Fixing CRM Data

We are currently completing three projects where clients need to take a more focused view on what types of company they target and what types of result they should expect. This means giving the sales team the right data in their prospecting system and removing the rubbish that can waste so much time and effort. In reality, ineffective data management policies mean that there are large numbers of duplicates, other records aren’t coded for SIC and size and enquiries are often not taken through to a final Win / Lose conclusion. Then of course, everyone has their own idea of who they ought to be trying to contact! Our approach is to remove the ‘rubbish’ and enhance the remaining data with the right internal qualifiers. It’s common for the customer data to be fragmented and inaccurate on CRM if there isn’t live integration, so it’s possible to run a merge against relevant accounting data to make sure that the sales team have an up to date picture of sales. We then allocate SIC code, size and other relevant external qualifiers to the data and then run detailed analysis to identify the best sectors to target.		A company needs an improved approach to Business Development, with bigger targets and better share of account penetration, while using a CRM system that is tired and bursting at the seams with old, irrelevant data, and has no ability to understand how important individual data is or could be.		Go back to basics, strip out the rubbish and get the surviving data right. Create a data audit to understand how bad your data quality is, then remove all the duplication, analyse your markets to identify best opportunities, enhance the data within your CRM to allow you to prioritise it, enhance with external qualifiers like SIC and size information and internal ones around cross-sell and churn potential, suppress records that are time wasters and then redirect your new prospecting activity to the areas where you get best return.
Finally we add new records to the required standard and overlay all companies with a Sales Potential score, to make targeting easier. The acid test for the deliverable should then be: Can I direct my prospecting activity where it will get much higher returns Can we create specific cross sell campaigns targeted at existing customers Can we isolate the customers that are most likely to leave us, and spend more time in improving their satisfaction levels Can we stop wasting large amounts of budget on talking to people where it isn’t worth our while We all know that business development is a numbers game, and small improvements in basic processes can get disproportionate results. There isn’t anything more basic than improving your prospecting efficiency and targeting. If it’s done properly, the results can be spectacular.