The short answer to this question is: no. But the long answer is: it could and should be. A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Microsoft Dynamics is designed to support various departments within your organization and enable data-driven decision-making. So, we can say that your CRM is essential for successful business operations, but secretly, you can't trust the data within your CRM.
Outdated or incorrect?
Annually, at least 40% of your internal data becomes outdated. That might seem exaggerated, but below are some examples of data you use that quickly become outdated:
- Email addresses - People join/leave positions
- Address - Companies move
- Active companies - Companies go bankrupt, merge, or get acquired
- Financial health - This can even change on a weekly basis
And then we have data that is incorrect and you may not even be aware of it. Often, sales is responsible for entering data into the CRM, and that happens to be something sales doesn't see as necessary. This leads to human errors and unnecessarily pollutes your CRM.
A data cleanse
Think of it as a sort of data detox, a cleanse for your internal data. By securely having all internal data cleansed by an external party, you ensure that all outdated, incorrect, and even duplicate data is removed and replaced with the correct data.
Continuously repeating this process is, of course, an option, but then you'll find yourself exactly in the same place a year later as you are now. An automatic data cleanse prevents this problem. Such an automated cleanse can even reduce administration for sales and prevent erroneous data entry in the future.
Interesting read: Whitepaper – Data Detox
Adding extra data
Now that your data is clean, you can rely more on the data in your CRM system. However, there will undoubtedly be pieces of data that you may not have easy access to but are of great importance. Think of creditworthiness, signing authority, and the number of companies in the corporate structure.
See: dataxess: Information about all companies in the world in real-time in your CRM
Extra data can help sales identify cross- and upsell opportunities, creditworthiness can assist finance in assessing risks, and information about sanctions can be valuable to the legal department.
External data can also help build multiple types of dashboards based on, for example, industry codes. In short, possessing external data provides a goldmine of new insights for all departments.
Being able to trust the backbone of your operations, your CRM, is essential. But you're nowhere without the right data. Clean up your data and add external data for a reliable CRM, with a wealth of new insights.
