Jul 11, 20217:39 AM - edited Jul 11, 20217:40 AM
Inbound Professor
How often do you clean your contacts database?
We’re in a data-driven era, where datasets are shared between marketing, sales, and customer service teams to increase organizational effectiveness and facilitate alignment. When you have high levels of inconsistent data, it’s not just one team taking the hit. It’s everyone. The entire company. The fallout from that bad data extends to every corner of your business that the data touches. With that in mind, how often do you currently audit and clean your contacts database? Once a month? Every quarter? Once a year? What does the process look like? Share your thoughts and current schedule.
We are just beginning wiht Hubspot and will be cleaning the database real time for the next few weeks post our first campaign. As we add contacts and sellers we will have a central Sales Enablement function that will own the taxk.
We do a quarterly audit/cleaning plus use a couple of workflows to help keep things organized throughout the year (primarily as a way to keep tabs on our Marketing Contacts number).
It really depends on a variety of different factors all of which have an effect in determining the frequency of how often you would need to clean your contacts database. First and foremost I would say that the most influential factor by far is the overall amount of data stored in your database. You should also take into consideration the cleanliness, integrity, and validity of the data while also ensuring that it is up to date and free of duplicate entries. Other factors regarding the data on a more specific and individual level are the number of contacts, the performance levels driving your business development/intelligence, the amount of productivity your data is bringing to your organization & the overall quality of your market research/data analysis in general. All of these different reasons definitely play important roles and should definitely be the deciding factors in making your decision on how often to clean or update your contacts database.
It depends on the impact the dirty data will have, but in general I like to automate as much as possible to happen weekly or continuously. Then other tasks can happen monthly, quorterly or yearly.
At its core, the question of when and why to remove a contact from your database is important. However, an unengaged lead this year can easily turn into an engaged lead next year. The question I have is... how do you determine a long-term target and a waste of time lead?
Hi there - as an inbound agency founder, we did a far better job of helping our clients clean their databases - typically twice per year - than we did for ourselves! It is essential, even as simple as de-duplication and making sure you don't have bottlenecks in your automation processes can take significant time. That said, it's a group of tasks that needs to be documented, actively monitored and QA'd by leadership in any organization IMO.
Hello from VT! I'm not sure how often we do a formal audit besides the one we did last year. However, we're nuts for updating contacts in HS to reflect day to day changes.
I currently do not work in an area that I know this but I think it depens on the business some need to do it more often than others. Quarterly may be ideal for some but may not be better for others which is why there is more options than just quarterly.
Our process looks at cleaning our database every half a year, however, we usually end up keeping a lot of data inside our CRM for later, and communicating only with the engaged prospects/clients.
We will go through and remove and merge accounts that need that done to them, but more often than not we keep all of the contacts that we are asigned through Hubspot.
