If your wondering how to clean CRM data in a time crunch, you’ve come to the right place.
If you’re like most companies, you could agree that your CRM data is somewhere in between “less than perfect” and “a complete mess”. We all agree that we could have much better-structured data that is organized and simpler to understand.
Keeping your CRM clean is a work of art. You could replace your text fields with pick-list values, or make fields conditionally required. However, this is also very time consuming, and if you’re a rapidly growing business, time is your most vital resource. The more time you waste cleaning the more money you lose so let’s dive in.
Instead of telling you the how to clean or structure, this blog will be primarily for those who need their CRM data go from “complete mess” to “ready to start calling” in 3 days or less.

Step #1) Understand TAM and ICP (1 hour)

Clean your CRM data
What are TAM and ICP? If you don’t understand the true meanings of these terms, there is a problem.
Your Target Addressable Market (TAM) is not a good list. This is anyone and everyone who could buy your product. Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is a small sub-segment of your TAM that has the biggest gap and would derive the most value from your product.
A good example would be selling ice cubes. Yes, you can sell them in Antarctica (part of your TAM), but you would be better off selling them on the beach in St. Pete during the summer. These customers would be your ICP because they are feeling hot and need ice for drinks.
Now that you understand, ask yourself what is your theory about who your company ICP is? Sometimes you can interview your market or look at current pleased customers. Try to find your “St. Pete Beach” equivalent to your product.

Step #2) Build a rich list (3 hours)

Clean your CRM data
Use Linkedin Sales Navigator or other data tools to thin a good list of targets according to your theory of who your ICP is. For example, you might pick:
US-based Real Estate companies with 100-1000 employees that use Salesforce.
Your list should constitute 500-5000 companies. If you’re looking at 5000 or larger, that is too big of a portion of your TAM, and that’s not narrow enough to be your ICP. If your list is smaller than 500, this is a problem because hopefully by the time you’re building an outbound team, you’re past the point of “do things that don’t scale”.

Step #3) Compare your list to your CRM Leads (4 hours)       

For now, forget all the phone numbers, emails, and names you collected on your white-paper downloads and trade show scans. Look purely at the company names of your CRM Leads. Export a CSV list and enrich the data.
To see a better outreach list, look at how much overlap there is between your ICP list and your CRM. This will give you a good idea of at least what your companies within your ICP know your brand.

Step #4) Research the Right Buyer Personas (1 day)

Clean your CRM data
Buyer Personas are individual stakeholders within ICP companies that can either purchase or start a purchasing evaluation process for your product. These are the people you want to target.
So for example, if you sell to marketing, your buyer personas might be CMO, VP of Marketing, Dir. of Digital Marketing.  
Do not look within your CRM, go to your preferred data tool instead. You can use ZoomInfo and DiscoverOrg, or leverage Inside Sales Solutions to find phone numbers and emails for each individual.

Step #5) Build a series of calls & emails (4 hours)

Once you have the clean data you need, go buy outreach.io with the integrated dialer and build a series of 3-8 emails. Then incorporate 2-5 calls and put that headset on and hit the gas.
There are 2 mistakes you should avoid when going through these steps

  • Mindlessly cleaning data
  • Not understanding your data’s “half-life”

Clean your CRM data
You should always be conscious when cleaning your data. There are times when you could be cleaning a 20,000 leads list one by one, name by name and at the end, you realize that 30% of the contracts are no longer working at the company. This is why step #4 is so important.
You might come to the conclusion you really didn’t use much of your CRM data…your right. The reason for that is because you are thinking of Cleaning your CRM, so chances are your data is more than a year old. Your data is probably not perfect when it comes to having the right emails. This means that over 40% of the contacts you collected have most likely switched companies.
I would like to thank Tito Bohrt for the valuable information provided. He is a leading expert in building world-class SDR teams. Check out Titos Linkedin page for relevant information.
Find out how you can utilize Inside Sales Solutions own Database Services here