The days of succeeding with email campaigns while sending a generic message are done. No one disagrees with this point. Everyone sees response rates dropping. The answer? On this point, people in the know also agree: The answer is segmenting your audience and...
Top of the mind: steps to Cleaning your CRM
"What is the first step to take to clean up your CRM data"? Nearly everyone I pose this question to gets it wrong. The typical answer is "dedupe the CRM". This list was for a client: A stream of consciousness cut & paste from an email. He needed something to...
Love and the Clean CRM
Do you remember your first time? I do. How could I forget? I was in love. The anticipation of being alone, just the two of us, was something I had been thinking about for weeks. When we all met our new team member, it was like every sales rep in the company...
The Clean CRM and the Intervention vs. Automation Decision
What and when to automate and when to intervene is one of the most far reaching decisions you will make on the journey to a clean CRM. In fact, this automation vs. intervention decision quandary will impact all processes in your business. Instead of an in-depth...
The One Thing you MUST do Before Account Deduping
Duduping a CRM is like an equation waiting to be solved. Just like a high school math, the more variables you know the values for, the easier the problem is to solve and the more likely you will come up with the correct answer. CRMs include is a vast number of “Data...
The 1st Law of List Building: Never Delete Data
Some definitions: Field: is a single value like a name, email, phone, date or note. Record: is a set of fields. In a spreadsheet, it might be row or column of data, depending upon the structure of the sheet. In a CRM, for example, a record could be an Account or...
CRM Dedupe, Normalization and Underwear
Deduplicating your Salesforce database without Normalizing first is like putting underwear over your pants. It's the wrong order.
Titles in CRM: The standardization debate
I've often talked about the importance of having a Data Plan for a healthy CRM. A data plan is simply a set of standards for CRM data. For example, review the following ways to write: Director of Human Resources Director, Human Resources Director of HR DIRECTOR OF...
Think strategically before buying contact data
I recently refused business from a new prospective client. I'll call him Harry. Harry wanted to update 1.2 million company records with fresh contact data. In the process of understanding his sales process, I discovered that he would be working with about 100,000...
Data decay: The WHY behind why your CRM data sucks.
"Wrong phone number" "The company was acquired" "Wrong title" "I have duplicates" "The data is old" "The emails don't work" "My CRM data sucks" "I just called someone who's been dead for a year" If you've heard any of the above comments or something similar; you have...