Imagine contacting a prospect who misspelled their email address while trying to download your white paper or someone who has been in your CRM for a while but has since changed jobs. You’re wasting your time and potentially overestimating the impact of scaled campaigns. That’s what stale CRM data can do to you.
At a basic level, having untidy CRM data is frustrating. The worst part is that it can cause revenue loss and make sales forecasting almost impossible. According to a study by Gartner, 45% of sales leaders lack confidence in forecasting accuracy because of poor data. In fact, only 47% of respondents believe their organization’s data is high-quality.
With CRM data cleansing tools, you can monitor and maintain healthy sales data on autopilot.
Not sure what these tools are, how they function, or how to find the right one for your business? Then, let’s dig into it.
CRM Data Cleansing Tools Basics
What Are CRM Data Cleansing Tools?
CRM data cleansing tools are software solutions designed to improve the quality of your CRM data by identifying and correcting inaccuracies, duplicates, and inconsistencies.
Imagine a sales rep on your team calls a lead only to find the person has left the company. This is precisely where data cleansing tools are helpful. They regularly update the lead database, ensuring your reps reach the right contacts.
Why CRM Data Cleansing Matters for RevOps and Sales Teams
Messy CRM data can pose significant challenges for revenue and sales teams. A study by Experian found that only 44% of CRM/ERP data is clean. This lack of data quality hampers businesses' ability to respond to market changes and improve customer experiences.
Therefore, having access to accurate data means your organization can achieve operational excellence and improve all facets of the business, including:
- Sales Productivity — Clean data reduces the time sales reps spend correcting errors and allows them to focus on selling.
- Customer Interactions — Using accurate data better positions you to personalize customer communications, increase their satisfaction, and close more deals.
- Reliable Reports — High-quality data provides accurate sales forecasts and performance reports, essential for strategic planning and decision-making.
Key Features of Data Cleansing Tools
Now that you better understand what these tools do, let’s explore the standard features that come with them.
Data Profiling
Data profiling is one of the most critical features, as it helps you detect anomalies in your sales data. Data profiling allows you to:
- Lay the foundation for identifying and addressing data quality issues.
- Identify issues such as duplicate contacts, incomplete records, and inconsistent data entries.
- Assess data distribution, such as the frequency of customer interactions, average purchase value, and customer demographics, which helps detect outliers and understand patterns in customer behavior.
Data Matching
Next is data matching, which uses advanced algorithms to match and merge records from different sources, such as your website lead forms or past webinar promotions. This ensures that all related data points are correctly linked.
Error Detection and Correction
This feature identifies and corrects errors, such as typos, misspellings, and incorrect data entries. Some tools use machine learning to predict and correct these errors automatically.
Deduplication
Deduplication is pretty self-explanatory—it removes duplicate records from your CRM. This capability reduces redundancy and improves the efficiency of data storage and processing.
Data Enrichment
Finally, we’ve got data enrichment. This functionality enhances your CRM data by adding relevant information from external sources, giving you a fuller picture of your prospects.
For example, integrating data from sales call transcripts can automatically update your CRM with detailed notes on customer preferences, pain points, and purchasing readiness. This helps your sales team send more personal and relevant follow-up messages, making it easier to close the deal.
What to Look for in a CRM Data Cleansing Tool for Your Organization
When picking a CRM data cleansing tool, you should keep a few key things in mind.
You don’t want to end up with a tool that doesn’t link up with your CRM or has limited capabilities for your needs.
Compatibility with Your Existing CRM System and Other Tools
What CRM platform does your business use? That’s the first thing you should consider.
The data cleaning tool you choose should work seamlessly with your current CRM system. Ideally, it should also connect with your ABM, helpdesk, and email marketing tools so you can capture all the data across the entire customer lifecycle.
When data flows smoothly between systems, you avoid the headache of manual updates and potential data discrepancies.
Ease of Use and User Interface
No one wants to spend hours figuring out a complicated tool. Look for a solution that's user-friendly and intuitive. A clean, easy-to-navigate interface means your team can get up and running quickly without extensive training.
Customization Options
Your business is unique, and so are your data needs. Make sure the tool offers customization options. Whether you need to set specific data validation rules, merge duplicates in a certain way, or clean particular data fields, a customizable tool will adapt to your sales workflow, not the other way around.
Pricing and ROI
Finally, consider the cost and what you’re getting in return. The average price for data cleansing tools ranges from $400 per user per year for budget to midrange options and $1,000 to $3,000 annually for more comprehensive solutions.
A pricey tool might not necessarily be the best option for your business. You need to think about what problem you want to solve and pick a tool built precisely for that use case. Think about the features included in the pricing plans and weigh them against the potential ROI.
4 CRM Data Cleaning Tools for Different Use Cases
When you’re ready to invest in a data cleansing tool, do your research and choose a solution that best suits your needs.
Here are four software tools with a focus on specific CRM data challenges:
- Momentum
Momentum is an excellent tool for capturing insights from sales calls, maintaining CRM hygiene, and boosting sales productivity. It transforms sales call insights into actionable CRM data, ensuring that information in Salesforce is always up-to-date and accurate. Additionally, it pushes information to Slack, allowing your team to act on it promptly.
Other standout features include:
- MEDDIC Autopilot: Momentum creates smart prompts based on MEDDIC and custom fields to capture data from sales call summaries and sync it back to Salesforce in real-time. This lets you keep your CRM data accurate and easily stay on top of potential risks and opportunities.
- Backfill: The tool allows you to analyze years of historical interactions and sync these insights directly to Salesforce, giving you a comprehensive view of customer behavior over time.
- Seamless Slack Integration: Automatically sync deal updates from Slack Account Rooms to Salesforce opportunities. This keeps your account histories clear and up-to-date, so your team is always in the loop.
With Momentum, you no longer need to rewatch or relisten to your sales calls and manually fill in your Salesforce fields with prospect information. Momentum automatically does it all for you, so your sales reps can focus on closing more deals while you have more complete insights than when your reps manually filled out the fields.
- Data Ladder DataMatch
If you’re looking for a no-code scrubbing tool that excels at data matching and cleaning, DataMatch is an excellent option. It comes with data profiling and discovery tools, making it easy to identify errors and discrepancies in your CRM.
Standout features include:
- Real-time API flows to validate data coming directly from input forms to your CRM system
- Automated CRM cleansing and matching routines
- Standardization of CRM data to ensure consistency
- ZoomInfo OperationsOS
ZoomInfo OperationsOS is another excellent option, albeit on the pricier side. It is a comprehensive tool integrating data cleansing, enrichment, and management.
Standout features include:
- Real-time CRM data enrichment from multiple sources
- Advanced data search, filtering, and segmentation tools
- Data visualization
- Integrate.io
Integrate.io is a versatile data integration platform with powerful data cleansing features. It is ideal for businesses that need to integrate and clean data from various sources to maintain a consistent CRM database.
Standout features include:
- Drag-and-drop interface to simplify data preparation
- 300+ pre-built integrators
- Scalable architecture to accommodate growing data needs.
Get on Top of Your Sales Calls Data
Messy sales data can negatively affect your planning capacity and pipeline management, stalling your company’s growth. Don’t let this become your pain point.
If updating CRM fields after sales calls is killing your sales team’s productivity, consider Momentum.
Contact us today, and we’ll set you up quickly so your team can focus on what they do best—closing deals and driving revenue.