Customer relationship management (CRM) data can be key to driving sales and boosting customer retention. It helps you understand when, where, and how your target audience interacts with your brand and what their specific needs are, making it easier to enhance your marketing and sales efforts. However, more data isn’t always best—it’s the quality of the data that drives higher results.
Collecting the right types and the optimal amount of data is essential for maintaining an efficient CRM database. It’s important to understand how each type of CRM data can support your goals to determine which information to collect.
CRM data analytics are incredibly powerful—when used with the right strategies, they can help you attract more customers, keep them engaged, and stay compliant with privacy regulations. With smart strategies in place, your marketing and sales teams can spend less time on CRM database management and more time driving revenue. Regardless of if your team is looking to implement a new CRM platform, start a data migration, or clean your existing database, let’s look at the benefits of using a CRM, the types of crm data you might store in one, and tips for keeping your customer data organized.
What is CRM data?
CRM data is information about your customers and target audience that you can use to understand their needs, preferences, and how they interact with your company. From basic contact information to the number of times someone visits your website, CRM data provides useful insights about what drives sales and retains loyal customers.
Common CRM data examples include customer names, email addresses, and purchase history. You can collect CRM data through various avenues such as direct interactions, collected forms, and point-of-sale activity.
Reps will utilize the manual CRM data entry functionality, or the data will automatically generate if someone gives you their information through a web form or at the point of sale.
What is a CRM database?
A CRM database is a centralized hub for all of your collected customer data. It serves as a one-stop shop for sales and marketing teams to plan and manage their outreach campaigns. Ideally, your CRM data will integrate with the rest of your marketing and sales technology stack to continually add, verify, and update your CRM data.
There are hundreds of CRM platforms, including on-premise and cloud-based solutions. Each offers a different range of features and industry-specific uses. Some of the most popular CRM vendors include Salesforce, Hubspot, Nimble, Oracle, SAP, and Zoho.
If you’re in the market for a new CRM software, ask your marketing and sales connections about the CRMs they’ve used in the past and peruse software-specific review sites like G2—this will greatly streamline your search.
Types of CRM data
The first step in optimizing your CRM and data management practices is to understand the different types of information you can collect.
Operational CRM data
Operational CRM data helps automate tasks such as lead management, email marketing, and customer support. Operational CRM focuses on the following information:
- Lead information
- Customer contact details
- Sales pipeline stages
- Customer support interactions
- Feedback results
- Marketing campaign results
Identity CRM data
Identity data consists of basic contact information, providing you with the information you need to identify a customer or prospect. The following details are part of the identity data category:
- Customers’ first and last names
- Mailing addresses
- Contact information, such as phone numbers and email addresses
- Social media handles
- Account information
Collecting identity data is vital for communicating with customers, personalizing your marketing strategies, and understanding your customers on a basic level. This type of information is easy to collect and verify, and much of it is collected during e-commerce or retail point-of-sale (POS) transactions.
Identity data is highly sensitive and vulnerable if a data breach occurs, so it’s important to only collect essential details and implement safeguards to protect them.
Descriptive CRM data
Descriptive data provides deeper insights into who your customers are. Also known as “snapshot data,” it helps you profile customers and understand their preferences based on the following information:
- Lifestyle
- Demographics such as location, age, and education level
- Purchase history
- Hobbies and general interests
- Family details and marital status
- Job title and industry
Descriptive data is slightly more challenging to collect than identity data, but it’s an excellent resource for personalizing your marketing and customer experience strategies. You can use methods such as surveys, social media monitoring, email, online dashboards, web forms, and face-to-face interactions to acquire descriptive data.
Qualitative CRM data
Qualitative CRM data helps you understand why and how customers interact with your brand the way that they do. It focuses on your customers’ opinions and how satisfied they are with your offerings, so you can cater to their needs and preferences effectively. Qualitative data involves findings from the following types of interactions:
- Customer surveys
- Reviews
- Social media activity
- Direct feedback from team conversations
Sales and marketing representatives can use qualitative data to improve how they approach customers. It lets your team know how customers feel about your company, and it’s the most important type of CRM data when you want to learn how to engage new prospects and retain existing customers.
Similar to descriptive data, qualitative data can be challenging to acquire. However, it’s incredibly useful for maintaining your revenue streams and reaching more of your target audience.
Quantitative CRM data
Quantitative CRM data is measurable, numerical data about customer behaviors and interactions. It’s essential for sales progress tracking, sales forecasting, and effective targeted marketing. The following types of hard figures and statistics provide accurate insights about how you can gain new shoppers, retain existing customers, and land more sales:
- Number of purchases
- Average order value
- Service tickets
- Social media engagement
- Number of leads and lead conversion rates
- Subscription renewal dates
- Time to close a deal
- Average sales representative call times
Quantitative data is fairly easy to track by integrating your CRM with your POS software.
Importance of choosing the right CRM data
Choosing the right CRM data to use and how to use it is vital for effective marketing, customer service, sales, and operations. Collecting too much data or ineffective data can cause you to miss opportunities, decrease customer satisfaction, violate consumer privacy laws, or waste time and resources. When you pinpoint the best type of CRM data to collect and manage, you can spend more time enhancing customer experiences and growing your customer base.
As your company grows and expands, you may interact with consumers across multiple channels and store data in different databases. This makes it challenging to maintain updated information, but limiting your CRM data to only the most useful information results in a more manageable, efficient CRM database.
How to choose the right CRM data
To maintain a manageable CRM database, you must determine which types of information can help you personalize and improve customer experiences. Approximately 81 percent of consumers prefer companies that offer personalized experiences, making tailored interactions a crucial part of your marketing and sales efforts. The following tips can help you choose the most effective types of CRM data to focus on:
Understand local consumer privacy laws
Keep in mind that for virtually all consumer data, you’ll want to make sure you’ve read up on relevant local consumer privacy laws like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU, the Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL) in China, and various statewide laws in the United States. These laws determine exactly which data points you’re able to collect, what level of consumer consent is required, how long this data can be stored, etc.
Define your company’s goals
To align your CRM data collection and management with your business goals, it’s helpful to focus on the following factors:
- Main customer touchpoints: Where do you interact with customers the most? This can be email, social media platforms, your website, or in-person events.
- Areas for improvement: Consider what you need to improve in order to grow your business. You might want to increase sales, expand your customer base, launch new products, improve customer experiences or boost efficiency. Once you pinpoint your main areas for improvement, you can clearly define your goals and plan the best strategy to meet those goals.
Focus on relevance and accuracy
Next, determine what type of CRM data is most relevant to your goals. For example, you might focus on demographics if you want to improve how you target potential customers with your online advertisements.
Purchase history data might be the best option if you want to determine which products bring in the most revenue and where to shift your energy and resources. Engagement data and feedback may be the best type of data to collect if you want to enhance customer experiences and boost brand loyalty.
It’s also essential to ensure your data is accurate by establishing clear data entry guidelines, training users, and automating validation checks.
Ensure consistency and quality
Use standardized data naming conventions and formats to ensure consistency. This makes data easier to review and analyze. You can also do the following to maintain data quality:
- Automate data entry processes
- Define clear data entry guidelines and rules
- Designate specific individuals in each department to oversee data management
- Conduct regular data audits
- Regularly update records and clear duplicate information
Why collect CRM data?
Your CRM data is one of the most valuable assets your company owns. Its use—or misuse—will directly affect your business success.
When you keep a clean CRM database with only the most useful information for your reps, you can unlock many business advantages and do the following:
Enhance customer experiences
Your customers expect highly personalized experiences when engaging with your brand. Every message you send needs to prove that you understand the customer as an individual, their unique needs, and their relationship with your brand—or you risk losing them to a competitor.
Your CRM data is essential for personalizing each customer’s experience, such as using their name in your messages, providing them recommendations based on their past purchases, and using their location (if they provide it) to spotlight local offers or opportunities. Additionally, your CRM can help you segment customers based on their preferences, making it easier to personalize your campaigns.
Ensure business growth
We’ve mentioned that your CRM is a tool for both sales and marketing teams, meaning your CRM is a direct factor in your revenue growth. CRM metrics help your team appropriately label and filter your customers to better engage with them. Most CRMs can run helpful reports, too, that forecast your sales, identify hot leads, and empower your sales reps to act fast.
Increase your conversion rate
By using your customer data, you can more accurately approach your customers with relevant offers and suggestions at times when they matter the most. This gives you a greater chance of driving sales and increasing your conversion rate.
Improve analysis and forecasting accuracy
A fine-tuned CRM can give your sales leaders greater confidence when forecasting your quarterly sales and help with crm data analysis. The CRM reports we mentioned earlier—we’ll explain those in the next section—provide your leaders the data they need to understand their sales cycles, identify areas of opportunity, and improve the accuracy of their forecasts.
Tips for keeping your CRM database clean and organized
One of the main challenges that sales and marketing professionals face with their CRM database is keeping it clean. As your contacts grow from hundreds to thousands and your entries come from multiple sources, your CRM will need regular maintenance.
Contacts become duplicated. Information gets stale. Reps cut corners when manually inputting data.
It’s inevitable that your CRM data quality will decrease with time, but you can keep your CRM up to date by prioritizing data cleaning and following these best practices:
Standardize data entry and ownership
Create clear data entry rules. These include using consistent formats for names, phone numbers, and addresses. Dropdowns, validation fields, and limiting free-text entries can reduce human error.
Identify and assign clear ownership of the CRM data. These stakeholders will be responsible for setting up rules, standards, and monitoring the quality of the data.
Follow a regular maintenance schedule
Given the multiple ways that customer data can enter your CRM, you need to follow a regular data maintenance schedule to catch and correct any outdated or incorrect customer information. At a minimum, your team should manually review its CRM database once every eight weeks—which is typically how long an email nurture campaign is—and before any major outreach seasons, like the holidays.
But the better option is to implement a data management platform like Validity DemandTools, which automatically dedupes, standardizes, and assigns records as they come in from different sources.
Get rid of unnecessary CRM data
Don’t be a data hoarder. Too often, marketers collect every possible piece of customer information they can, but this often distracts them from the details that actually matter. Plus, privacy laws like GDPR require marketers to delete customer information after a certain amount of time. Remember: the goal is to only store information in your CRM data system that is actually useful for improving your customer experience. Remove everything else.
Be aware of usability
Your CRM should help your team work better and seamlessly integrate with their day-to-day workflow. Regularly speak with your reps and ask about their experience with the CRM. How is it helpful? How can it be challenging? Take this feedback and create guides or training to coach your team.
If most of your team dislikes your CRM or finds it too time-consuming, it might be time to make a switch. (See how Meta reduced the time they spent updating CRM records by 50 percent with Validity® GridBuddy Connect.)
Run regular reports
A CRM can provide many different reports that help you understand where your revenue is coming from, how customers are progressing through the pipeline, and how your campaigns are measuring against their goals. CRM reports are essential for optimizing your sales and marketing strategies, and running regular reports can also help you catch if there may be an issue with your CRM data quality.
Merge duplicate records
As we mentioned, some of your contacts will become duplicated. Every CRM user battles with duplicates, and it’s best to merge them (otherwise known as data deduplication) before they create duplicate workstreams—and waste your team’s time.
The best way to manage duplicates is with a tool that can detect, eliminate, and prevent duplicate records. Otherwise, your reps will have to manually review fields like first and last name, email address, and home address to potentially identify your duplicates. Sign up for a free trial of Validity DemandTools to discover how it can help you manage duplicate information.
Train your team
Navigating any CRM can be tough for even the most seasoned sales and marketing professionals, especially if they’re unfamiliar with the software. Regularly train your team on how to use your CRM, and thoroughly explain how new customer information should be added and how profiles should be reviewed.
You cannot assume that your team will know exactly how to enter information or your company’s ideal way to manage data. So, ongoing training and reminders are necessary to empower everyone to keep your CRM clean.
Why trust Validity with your CRM data management?
Validity helps you optimize your data, ensuring your company gets the most value out of each customer interaction. We are committed to doing good and building trust with you and your customers, empowering you to practice ethical marketing.
Thousands of successful businesses around the world count on Validity to manage billions of CRM records, enabling them to collect vital data while protecting consumers’ sensitive information. You can depend on Valdity to help you use trustworthy data to your advantage, outperform your competition, and grow your business.
Overcoming the challenges of CRM data management
It’s natural for your CRM data quality to fluctuate over time, but by optimizing the data you store and training your team on the best ways to manage your data, you’ll have a much easier time engaging your customers in meaningful ways.
There are many other tips and best practices for you to effortlessly clean your CRM data and optimize your strategy to drive revenue. Download our free Ultimate CRM Admin Toolkit for more resources to overcome the challenges of CRM data management.
