Sponsored Content from IRD Prospector

Your CRM is sick. It started off as a promise to streamline your sales processes and save the team thousands of hours of time. Instead, it’s causing arguments, making people yell at their screens, making some of them revert to old techniques and causing a far bigger problem than it’s worth – and CRMs don’t come cheap.

Your CRM is diseased. And like disease, the problems within it are growing of their own volition. If you leave it too long, your CRM will turn into a zombie – if it hasn’t already! That’s the bad news. The good news? The sickness lurking within your CRM is curable. But it’s going to take some time and effort to nurse it back to health.

1.Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater

Within some companies, the health of their CRM has deteriorated so much that it feels like the best solution would be to start from scratch. We disagree – you don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. So, 9 out of every 10 entries is rubbish? That’s still one potential lead you have right there. With the thousands of entries you have, there’s gold hidden amongst the rubble. It’s not worth missing a highly lucrative opportunity because you’re fed up with your CRM.

2. It’s time to cut the crap

So we’ve established that your CRM is full of junk. Defunct companies, CFOs who’ve gone off to have babies, disconnected phone numbers, EnergyCorp and Energy Corp listed as two separate entities … Yuck! What a mess! 

You know what you need to do here – clean that data. 

There are a few options. You can task your employees to check through every single one of those entries. Painstakingly fixing, merging, and updating alllll those entries. You can employ people to go through and do that for you, instead of lumping your employees with that horror. Or, there are third party products that can help. Many companies go with a little from column A and a little from column B – both the third party add on and some manual scrubbing.

3. Fill it with the good stuff

Once you’ve cleaned up that CRM you’ll be left with complete, valid records that could be promising leads. Ok, so your CRM is back to being healthy (a little skinny maybe), not a crippled beast that’s growing weaker by the day.

Now it’s time to feed your CRM to make it really strong, to turn it into a force to be reckoned with. So, how do you go about doing that? Well, you need to fuel it with the right food – quality business opportunities, targeted directly to your market, that are complete and not stale.Finding them yourself isn’t easy. Marketing techniques have varying degrees of effectiveness. It’s more of a drip than a nice, chunky dataset that can feed your now-hungry CRM.

That’s why we created our targeted Prospector solutions: Prospector for B2B, Prospector for media sales, and Prospector for marketing services. Each of these solutions is designed specifically to give you targeted opportunities that make sense for your business. No useless junk, like opportunities from Romania. You just got rid of that, remember?

Supercharging your CRM with targeted opportunities is an easy way to feed your CRM, to make it ripe with potential again. Plus, it saves your team from putting in the hard yards trying to manually find new and useful data to fill it in. 

4. Keep that CRM healthy

Once your CRM is full of nice, clean, useful data – well, you need to keep it up. Today it’s all fresh, clean and complete, but if you leave it in that state then the cancer will start to come back. Frank from Gardaco will move onto a new role. That promising new start-up will fail to launch. Email addresses will change.

We all know prevention is better than cure, so empower your team to take care of their CRM and their CRM will continue to take care of business.

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