‘Tis the season for spring cleaning! While that probably makes you think about your overflowing inbox on your desk (or your email), another area that can benefit from a bit of tidying up is your CRM platform. If you’re not constantly on top of sorting the data that comes into your CRM software, it could quickly become overwhelming and unorganized.
Why not use spring cleaning as your excuse to spend time in your CRM and ensure that everything is in tip-top shape so you can stay organized and efficient? These tips should help.
Sort Through Customer Contacts
It happens: you enter a customer, and then another employee enters a new record for the same customer. Now you’ve got duplicates, and that makes it harder to find data and notes around that client.
Spend some time sorting through those contacts to identify duplicate entries, remove redundancies, and make it easier to find what you need.
Update Customer Information
You remember squirrelling away an email that a customer sent you six months ago with her new address, but you never updated her CRM record. Now’s the time. It may take a while to go through each file, but it’ll be worth it in the long run.
For any client you haven’t spoken with in a while, check the links and email address in her file to ensure they’re still working. This is a great excuse to check in and see how things are going!
Stay on Top of Events
It’s especially imperative that you share information with your team if you’re not the only one using your CRM system, and that includes events. Got a sales call and need one of your team members to participate? Make sure that goes on the calendar and that he is available.
Encourage your team to also update the calendar to reflect their sales activities so you can see, at a glance, what’s going on.
Make Sure Emails Are Affiliated with Contacts
Insightly makes it easy to connect email chains with contacts based on their email addresses, so ensure you’ve got the right email address in your system. Being able to log into your CRM and see relevant emails saves you the trouble of digging through your email records.
Tag Smartly
Another feature we’re proud of is our tags, which help you stay organized based on whatever criteria you deem important. You can tag files by demographic, association, interests, industry, and more so that you can easily sort the types of contacts you want to reach for a given task.
You can even tag red flags. Say you’ve spoken with a finicky client before and want anyone who wants to reach out to her again to talk to you before calling. Flag the account with a tag to have your employee get the scoop from you before making the call – so he’s fully informed and better equipped to deal with the client.
While spring cleaning is your excuse right now to organize your CRM to be more effective, don’t wait until next spring to do it again. Put a recurring event on your calendar for a monthly check-in to look at duplicate entries and update information. That way, you always have the most recent and relevant data in your CRM system, and that will set you up for success!
At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a huge variety of verticals. Learn about Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.
