Synchronizing your CRM with the real world: Fail
As companies disappear by mergers, acquisitions or by bankruptcy, your CRM becomes a data base with incorrect data.
Additionally people do change jobs and even change companies.
The data in the CRM is aging everyday as everyday changes happen in your market with your customers and potential customers.
Failing email campaigns, direct mailings and telemarketing campaigns
Due to the fact the decision makers have long gone:
- The great email campaign you had planned has many undelivered messages: no results.
- The planned event gathers only a few participants as your direct mailing campaign failed to reach the people.
- The telemarketing campaign returned less than expected results.
Keeping you CRM data base recent is a challenge: an up-to-date customer and prospect data base is a mirage:
- Impossible to achieve
- Aimed at by every one
- Failed to reach by every one as it is far away
The maintenance costs involved for regular updates are hughe and recurrent.
Search Engines and Social Media as source
The sources that are most up-to-date will be the search engines and the social business websites (like LinkedIn, Viadeo, Xing, ecademy, Rize, Social Business Club) as people can have a personal reason or benefit to declare their change in their career. However many will not update their career information if they didn’t find a suiting job.
As always keeping any data base synchronized with the changes in the real world is almost impossible. However every company tries to achieve this with their CRM.
The same applies for external sources providing contact data: they face the massive task to keep their data base correct for more than just your market or customers.
Maybe it is better to rely upon the search engines or social websites that get updated by the persons involved themselves.
How up-to-date is your CRM?
Or did you just stop to keep it recent?
More from LEADS Explorer
- Your CRM is crap when marketing ….
- The Big Brother CRM
- The correlation between CRM efforts and selling
LEADS Explorer Recommends
Given the nature of the economy right now, it’s really important to stay on top of changes and mergers in order to keep your information as up to date as possible. As the article stated, social media sites, especially the professional ones, can be great tools in knowing who is doing what for what company. It takes time and effort but it’ll be worth it.
Too much information for the salesman and the sales team is currently available. They should get help from the information systems they are using.
Instead they are forced to enter data into a CRM (a contact data base in most cases).