Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems are tools that offer organizations the ability to keep track important customer information. They support sales management, provide actionable insights, integrate with social media and foster better communication within the team. Cloud-based CRM solutions are great for driving sales, providing better service for customers, and keeping everyone across an organization on the same page.


In a recent Salesforce Research report, it was found that salespeople spend nearly one-third of the time performing data entry and administrative tasks. A quarter of their time in front of a customer is spent, not selling, but preparing for meetings. This leaves little time to actually collect the information they need from the customer. As a result, both salespeople and organizations experience a dip in productivity. An automated CRM system could help ease the burden of manual activities on sales teams to a great extent.


A CRM system can manage and nurture customer relationships, collect and store customer information in a central location, and track customer interactions. However, inaccurate CRM data can do more harm to your sales efforts than good.


Here are some reasons why CRM data could be inaccurate:

1. Human Error
Inaccurate data due to human error can lead to complex challenges that range from mistakes on cold calls to inaccurate reporting and decision-making.

2. Incomplete Data Entry
Having incomplete data is like trying to sell to a customer without their contact details. Holes in your data make it hard to properly target the leads that will buy your product.

3. Duplicate Entry
Duplicate entries refer to the doubling of information in your CRM. For example, Chief Growth Officer Lisa Smith might show up multiple times across companies. They can paralyze processes as they can appear in prospect lists, contact data, and sales accounts.

4. Outdated Data
Data is an important element of keeping up with your prospects. Outdated information makes it harder to track and maintain current information about how your prospect’s as companies and personnel changed over time.

On the contrary, accurate CRM data can benefit sales teams and organizations in multiple ways:

1. Better Understanding of Customer
When your CRM data is accurate, it helps sales teams understand the customer and their needs and preferences better.

2. Improved Customer Relations
Salespeople can send out personalized communications to customers based on accurate CRM data and thereby nurture them better and lay the foundations for strong relationships.

3. Track leads, deals, pipeline and contacts
Accurate and updated CRM data helps salespeople track the buyer journey and they can make decisions based on the stage of the sales funnel.

4. Better Qualified leads and Access to More Sales Opportunities
The higher the quality of CRM data, the more likely you are to land qualified leads, as all sales decisions are made based on the availability of accurate data. It could also open the doors to new opportunities, as it could help you build better buyer personas and adopt a more targeted sales approach.

5. Better collaboration amongst teams
With clean data, team collaboration becomes an easier. This is because reliable data enables accurate information about clients, deals and pipelines, contributing to better decision making and collaboration amongst teams.

6. More accurate sales productivity data and reports
When the CRM data is accurate, your sales reports and productivity data are likely to be accurate too. This is will ensure that sales teams and managers are able to make better decisions. Investing in CRM platforms with accurate data could boost sales efficiency.

7. Better Sales and Management Decision Making
Dirty data can adversely affect your sales metrics and reporting and negatively impact your business. However, with clean CRM data, sales teams can bank on the accuracy of the data to make decisions that matter.

8. Faster Sales Cycle to Close Deals
With accurate data, sales teams can have a better understand of the buyer’s journey and make the right decisions that lead to faster sales cycles.


The accuracy of data is critical for successful sales. SARA AI can be integrated with CRM systems to automate CRM entries and help sales teams, managers and businesses have reliable data at their fingertips.


sources:
https://c1.sfdcstatic.com/content/dam/web/en_us/www/documents/reports/sales/state-of-sales-3rd-ed.pdf