B2B CRM Cleaning 101

B2B CRM Cleaning has become more important than before.

The CRM industry has been growing at a staggering rate. CRM is the most popular and commonly used software among marketers. Recently, CRM software (with clean data in CRM systems and easy to run CRM Cleaning Process) with many additional functionalities like mobile-based solutions and cloud-based solutions have been released which has led to a significant increase in the rate of adoption of CRM by businesses. 

By 2017, the CRM will grow to a $36.5bn industry, growing at a CAGR of 15.1% and overtaking ERP in the process. – Gartner.

Gartner Predicts CRM Will Be a $36B Market By 2017!!

As CRM tools evolve and collect data from sources like social media, the value and accuracy of such data decreases. Just having a huge CRM Database with many leads, client information, and correspondence details don’t necessarily ensure good marketing performance. The e-mails, postal addresses, and phone numbers can be irrelevant, and this results in most of your emails to return or they bounce. Therefore, your business is not able to reach the right people.

The old data is having adverse effects on crucial marketing decisions. Maintaining a clean CRM database and CRM Cleaning at regular intervals is the most important aspect of any marketing campaign. CRM data cleaning is often overlooked by business leaders. According to a report by Gartner, an average company loses $8.2 million annually due to wasted resources on outdated and poor data, missed sales and lost opportunities, which can be easily resolved by having clean data in CRM systems. 

 

Few advantages of CRM Cleaning:

 

• Improve chances of Customer Acquisition:

A clean CRM Database helps you to target the right group of potential clients. B2B CRM cleaning helps in increasing the ROI of your marketing campaign- be it returns on postal or e-mail campaign. You may be able to recover lost customers who have changed their address/contact details. Also, you must target your marketing campaigns at the right bunch of clients to reduce costs. Consider the case of NRI, a 100-year-old company offering printing services and graphics to B2B companies, and most recently, 3-D printing. They wanted to consolidate their databases to ensure higher open rates and lower bounce rates, and consequently, achieve a better ROI. After they successfully employed B2B CRM cleaning services, NRI reported higher growth in sales, transformative web traffic growth and a reduction in marketing costs.

 

• Market Insight:

With the changing economy, having a market insight is extremely crucial for your company. Not only will it accelerate your revenues and sales, but it will also help you to adopt better business processes for available opportunities. A clean CRM, along with efficiently targeted marketing will help you understand in details the new prospects and build strong connections with customers. New York-based banking company, Orange County Trust, resorted to restructuring their database to have a better market insight. As a result, it experienced growth in their campaign response rates, lead funnels and sales.

 

• Better Decision-Making process:

Nowadays, companies collect and analyse an enormous amount of data from various customer-related activities. It helps them to dive deeper into customer insights and make important business decisions based on customer data. Especially, it goes without saying, any analysis is as efficient as the data processed. So, maintaining a clean pool of data will never mislead you in the wrong direction and help you make better decisions. B2B CRM cleaning is not a luxury anymore, it has become a necessity.

 

• Eliminate Sales and Marketing loss:

It has been estimated that marketing teams waste 20% of their daily time dealing with incorrect data. Thus, it wastes almost $100 on each duplicate record contacted.B2B CRM cleaning becomes very important in this scenario. Consequently, if you maintain a clean CRM database, inaccurate and duplicate data eliminates automatically, leading to reduced sales and marketing loss for your organisation. Scotland-based industrial workwear company used to deliver 100,000 catalogues per year to the addresses of customers in their database. Each catalogue cost them a little above $2. Therefore, the company was not achieving the expected ROI from their marketing campaign. After they had hired a data cleaning agency to clean their CRM, they found that while 8.6% of the customers were no longer in business, 2.7% had changed their address. Hence within a few weeks, the company was able to eliminate losses of $25,000.

 

• Build Brand Value:

Your marketing campaign represents the right voice of your firm that reaches out to customers. And it is this voice that helps you establish your brand value and reputation. Therefore, having duplicates can result in sending content to users who might have opted out. Incorrect lead information may result in wrongly addressing a potential customer. All these prove detrimental to your brand value. Ultimately, your emails will end up in the spam folder, however lucrative your offer to the customer is. Hence, regular B2B CRM cleaning and data cleansing helps in maintaining a good reputation among customers.

 

 

With the age of big data rushing in, companies are facing a phase of data explosion. They often fail to store and use the data efficiently. Most of the data, you collect from social media platforms, IoT ecosystems, online marketing tools, etc. is unstructured. Feeding such data to analytics is unfruitful. Hence, it has become imperative for companies to employ third-party B2B CRM cleaning services, Data mining services and data cleaning agencies. These companies use specialized tools and sometimes manual operations, rather than rely on DIY models as in the past.