CRM data entry best practices: improving CRM data quality

Published September 27th, 2022

In a post-pandemic 2021 study by IT ProPortal in the UK, it was revealed that the estimated rate of organic data decay had accelerated by an average of 0.5 percent per month, resulting in an annualized decay rate of 37.5%. The rise was directly attributable to the pandemic’s high mortality rate and the number of people moving house.

In addition, a recent Gartner report estimates that when it comes to B2B contacts – especially in sectors with high job turnover like Silicon Valley technology and those suffering from ‘The Great Resignation’ phenomenon – the data decay rate is estimated to be 70.3% per year.

What is CRM data quality?

Data quality is the cornerstone of customer relationship management. It encompasses the accuracy, integrity, value and uses of the data you’ve collected. It sets the standard for everything that you're intending to collect, enter and maintain – so every piece of data needs to be high-value.

Data platform Atlan says: “If your data is: accurate, available and accessible, complete, relevant and reliable, timely, gives the right degree of granularity, and helps you with decision making, then your data is of good quality.”

That’s a long list for a never-ending issue.

CRM rich text editor advantage

It’s clear: CRM data entry that doesn’t follow best practices, negatively impacts your sales revenue. What else affects the quality of the CRM data used across an organization? The rich text editor that’s embedded in the CRM software.

Integrating the best CRM HTML editor components in your tech stack can help you achieve your goals of data quality, integrity and increase your sales. In many cases, using the best technology can also increase the engagement with and quality of the outputs from your CRM.

That’s especially true when you use state-of-the-art content authoring components that help resolve your data quality issues. You’ll get cleaner data (better for reporting and the next person using the record) and rules that can be enforced by the editor automatically at the point of data entry, rather than a manager having to monitor every data entry point and person.

CRM data entry best practices

There’s three golden rules to CRM best practices data entry:

• Clean your existing data and regularly assess its health
• Stop bad data from being added
• Remember data gets stale immediately, so data quality is a never-ending mission.

The first rule is beyond the scope of this article. However, here’s four best practices you can implement immediately. By integrating a quality WYSIWYG text editing component in your CRM, you can satisfy the second golden rule listed, and elevate the reliability of your CRM data.

1. Streamline your documentation methods

Organize your CRM data contributors to understand where bad data may potentially be introduced.

• Start by mapping the sales and marketing funnels and workflows, then extend it into other areas of the organization that use the CRM. Understand where the data comes from, who enters it, who accesses it and what procedures (if any) are used to vet and store it throughout.
• Then outline a clearly defined process, to ensure that low-quality data no longer makes its way into your database.
• Establish a retraining program for all existing team members, on the new process, and an onboarding process for new appointments.

2. Tighten your data collection

Some of the data you’re currently collecting may well not qualify as being usable, and ends up piling up in a corner of the CRM as defunct bad data. That data then becomes difficult to manage, time-consuming and a burden to your resources, so it's easier to tighten your initial collection methods and locations.

• One source of lead information that's often overlooked, comes in via the contact, opt-in and lead-gen forms embedded on websites and landing pages. As a website expands, old pages are often forgotten and different data formats continue to come in from various sources. Close down this data entry point by standardizing your forms across all channels.
• Manual data entry leaves a significant margin for errors. However, it’s generally not possible to eliminate it completely. Often a single misplaced or misused letter can determine the deliverability of an email, so it’s important to create a centralized set of rules for the creation of contact records – to establish and maintain checks and balances on each entry.
• Another way to shrink errors is to add proper validation to your standardized forms (see above). Validation ensures the data entered meets certain criteria – correct email format, correct length zip or postcode, or appropriate capitalization for names and locations.
• Pre-set dropdown option lists can also help to limit error rates. These can offer country, state and other established location information, to help cut back on standardization issues from people entering abbreviations that need to be cleaned up at a later date.

CRM data driving data-driven growth

The Gartner Future of Sales 2025 report reveals that by 2025, 60% of B2B sales organizations will likely have transitioned from experience- and intuition-based selling to data-driven selling. Why? B2B buyers now prefer to engage with suppliers through digital and self-service channels, therefore making multi experience selling a must-have.

However, you can’t deliver that without solid, accurate CRM data.

Your team needs to understand the fundamental importance of data: how, when, and where it’s used in workflows, how a data-driven decision is better than a hunch, and why precise, personalized communication is vital to clients.

Most importantly though, managing the quality of the data in your CRM is both an art and a science. And it's a never-ending task.