Guest author Hardeep Chawla, Zoho's Director of Enterprise Sales, is a seasoned SaaS sales leader with over a decade of experience driving growth and building high-performing teams. Known for his strategic vision and consultative approach, he excels in guiding enterprises through complex buying journeys and digital transformations while fostering long-term customer relationships.
Sales is a messy business. Deals move fast, reps are busy, and no two lead sources are exactly the same. While that may not pose problems on a deal-by-deal basis, when leadership looks to the data to understand what's working and what's not, poor data hygiene can be a huge impediment. And the longer that hygiene is ignored, the more work it takes to fix. That's why it's so important to build data hygiene into the culture of your sales operation, starting from the top down.
As 2024 comes to an end, senior executives should begin to ask themselves: What is the state of our data hygiene? While it's important to monitor the health of your CRM data year round, the end of the year offers particular opportunities to prioritize the data cleaning and enrichment processes that fall by the wayside during busy seasons. Teams that make time for data hygiene during slower periods are often in a better position to maximize their upcoming sales strategy and marketing budgets, and identify opportunities to build better data hygiene safeguards into their systems going forward. To get the most out of your sales, marketing, and customer relationships in the new year, encourage your teams to focus on the types of data cleaning that deliver the most value.
End-of-year data hygiene checklist
1. Standardize fields with many possible variations
The first step in your yearly cleanup should be to ensure that the basic data in your CRM is sortable and easily parsed. Do this by ensuring the naming conventions for key fields—like job titles, industries, and locations—have been standardized to some agreed upon format. Consider creating a small task force to correct spelling and abbreviation variations in titles and industries. This seemingly mundane effort can have a profound impact on lead scoring and segmentation.
Your task force should also focus on making state and country data consistent by choosing what to abbreviate and what to spell out fully, and bringing existing fields up to the chosen standard. This helps your territory management system accurately assign leads and customers to the right owner for their area, and reduces the number of outliers that can't be automatically assigned.
If your organization doesn't already use data validation on incoming data, now is a good time to start. Changing open-ended fields to picklists is a good way to prevent variations in commonly abbreviated fields.
2. Deduplicate your data
If you've built up a significant number of duplicate leads and customers since your last data cleanup, removing them slims down your email marketing lists and reduces redundancy. Consider assigning a DRI on the marketing team to create rules for selecting a master record from each set of duplicates (such as the record with the most recent engagement, the highest number of email clicks, or the lowest number of email bounces). Your DRI can also set merge rules and survivorship rules to decide how conflicting fields are handled and which ones can be overwritten.
Note: Establishing a process for previewing deduplication results is crucial. Your DRI must be able to view changes before committing to them or erasing live lead data.
To cut down on the amount of deduplicating needed at the end of the year, recommend a regularly scheduled deduplication process following the rules your DRI has created, or advise your sales and marketing teams to incorporate duplicate checking into their data capture process.
3. Remove unengaged contacts
Keeping unengaged contacts in your email list doesn't improve your odds of conversion, but it does obscure your real engagement rates, increase your bounce rate, and degrade your sender reputation. Advise your marketing team to remove hard bounces first, then soft bounces and unsubscribes if they don't plan to run a re-engagement campaign. Your marketing manager should set a threshold for how long your emails go unopened before the contact is considered unengaged (such as 6 months or 16 emails) and establish a process for filtering out unengaged contacts at year's end. For non-email activities, marketers can filter out contacts that have no owner, have never been qualified, have had no tracked communication with the team, or have never filled out a form to indicate interest.
Before deleting your unengaged contacts, advise your marketers to look for patterns in how the contacts were originally obtained. If a particular lead source is producing mostly unengaged contacts, they might reconsider gathering leads that way going forward.
4. Connect leads to accounts
The best time to map a contact to an account is on conversion, and the second-best time is now. Matching all of the contacts associated with a deal to the company account keeps leads with the right account manager, prevents confusion over lead ownership, and ensures that your account-based marketing is capturing all of your contacts in their correct roles. Your sales and marketing teams can use fuzzy matching to map contacts with incomplete data by making inferences from public data like name variations, email domains, and known mergers.
For companies with multiple business units in separate lead stages, parent-child company relationships can help accurately capture each contact's company role without interfering with the funnel.
5. Enrich your records
After your teams have cleaned up the data you do have, it's a good time to figure out what you still need. Ask your sales teams to determine which types of data they need for your existing leads: firmographic, technographic, intent, or B2B contact information. Teams should set a target for the accuracy of the data they add and test it against a third-party verification service to determine whether their data sources are worth using again. For the biggest impact, they should prioritize records where the missing fields are critical for their specific sales processes. In particular, they should focus on filling missing fields that will enable the sales and marketing teams to run automations for greater efficiency in the new year.
Your sales team can enrich their lead data from within Zoho CRM. Zia Data Enrichment sources additional information for contacts and companies, and allows your team to add only the information they want to your CRM.
6. Incorporate usability and security into your data hygiene
When your data is clean and complete, it's a good time to make sure it's also organized and protected. Encourage synergy between your sales and marketing teams for industry and job function segmented campaigns, and ensure that your CRM record owners are categorizing their contacts and accounts into clear segments that support those outreach goals. Assign a DRI to review and update your lead scoring models; the end of the year is a great time to revisit lead scoring criteria to make sure they align with updated business goals and reflect the behavior of your highest-converting leads. And take a close look at your user access permissions, which can become misaligned or poorly applied over time and risk unnecessary data exposure. Coordinating with IT to review the user permission levels on your teams is a quick way to head off security issues and ensure that your team isn't creating any security risks.
Taking a little time at the end of the year to clean up your CRM data gives your entire sales operation a healthier start on next year's customer engagement, with accurate segmentation and territory management, robust account-based marketing, and efficient and secure databases and email lists.
