Successful salespeople are often deemed untouchable.

It is a brave sales manager that will take disciplinary action against a salesperson that is making their quotas, simply because they have not updated the CRM. Most good salespeople recognise the value of CRM – for tracking and managing activities and pipelines – especially in complex selling environments.

Yet, administering CRM eats into face time with customers.

A poorly planned or implemented CRM system is frustrating.

One of the biggest sources of frustration for CRM users is duplicate records – Accounts, Customers, and Leads. Frustration, in turn, can quickly turn into resistance, and, ultimately, system failure. When your top performers stop trusting the CRM its value becomes questionable

How to Create a Single Customer View

Creating a single customer view is a complex endeavour that requires meticulous planning and execution. Dive into the intricacies of creating a single customer view to understand the challenges and best practices involved.

From data integration to identity resolution, consolidating disparate customer data sources is essential for gaining a comprehensive understanding of individual customers and delivering personalized experiences.

Duplicate records are not always obvious.

Is Mr S Jones, CIO the same person as Steve Jones, IT Manager?

Is The TeleFX Ltd the same company as Tele(FX) Limited?

Missing information, inconsistent information, spelling errors, and abbreviations. These are all examples of how multiple records can be captured to represent the same customer.

Of course, customers are not always individuals. They can be family groups, companies, clubs, government agencies. Is a subsidiary the same customer as the parent? Is a branch, or a regional office, the same customer as the head office?

Confusion leads to errors

Duplicate records can cause more than frustration – they can create conflict and confusion. Your sales team, or customers, shouldn’t be treated like the confused baby in the video…

Imagine two of your top salespeople, both working on a significant opportunity – together making up 15% of your funnel for the year. After 6 months of effort, they discover that they are working with the same client – different relationships, different naming conventions – the CRM didn’t pick it up.

Who gets the commission? What about that discount the one had to negotiate – or the free services thrown in by the other? Do both deals apply? Or will the client simply decide that you are too unprofessional to do business with? How do you explain the sudden drop in the pipeline to your boss or your shareholders?

You may not need to imagine this scenario – something similar may have already happened – particularly in larger companies with regional teams.

Or it may seem a little extreme.

Why Accurate Addresses Are Important

Maybe in your environment, inconsistent, duplicate customer records only have an operational impact.

How many times do you send the same marketing email to the same customer – not realizing that they are captured multiple times? Analysis by Gartner suggests that annoying customers in this way can reduce campaign effectiveness, and cut potential revenue gains by up to 25%.

Accurate addresses play a pivotal role in business operations, influencing everything from logistics to customer communications. Explore the significance of address accuracy and why it is crucial for organizations by delving into why accurate addresses are important. From reducing shipping errors to enhancing marketing effectiveness, maintaining precise address data is essential for driving efficiency and customer satisfaction.

Enhance your CRM system with data quality

CRM software simply is not designed to manage complex duplicates. Popular applications, like MS Dynamics CRM or Salesforce.com, provide some basic checks that will stop outright copies from being captured into the database.

Simple, inconsistencies, like a space or a hyphen added to a name, can bypass these checks.

This is why these vendors, and others like Oracle and SAP, have partnered with third-party data quality vendors to provide more robust cleansing and matching capabilities.

Data quality for CRM must cater not only for simple data capture errors, although these can significantly affect customer data quality. We must cater for regional differences, abbreviations, missing or changing information, and the various other realities of the modern salesperson’s life.

Why Data Quality Matters for Lead Generation

Lead generation relies heavily on the quality of data used to identify and engage potential prospects. Discover the importance of data quality in lead generation and how it impacts conversion rates and sales effectiveness. Explore why data quality matters for lead generation to understand the role of clean, accurate data in targeting the right audience and nurturing leads effectively.

Reduce frustration and improve sales

Our goal must be to reduce frustration by recognizing that sales are an imperfect science – we simply do not always have all the data, or the right data, especially at an early stage in a sales cycle.

High-quality customer data serves as a cornerstone for successful sales initiatives, enabling organizations to understand customer needs and preferences accurately.

We want to identify potential duplicates at the point of capture – to avoid the conflicts and issues that will come into play otherwise. Of course, if we deployed some time ago and already have problems, we want to be able to automate corrections, matches and potential merges so as to take the load off our sales team

Learn how high-quality customer data drives sales success by empowering sales teams with actionable insights and enabling personalized interactions. From improving lead qualification to enhancing customer engagement, leveraging clean and reliable customer data is essential for driving revenue growth and fostering long-term customer relationships.

Quality customer data will improve your customer outreach and your sales team’s CRM experience.

How to Shift from Product to Customer-Centric Insurance

In an increasingly competitive insurance landscape, transitioning from a product-centric to a customer-centric approach is essential for sustained success.

Explore strategies and insights for making the shift from product to customer-centric insurance to meet evolving customer expectations and drive loyalty.

From personalized offerings to proactive service delivery, placing customers at the centre of insurance operations is key to unlocking new opportunities and staying ahead of the curve.

Maximise Your Investment in Microsoft Dynamics CRM with Quality Data

Microsoft Dynamics CRM offers powerful capabilities for managing customer relationships, but its effectiveness hinges on the quality of data it holds.

Learn how to maximize your investment in Microsoft Dynamics CRM by ensuring that your data is clean, complete, and up-to-date.

From data migration to ongoing data hygiene practices, quality customer data is essential for realizing the full potential of your CRM investment and driving business growth, and meeting compliance goals.