Is Your CRM Data Inconsistent?

Is Your CRM Data Inconsistent? 

If you are an executive, marketer, salesperson, customer success rep, or a product manager—close your eyes. Imagine the data in your CRM is accurate and meaningful—a story exists within that data awaiting clever discovery that unleashes happy customers, new leads, more conversions, and sustainable explosive growth. 

Now open your eyes. Right now, your CRM data inconsistencies are likely costing you money. 

What if you no longer had to struggle identifying your strongest verticals, your ideal customer profiles, and your most profitable clients? In theory, you have the tools capable of building such databases of information, but why does it continue to be a struggle and why does a CRM constantly become a point of contention across teams and leaders? 

The Problem with Data Cleanliness in Your CRM 

Well, let’s just cut to the chase—manually logging all the information and keeping it up to date is painstaking for your team. It’s an ancient, mind-bending exercise that doesn’t reflect the way in which business gets done these days. Sure—CRMs have gotten a lot better at automating the transactional nature of the modern business, allowing email forwards, attachments, notes, and the like—but that assumes you really want your team spending their time doing the work once, and essentially repeating the transmission of information from the systems they actually use into a central database.  

Assuming that people have the bandwidth, or the desire, to invest this extra time is often asking too much—especially if they’re already doing well—it seems like redundant work. As companies have continued to onboard more technology than ever before, information now exists across the ether. There are specialized tools for marketing automation, sales prospecting, separate CRMs just for your customer success teams, and water cooler and client chats are happening across several mediums—email, Slack, Trello—all over the place.  

It’s almost impossible to keep a pulse on your managers, colleagues, and clients—but there’s an easier way,. If you’re wondering why people stop following CRM best practices, the list typically goes as follows: they have no formal training, the ask seems overwhelming, inflexibility of the software to match reality of processes, the CRM starts to waste more time than it saves, the value of the tasks doesn’t actually make sense, and the data quality starts to fade. It’s a vicious, self-perpetuating cycle. And an archaic one too.  

However, it’s incredibly important to note that even if you’re collecting the wrong data, imperfect data, or data that doesn’t yet showcase its relevance yet—it is absolutely critical to not abandon these processes and swear off your CRM forever. That is a dangerous step— there are tools and automation systems that can still derive valuable insight by enriching current data with data from other sources within your company and putting the puzzle pieces together. More on that later. 

Finger Pointing—Who’s to Blame? 

Salespeople. End of story. JUST KIDDING! Everyone is to blame. Sales is typically the red herring in all the disaster stories we’ve heard around CRM mismanagement. However, that’s unfair and doesn’t get to the root of the problem. The real problem is that everyone feels that they need specific information, and as a result of being the most often customer-facing and market-facing role—the task of gathering and entering information often falls on the shoulders of a company’s sales force. 

In a company whose culture is starting to erode, you may hear things like “Yeah, well Sales doesn’t do anything, they have time to do it.” “They’re the only ones who talk to so and so,” and things like “Yeah, but they will make more money because we’ll close more deals...” 

Your marketing team needs one set of data, your product team another, your broader executive team needs real-time insights into revenue projections, and your customer success team needs to know what the hell your sales rep just promised a customer. It’s everyone’s fault. 

Everyone’s Needs Lead to CRM Misuse 

There are a few problems that often start to unfold as a result of the too many cooks in the kitchen problem touched on above. First and foremost, one of the most common problems is just capturing the completely wrong data. Most businesses are an evolving, shape shifting entity—more so now than ever before due to the rapid digital transformation occuring. Your team cannot possibly know right off the bat which data points will serve the most value, nor do they have the resources to custom deploy some sort of system that can aggregate every possible data point that’s out there to be analyzed. This often leads to teams focusing on the wrong metrics and will lead to confusion, poor strategy, and missed goals. 

There’s another side to that story too, however. Lack of generalized data expertise, misaligned goals, poor communication of strategy—these can all lead to the good data you do have going unnoticed, unused, and costing you money. Now in a perfect world, you are likely incorporating teams of data analysts and scientists to ensure the data being collected and analyzed is useful, actionable, and will drive to more revenue. Unfortunately the world isn’t perfect, and you can’t afford to build a team of analysts and data scientists and have to rely on your managers having some sort of data savviness—but they are then spending upwards of 15% of their time manually downloading spreadsheets, trying to structure the data into a somewhat useful architecture, and then analyzing it to the best of their ability.  

It’s not fair to your team to have expectations that they are all comfortable with digging through massive stacks of datapoints and numbers and then expecting them to get the story hidden within right every time. When is the last time your organization deployed funds to train your management team in data analysis? 

The Future of Understanding How Work (Acquisition, Deals, Retention, Communication, etc.) Gets Done: 

The logical solution to nipping lack of CRM clarity in the bud is to gather all the data you may need across all the mediums that are generating it, storing it, and making it actionable. With companies relying on cloud-based technology, it’s an interesting a new opportunity to automate the problem that has emerged. 

By seamlessly connecting to the tools your teams use to do their work and get the job done, tools like: Slack, JIRA, Salesforce, HubSpot, Trello, Figma, and many many more, Peoplelogic automatically aggregates ana analyzes the data across all those platforms. Furthermore, we reduce the need for hiring dedicated analysts, and free your current team from the monotony that is their daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual reporting. 

Our models train using your unique data, reducing the risk of data misinterpretation and the platform surfaces prescriptive recommendations that ensure executives, managers, and employees better understand their people, performance, and productivity.  

What if my CRM Data and Processes Are Perfect? 

Even better! While Peoplelogic can help put together the pieces from data that is all over the place, on the flip side, we also make data more impactful and actionable. If your CRM processes are best-in-class, our tool connects the dots using your CRM data, in combination with other sources, and automatically enriches it—giving you comprehensive access to the insights and data across all of your tools. The more integrations that you connect, the clearer the picture of how work gets done becomes.  The best part? You can ditch those out-of-date dashboards and stop having to spend your valuable time downloading all those CSVs and combining the data into those tedious reports. All you need to do is build a dashboard in Peoplelogic that updates in near real time.  

There’s a story hidden within the data that your teams are generating. Peoplelogic helps craft the narrative of how your organization gets work done. The platform mitigates risks, highlights areas for growth, and allows you to interact with all that disparate data in one place. Just because you feel like your CRM may be in rough shape,or even if it isn’t, it  doesn’t mean you have to miss out on the opportunity to become a data-driven growth machine.Let us help you make sense of your team’s data. If you want to get in-depth insights and recommendations from the vast swath of data being produced across your teams—get started with Peoplelogic for free or learn more about our solution for sales teams.