Posted by Sarah Templeton on Tue, Oct 27, 2009
When speaking with a partner of a local law firm, he lamented about their database, "Just getting our holiday card list right requires a monumental effort!" Many times sales leads in the database are kept long past their shelf life which means they no longer hold any revenue potential and should be jetissoned.
A well-known stumbling block for anyone who has worked in marketing or sales is bad data. While there are many protective measures companies can employ to make sure they are operating with clean data such as Access Hoovers as a plug-in to Microsoft's Customer Relationship Management software, you will only realize the full potential of your marketing efforts using CRM with clean data. Though it seems trivial, even the distribution of holiday cards has created many a headache at professional services firms.
Database maintenance requires daily discipline, and a champion. Here are a few additional tips on how to maintain a clean contact database:
1. Only enter the data you need into CRM and filter out the junk. For example, after a trade show or conference, your stack of business cards was turned into a .csv file, which was later dumped into CRM. Are all these leads needed? Do they fit your target market? If not, get rid of them.
2. Follow a standard firm-wide convention. Define what a prospect is versus a lead versus an opportunity. Who is to follow up, and when? What information is required of all new entrants? When we began scrubbing our database, we had many accounts with just a last name, no first name and no other contact information.
3. Clear the orphans. If there are contacts there unassigned to a company, export them and sort by project or account manager. If they don't know who the person is, chuck it.
4. Append missing data. We are fortunate to have the Access Hoovers plug-in to our Microsoft Dynamics CRM program. With this, we can append account and contact data with just a few clicks.
5. At least once a quarter, run regular audits of the database. And once a week, hold a sales and lead tracking meeting to discuss new leads, follow up and next steps.
The old adage is garbage in, garbage out. It is difficult to create a good result when given bad input. Save yourself and your team member's from a few headaches by following the steps above to keep your own database clean and healthy, allowing you to focus on what's truly important: serving your clients.