Maximize CRM Hygiene: Best Practices for Clean Data & Emailing

Cleaning New Records

To keep a clean CRM, it’s crucial to promptly clean any new data that’s added to the system in order to prevent further clutter. 

Step 1: Fields

Mandatory Fields
To ensure complete records, set mandatory fields in your CRM that must be filled out before a record can be saved. However, limit these mandatory fields to essential information, like a full name and email address for people. Requesting too much information will deter people from simple actions, like signing up for a newsletter. You will always be able to fill in other fields later. Mandatory fields for accounts usually include the account name, account type, and contact information.

Custom Fields
Custom fields help you tailor your CRM to meet the specific needs of your business:

• For people, you can add custom fields for information like interests, preferences, or purchase history. 
• For accounts, custom fields might include details such as hours of operation, ownership structure, or the stage in the sales funnel. 
• Additionally, you can use dropdown menus, checkboxes, and other standardized inputs to add custom options to existing fields. 

To monitor the cleanup progress, create a “Verified” custom field (like a dropdown menu) for people and accounts. As team members review each record, they should update this field, allowing you to track the cleanup’s overall process. 

Unnecessary Fields
Your CRM comes with default fields that you may not need. You might also stop using some custom fields in the future. Removing unused fields can reduce clutter and make it easier to find the important fields. Remember that you’ll always be able to restore deleted fields.

Completing Records

To ensure accurate and complete records, inform your team about which fields they need to fill out, either through outreach or research.

B2B contact databases such as ZoomInfo and Lusha provide useful information such as phone numbers, social media profiles, and company websites, which can be automatically added to your CRM. However, it’s still crucial to manually inspect the synchronized information’s accuracy. These databases also help you identify potential prospects within the same company and similar businesses to target.

Step 2: Scrubbing New Records

Create two dynamic lists in your CRM – one for people and one for accounts – to capture new records. Make sure to regularly update the “Date Created” field and check these lists often. Consider using email alerts or messaging app integrations, such as Slack or Teams, to receive quick notifications about any new records. 

Clean new records following these steps:

• Check that mandatory fields are completed. If not, there’s an issue.
• Correct spelling, capitalization, and other obvious errors in the record, such as email addresses with “.con” or “gnail”.
• Manually check for duplicates that aren’t automatically detected. Remember to look for alternate names for people (e.g. “Bill” for “William”) and accounts (e.g. “Initech” for “Initech Inc.”).
• Group people who have a business email with others who share the same email domain and assign them to the same account, if applicable.
• If you have time, search Google and update the record with any additional contact details, websites, social media profiles, or news mentions found.
• Check if new information has synced to the record from your B2B contact database (if you bought one). If not, search the database to update it.

Assign each record to a team member and notify them. Once the team member confirms that all necessary information has been added, they should update the custom “Verified” field to mark the record as reviewed.

Cleaning Existing Records

To maintain a high level of CRM hygiene, manually review and clean existing records, similar to how you scrub new records but on a larger scale. You can use CRM functions like dynamic lists, bulk changes, and automations to make it easier. Another option is to download records as spreadsheets, edit them, and re-upload them into the CRM.

Dynamic lists are especially useful for cleaning data, both in the present and future:

• Use a filter to identify unverified records with missing or incorrect information that you want to focus on.
• Clean the records and change the custom Verified field to remove them from the list. Your goal is to have zero records left in each list.
• Don’t delete the dynamic lists, as they’ll be able help identify issues with any new records uploaded to the CRM.

It’s best for the team members who own the specific records to take responsibility for manual checks. Assigning a manageable number of records for each person to clean up weekly is ideal. 

Step 1: Eliminate Duplicates

To make manual cleanup easier, first remove duplicate people and accounts. This will decrease the number of records that require inspection and may also result in cost savings, as some CRMs charge based on the number of contacts.

Most CRMs come with a duplicate detection feature that compares fields such as name, email, phone number, etc. to find matches. However, keep in mind that merging duplicates still requires human input. 

If your CRM lacks a duplicate detection feature, consult your account manager or CRM consultant for alternative methods like automation rules or apps. You can also export your data to a spreadsheet. Excel and Google Sheets have built-in functions to identify duplicates. 

Step 2: Address Absent Data

To fix missing data in your CRM, like records without a name or email, use dynamic lists:

• Create filters to display unverified records with the specific field you need. 
• Start with missing mandatory fields and then address other missing fields based on your priorities. 
• After filling in the missing data, follow the same steps for scrubbing new records.  
• Update the custom Verified field to indicate that the record has been reviewed.

Step 3: Formatting

Keeping data consistently formatted is important for improving the CRM’s efficiency. It makes the data easier to understand and search through.

Certain CRMs can identify incorrectly capitalized or formatted data. If your CRM doesn’t have this feature, ask your account manager or consultant for help. This is faster and more accurate than reviewing lists manually. After fixing formatting errors, update the custom Verified field to indicate that the record has been reviewed.

Names

First & Last Names
To ensure proper capitalization of first and last names, create a dynamic list to identify records that don’t begin with a capital letter, then manually correct them. Alternatively, you can download the records and make corrections in Excel.

When reviewing records, be mindful of occasional cases where the first and last name are switched. This mistake is common and easily overlooked, particularly when both names could be a first name (like “Elton John” or “Kevin James”).

Middle Names
Middle names cause issues when entered in the first name field since there’s no dedicated field for them. This leads to problems with personalization, like addressing someone as “Hi James E.” or “Hi James Earl” instead of “Hi James”.

Entering middle names in the last name field affects CRM alphabetization and can be confused with a hyphenated last name. Long first or last names with a lengthy middle name cause issues when the field has character limits.

It’s best to remove middle names to avoid complications since they are not necessary. Create a dynamic list of people with a space in the first or last name fields. Delete any middle names in these fields. But make sure not to delete people with compound names such as “Mary Ann”.

Prefixes & Suffixes

• Prefixes are titles that appear before the first name, like “Mr.” or “Dr.”, and are often mistakenly entered in that field. 
• Suffixes are letters or words added after a name, like “Jr.” or “PhD.”, and indicate family relationships or education/career status. Suffixes are often wrongly added to the last name field.

To solve this problem, use dynamic lists to find wrongly placed prefixes and suffixes. Then, you either remove them or create dedicated fields for them. 

If you make new fields, make sure they are dropdown menus instead of text fields to ensure consistency in data entry, including punctuation and capitalization. You can also add new options to the dropdown menu for any new prefixes or suffixes you find in the future.

Doctor Automation
Prefixes and suffixes are especially important for doctors. To simplify data entry, create a rule that if “PhD.” or “MD” is entered in the suffix field, the prefix field will automatically change to “Dr.”, saving time and preventing missing information. 

Accent Marks

It’s important to respect how people want their names spelled, but accent marks often cause problems. Most American keyboards lack accent marks (e.g. é, á, ñ, œ, ü). This makes it difficult to input data and can affect search results. For instance, searching for “Jose Gonzalez” may not display results for “José González”. Also, manually copying and pasting accent marks is inconvenient.

It’s risky to assume that accent marks will display correctly for everyone because some factors like device or software cause issues. To avoid this, replace accent marks with the closest English letter. To identify records with accent marks, create a dynamic list by filtering first or last names that contain commonly used accent marks, starting with those in Spanish, French, and German. Add more as you find them.

Step 4: Additional Lists

To speed up manual checking, create additional lists of unverified people to find additional errors:

• Find people with names that have unnecessary numbers, punctuation (except for hyphenated last names), or special characters (like @, #, %).
• Identify records with identical first and last names, But they may not always be incorrect, particularly for non-English names.
• Check for records with first or last names containing only 2 or fewer letters. However, keep in mind that this may not be an error, especially for non-English names.

Step 5: Final Manual Checking 

To wrap up the data cleanup process, create a dynamic list that filters only for unverified records. Although this list may be the most extensive, it is crucial to go through each person and account carefully to avoid leaving behind any incorrect or incomplete information. Once these lists are empty, the cleanup is finally over.