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.
Yikes. Our Co-Founders keep spending money for contact and leads lists and insist that they get dumped into our system. Because we have hundreds of thousands of potential prospects, we're loathe to remove all but the most disqualifyingly bad leads.
We'd like to build this system so that leads get timed out and returned to prospecting or handed over to new reps on a rolling 90-day cycle, which would be essentially quarterly.
It is a constant process, and important to have reports set up to show you where there are gaps and data quality issues so you can catch it and fix it! You are only as good as the data you have!
Cleaning the contacts database is a must have activity. Because, if it keeps growing that may cost a lot for renewals. There is no such timeline which should be considered as a standard to clean database. But, in my views system should reviewed every quarter and keep creating some contact views to segragate the non active contacts. And every year before renewal review these lists and remove such contacts.
I have tried annually to clean it up but I am hoping with HubSpot and workflows we'll be a lot more consistent. I usually clean up duplicate accounts, duplicate contacts but we don't do much we people who aren't at the company or unsubscribed. They just sit in SFDC not sure what best practice is with those contacts.
I would say it depends on the customer timeline for your business. Understanding a typical lifecycle for a customer and the latency and recency of your customers can help determine when someone can be considered disengaged.
The cadence that I find works best for most of the organizations I've worked with is whatever coincides with your newsletter or largest mailing, as long as that is no longer than once every quarter. If there is a mass mail or email that goes out more frequently (i.e., monthly), then the data should be scrubbed prior to that activity. If the organization doesn't conduct any mass mailings or emails (or that activity takes place at longer than quarterly intervals), then best practice would be to clean up the database quarterly.
I think this is a constant process. If you see something, say something (or correct something). Whether they have the wrong persona assigned, contact isn't there anymore, or other reasons, clean it up as you go.