As a kid, keeping your room tidy was a chore your parents constantly had to remind you about. Today, your chores are probably much different than when you were 12 — especially in your profession. Your “chores” might be removing unwanted emails from your inbox, eliminating desk clutter, or, in this case, cleaning up your CRM data.
Cleaning Data in HubSpot
Your parents may not be reminding you at the office, but keeping your CRM data tidy is vital to the success of your business. Otherwise, a messy and inconsistent database could impose negative effects on your sales productivity, marketing initiatives, and customer retention.
Not to mention, CRM data doesn’t have a long life span either. In fact, 30% of your database goes bad each year. That's all the more reason to check in on your data once in a while. So, what can you do?
Having all your data in the same place is a great first step. It goes without saying, CRM data is used across sales, marketing, and customer service departments.
Seeing how this data links to all your campaigns and service efforts via an all-in-one Customer Platform makes the cleanup process that much easier and helps prevent outdated data from falling through the cracks.
Whether this is your first clean up or you’re looking for ways to improve your current system, here are some steps you can take to routinely clean your CRM data in HubSpot.
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1. Examine Your Data and Identify What You Should Clean Up
Before you start, you’ll want to check the overall condition of your data. Is it up-to-date, relevant, or useful? Identify what data is worth keeping and what you should be eliminating.
In most cases, bad data stems from human error, but there are other possibilities that you should look out for. Here are some things to check:
- Remove contacts that have hard bounced or unsubscribed: Create a list of outdated contacts and then delete them from your database. This process is outlined here.
- Find duplicates: Scan for any duplicates and figure out where they might be coming from. If you have a Professional or Enterprise subscription in HubSpot, you can use the duplicate management tool, which uses machine learning to identify duplicate contacts and companies.
This also includes duplicate properties which can cause headaches. Navigate to your property settings and review any properties that might be similar. If you find duplicate properties, you can use workflows to copy data from one property to another with a Professional or Enterprise subscription. - Filter contacts who have not engaged: The dates on properties such as last marketing email open date, recent conversion date, or recent sales email replied date are good indicators of the engagement level of a contact. You can filter contacts based on the date they have most recently engaged and if they haven't had any recent engagements, you can remove them in bulk.
2. Standardize How You Will Input Your Data
Now that you’ve established a routine with your team, you'll want to create a standard structure of how you and your teammates should input their data into the CRM. What information should be required when contacts are created?
One way to standardize this is by setting property fields that will appear when manually creating contacts or companies. This can help create consistent data when new information is entered in your CRM. If you have a Professional or Enterprise subscription, you can take it a step further and make certain fields mandatory during manual creation.
This strategy can also be applied when contacts are created through form submissions by including key fields in your forms that your team will value.
To ensure all of your data is consistent, you can create a list of contacts to check against any key fields that a contact may not have a value for. For example, if you're looking to find contacts that do not have a value for the property "industry," you can create a list with the criteria "industry is unknown."
3. Determine Who Will Do The Cleaning
Not every company has a CRM manager, so discuss with your team who will be assigned the task of cleaning up your data. You can also prioritize it as a team effort, ensuring members check over their data within their team only. This strategy can be useful for a large number of contacts that may not be manageable for one member to tackle.
4. Create a Schedule
You should determine how often you'll want to perform your cleanup maintenance by creating a schedule. Once a month? Every quarter? Once a year? Depending on certain factors that will determine how frequent you'll need to do the task, such as the quantity of data you have, it's important to stick to a schedule to keep your data fresh and clean.
5. Get Some Extra Help With Integrations
Data management integrations are a great way to get some assistance. Check out a few of these integrations:- Insycle Data Management: Insycle allows you to automate your HubSpot data cleansing throughout your database. Its features include bulk merging of duplicate records, flexible record matching when importing data, and standardizing values.
- Leadspace: Leadspace helps maintain accurate data by optimizing lead routing with lead-to-account matching.
- Property Capitalize: This integration will correct the title cases in any existing or future records.
Keeping Your Data Clean
No matter how you go about cleaning your CRM data, follow your plan and stick with it. Keeping a routine will allow you to have more control over your data and keep it in pristine shape. Speaking of control, it’s always best to have all your data under the roof — rather than have it scattered all over the place. Tools like HubSpot’s Customer Platform will help you with just that.
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