How a clean CRM leads to an efficient and effective sales machine

The new year always brings about new health trends, so why not CRM health?

Your HubSpot contacts list may be a little bloated, so we have outlined a few simple steps you can take to slim down your instance and get it back into shape.

I realize your time and resources are limited. You would probably rather craft a well thought out email campaign or design a new beautiful landing page to deliver more leads to your sales team. Isn’t that the goal of digital marketing?

Unfortunately, generating leads is only half the battle.

Skilled and talented workers are in high demand, making clean, efficient automation tools more critical than ever. Spending the time setting up a healthy CRM is the foundation for your lead collection, marketing automation, and customer retention strategy. If you take the time now, you will be able to automate more mundane tasks, leaving more free time to spend on those fun projects you have been pushing off. As for your sales team, a clean CRM will ultimately provide better quality leads with more insightful marketing data to drive more sales (and make their jobs easier).

1. Remove duplicate contacts and companies

Duplicate contacts and companies are more common than you may realize. A simple misspelling in a form field can create an entirely new contact entry. Over time, duplicate contact data can really add up. 

Having duplicate contact entries in HubSpot not only increases your subscription costs, but also skews your overall metrics. When reviewing campaign performance, you want to make sure that you can trust that the data you are analyzing reflects actual leads and actions taken in the buyer journey. Plus, if you reduce your monthly subscription costs, you may be able to wow your boss with additional budget for that new AI tool they’ve been eying since Q4 2022.

Duplicate contact entries also hurts your qualifying of leads and provides an incomplete picture of your contact to your sales team. Duplicate records of lead engagement will segment a person’s buyer journey. This will provide an in complete picture of what interactions a prospect has made with your company. Better marketing data leads to better insight, and better actionable decision making. 

HubSpot has a helpful walkthrough on how to view and manage potential duplicate contacts and companies. 

This process can be time consuming. This is one of the benefits of having an automation focus agency working on routine maintenance of your HubSpot account.

2. Standardize your data collection

Using a few clean efficient forms with standardized fields will remove the need for cleanup down the road and simplify your data collected. 

A dropdown selection for country,  industry, or job function/title would reduce the data points entered. 

Implementing dropdown and radio select form fields whenever possible will keep your marketing data collection clean. This allows you to have clear information that is more easily used for analysis and reporting. 

Example: Better segment your audience by providing 3-5 key industries that are ideal for your sales verticals in a form dropdown list instead of a single line text box. 

3. Don’t waste your time and reputation on dead leads

Remove unengaged contacts from your database. This will not only immediately improve your email deliverability, opens, and click rates, it will also allow you to focus on higher value prospects. Bounced email addresses are an easy group to target. By removing contacts that are not even receiving your emails, you will be sending to a cleaner, more engaged list. In addition to improving your email marketing numbers, it will also show Google, Outlook, and other inbox providers that your audience wants to receive your content. This will reduce the chance of being flagged as spam.

Worried about letting those leads go? Don’t–HubSpot allows you to convert contacts to “non-marketing contacts”, removing  them from your subscription model. This means you can still store their information and send 1:1 correspondence to them, but they will not be able to enter your automations or receive mass marketing emails.

Looking for help with managing your CRM? Check out our HubSpot service page.

4. Don’t let anyone fall through the cracks

All contacts in your database should be assigned an owner (a sales or marketing team member), global lead assignment notification workflows ensure the right people get notified on customer journey progress. Whether your contacts are segmented or you work with an account based sales model, all you need is a clean data point (Example: state, country, company name) to be able to build out an automation workflow and set internal notifications to go out to your team.

Once this global assignment is in place, you can develop a strategy to re-engage those contacts who have gone cold. Remember to clean out the contacts who show zero interest. 

If you are worried about your team receiving too many contacts to manage, this next suggestion ensures you are able to better organize and target your contacts.

5. Define your buyer journey

Clearly identify your customer lifecycle. This will help move prospects from marketing efforts, to sales efforts, and hopefully to becoming a customer. 

You do not want your sales and marketing people running after low quality contacts. Identify who is worth spending marketing dollars on and who is worth having a sales person reach out to directly.

Example 1: A contact who attended a webinar and downloaded a buyer’s guide would be an ideal contact to have an 1:1 discussion with.  

Example 2:  A contact who downloaded an ebook and read a blog post would be ideal for Google Ad retargeting and an email nurture campaign to better qualify their buying interest.

Once you identify what lead activity is most important to your company, you can rank the contacts as a lead, marketing qualified lead, or sales qualified lead through automation. 

Final thoughts

Taking steps now to clean up and strengthen your CRM data can save you time and money down the road. It will provide you with more reliable marketing data, leading to better insights and decision making. You will then be able to spend the rest of 2023 focusing on delivering better marketing content and driving more leads to your sales team.

Extra tip: HubSpot has a wealth of available knowledge! Be sure to utilize it whenever you want to gain experience working with your CRM. Their blogs, community discussion forum, blog, and knowledge base are great resources to use to sharpen your automation skills.

Still not ready to tackle a HubSpot CRM cleaning up on your own? 

Reach out to a TribalVision representative today to discuss a datahealth or full HubSpot audit. Our HubSpot experts can ensure your automation process is running efficiently and delivering quality leads to your sales team.