’re typing, you’re not talking, and talking is how you believe you’re going to land customers, get your commissions and pay your bills.
What if I told you, you’re only half right? It comes down to bad data and dead data. From the minute a list of prospects is built, it is becoming invalid… people are retiring, getting fired, changing companies or you name it – they’re simply no longer where you just figured out they’d be.
So, what’s the value in updating your CRM fields for every person in your prospect pool that you contact? Simple – the better the data that you can provide back to your Marketing team, the quicker they can assess the value of the sources of their information. They can also work on your behalf to find new and alternate contacts faster.
List building tools such as Hoovers (not to nitpick, but to highlight one example) charge you for access to their database and also to download people’s names. By entering updated data as you find it into your CRM, you are communicating back to Marketing vital information. For example, if you should discover a trend – everyone you’ve tried to reach that came from the new XYZ list tool is long gone, you could help Marketing to stop investing in that tool. Not only would you be saving yourself time by not calling outdated and bad contacts, you’d be saving marketing budget that could be spent on a superior list service.
Does all data matter to marketers? No, but here’s a quick rundown of what probably matters to us:
- Correct spelling of company’s name
- Correct spelling of contact person’s first and last name
- Valid email address for the contact
- Valid phone number for the contact (direct dial preferred)
- Date of last outreach (Why do we need this? Well it’s not because we want to manage you – it’s because we are doing our best to assess the validity of that contact’s employment – dead data, remember?)
- Postal mailing address (This helps us save time and effort when it comes to setting up meetings for regional sales people. Also, it can help save time for creating direct mail lists.)
- Valid lead source (This will depend on how you’ve set it up internally, but it’s good to know where we discover people so that we can do it again.)
- Are they a duplicate entry person? If John Doe works at ABC Company – we don’t need multiple entries to tell us that. For example: John W. Doe at ABC Company or John Walter Doe at A.B.C. Company or John Doe at ABC Co.
Note: On behalf of all Marketers, if you have a system that rewards your sales team for every new person they enter into your CRM – please have a penalty system for people who knowingly enter bad and duplicate data into the system.
Remember when I said you were only half right? Well, here’s the deal – if you’re dialing dead numbers or getting bounced emails, you’re not closing deals either. Work with us to get the best house list possible with the most up to date information. It’s an uphill battle we all have to fight. Thanks for working with us.
To summarize, try to keep your prospects’ contact information as clean and up to date as possible so that Marketing can work to help Sales find new contacts or better contact information.