Myth #4: Integration Ensures Cleaner CRM Data

Data has a time frame for accuracy. In your career alone, how many different companies and titles have you held? Imagine each one as a business card. How many business cards have you distributed over the course of your lifetime? One for the prospect you meet at a tradeshow. One for the long lost friend you run into on the bus. One for the attractive woman you meet at a bar. One for the local pizza shop drawing to win a free Apple device. One for every webinar you’ve attended. Every white paper you’ve downloaded.

Your business card has been a lot of places. Someone, somewhere, has an outdated business card of yours in his or her Rolodex. Chances are, your Rolodex contains a few business cards that are no longer accurate nor relevant. You do not want outdated business cards seeping into your CRM.

How do you ensure that the data in your CRM is the most up-to-date data available? Things are constantly shifting inside your prospects’ and customers’ worlds, and you need to be on top of your intelligence to win their business. You need to clean your CRM data. You may have hundreds of thousands of records to clean, so the logical solution should be an automated data-cleansing tool.

However, just because it’s automatic and integrated, it doesn’t mean the data in your CRM is getting any cleaner. You need to make sure that the data you’re replacing old data with is new and accurate. Just as you wouldn’t dump a bucket of business cards from the pizza shop drawing into your lead queue, you can’t clean CRM data with outdated and wrong data.

However, if you’re implementing data from a high volume, user-contributed database that rewards users for creating rather than correcting data, you have no idea with what you might be infecting your CRM records.

You want to know exactly what you’re putting in your CRM, and you want to know that it’s correct information. As a test, pull up your company’s record in data.com – a user-contributed database with 200 million company records, and 30 million contact profiles (and growing). Is anyone listed in your record who you don’t know? Has anyone recently been added as an employee, but left the company six years ago? Chances are, someone incentivized by data.com’s volume-centric awards system uploaded an old list of executives, earned his or her awards, and forgot all about it.

Would you put that data in your CRM?

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