You can’t afford for a clogged sales pipeline to keep costing you sales.
How many times have you let a red hot lead slip through your team’s fingers while you’re off chasing a whole bunch of less important prospects?
Data clutter can clog your sales pipeline with mess. Finding the right leads to prioritize shouldn’t require the sleuthing powers of Sherlock Holmes.
But you can easily make a mess of your data - especially when you import or bulk edit thousands of rows of data over time.
Clutter starts crippling your lead qualification when these type of errors creep into your contact data:
- Phone numbers with a country in full vs. only local numbers
- Different naming conventions such as initials, middle names or two last names
- Incorrectly spelled words as a result of human error (which can cause duplicates)
This issue can be so costly and time-consuming - but let’s face it; data maintenance is not usually at the top of any salesperson's priorities.
Getting your sales team to stop and take their time fixing data duplication means spending less time on more important tasks like calls, emails and meetings. Your time is precious.
While some data clutter is unavoidable, why not focus on simple, solvable issues that could otherwise cause headaches for your team?
5 Common Data Clutter Mistakes You Need to Avoid
Social Media Syncing
Before you sync lots of social media accounts, consider what the benefit is of having 10,000 Twitter handles in your CRM. If you specifically want this data - just add key profiles for your most important or highest potential leads.
Adding directly from social media can lead to a large number of spambot accounts and people who aren’t your target audience in your contacts (and a Twitter handle alone for contact is not the most exciting proposition for your sales team).
Some businesses don't ever need to sync their social media fans and friends to their account, as our research has found it's often unlikely these contacts will merge with existing ones. Instead, we recommend making it easy for everyone in your company and waiting to add social media contacts until you have a good reason to do so.
Syncing All Team Members' Gmail Contacts
Dedupely points to this issue as one of the leading causes of duplication and non-relevant contact data.
There's an extremely high chance that salespeople on your team each have a small group of the same contacts in their Gmail Contacts list. The most obvious is each other! And what about family, friends, doctors, the postman and cousin Annie that can immediately clog up your CRM with redundant data?
Let’s face it, prospects and clients in your contacts are likely already in your CRM (if they’re important!) - you can keep your pipeline cleaner by preventing your team from syncing Gmail contacts.
Accidental Duplication From Imports
A large number of sales managers turn to Dedupely to reduce clutter formed because of imports that have gone awry. Fortunately, Pipedrive enables you to merge duplicate contacts automatically - a time-saver that can’t be underestimated.
You can do this by checking for the following:
- Matching Contact name with either phone number and/or email address
- Matching Organization name with address
Doing so makes sure you can update the data you already have in Pipedrive with new data in your import file.
To avoid creating new duplicates, you should make sure you review the particular fields the process uses as the basis for merging before import. Fixing or removing mistakes will make for much cleaner data.
The classic ways you can get caught creating duplicates:
- Simple data differences across users
- Company names spelled differently, think Wal-Mart vs. Walmart
- Different phone number formats
- Email address mistakes
- Organizations that don’t have the same address
Integrating without Testing
CRM apps and integration tools like Zapier are powerful tools.
But if you hook up integrations without due diligence, you risk making a mess of your database.
For example, some Zaps won't check for duplicates before adding new data to Pipedrive, which can become a problem if new contacts get added on an hourly or even daily basis.
The best way to avoid this is to test your integrations thoroughly before using them long term.
Neglecting to Write a Team Data Policy
Your entire team has to be on the same page about data cleanliness.
Discussing a few policies with your team can save everyone endless headaches.
These policies could consist of things like:
- How you import data
- How to prevent importing duplicates
- Standards for manual data entry
- Uniform telephone formats
- Note taking during calls
- Checking for duplicates before entering new contacts
- Ensuring the correct spellings
- How clean our integrations are and if they're causing us more pain than gain
- Contact syncs
- Webform inbound leads
Every team has their own style but defining a few simple rules to keep your data tidy means less time wasted correcting any mistakes later.
What Are Your Goals for Pipedrive?
Asking yourself what you hope to get out of Pipedrive and why you need a CRM in the first place will tell you what data you need.
If your goal is to call prospects and move them through each stage in the funnel, you’ll need phone numbers - so only collecting data with phone numbers might make sense for you.
If email marketing and email contact is a huge part of your company, then email addresses might be what you need.
You can avoid most data clutter and duplicates by getting these basics right.
A few clear and simple guidelines for your sales team to follow will eradicate so much of the clutter in your database - and make sure you don’t lose red hot leads amongst an endless mess.
Don't Strive For Perfection
Data is easy to collect, but hard to keep clean and relevant. While you want to do your best to extract gold from Pipedrive, it's counterproductive to strive for the perfect database.
Duplicate contacts will leak in one way or another, and this is why we developed Dedupely. Often you'll need a solution as a result of the potential mistakes outlined above.
