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Connorj13
by: Contributor | Elite Partner
Contributor | Elite Partner

How I’ve Learned To Automate CRM Hygiene

As a systems engineer, I have worked with many different companies of all sizes. While they have more differences than similarities, one thing they all have in common is – dirty data. 

 

Doing data cleanup is not a glamorous job, and it’s often a very tedious job that takes a lot of time and attention. That’s why it is never surprising when I find marketing, sales and operations people don’t even know where to start. While it may be something you try and brush under the rug, it’s something that should have your team's full attention.  

 

It might not seem like that big of a deal, right? Your reps know their accounts and contacts. The minor details don’t seem to matter in the grand scheme of things. However, poor CRM hygiene is costing you money. Just to drive it home, I will say it again - the dirty data in your CRM is costing your business money!

 

Not only does poor CRM hygiene make it difficult to create meaningful reports, it also makes it difficult to power automation for your team.  Not having insights into the quality of your data means you cannot depend on personalization tokens, triggered automation, list segmentation and much more. 

 

In solving this problem year after year, I have found that the best way to tackle this problem is through continuous automated cleanup.  This has multiple positive impacts - it frees up your team's time, your marketing team can design more powerful targeted campaigns, your ops team can confidently set up triggered automation and your sales team can quickly and easily create segments for targeted sales. 

 

The good news is that once you’ve identified you have a CRM hygiene problem, I have the solution for you. Check out how I worked this out using Operations Hub:

 

First things first, you will need to create custom a few contact properties in HubSpot to map your user type and the company your user is associated with (account ID). This will give you a custom identifier on all of your contact records.

 

The next step is important, you will need to ensure that you pass this custom identifier information from your CRM into HubSpot via API. If you do not execute this step correctly, you will not be able to isolate your records as you need to.

 

The final step is to create a workflow with the enrollment criteria equalling “user type” is (custom identifier) Then, write a custom coded action to pull that user type account ID and associate it with the appropriate company.

 

By following these three steps, you can confidently say goodbye to poor CRM hygiene and have trust in your data.  If you’re looking for a deep dive on how exactly you can execute this and some other advanced additions you can build on top of this, register for our upcoming workshop or (re)watch my AMA!

 

Want to read more of my thoughts. Here’s my previous blog post on SDR reporting.