Migrating to a new CRM is the opportunity to clean up your CRM database and start afresh! If you have been neglecting your CRM data, this is the perfect opportunity to fix it up.
But hold your horses.
We’re not going to simply import thousands of contacts into your CRM without a plan. Keep reading to learn the 10 mistakes to avoid when migrating to or revamping your existing HubSpot CRM.
What Is A CRM?
By definition, a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a software that helps businesses to manage and maintain customer relationships, track sales leads and deals, see how contacts interact with marketing activities and logged customer support tickets. It captures and maps the different touchpoints that a customer experiences throughout their buying journey.
Purpose of CRMs
The purpose and goal of a CRM is not to just store customer data but rather, to manage business’ relationships, interactions and data about potential customers, existing customers and past customers.
A clean CRM can help marketers and sales teams draw data from to develop better data-driven strategies. But in reality, most businesses can’t trust their own data.
Boy, are they missing out!
1. Not Removing Duplicates & Dead Emails
With free email providers, it’s easy to have virtually as many email addresses they want. Statistics show that each user, on average has 2-3 email addresses per person for personal and professional purposes. This doesn’t even include the email addresses that get deleted when people move jobs! If you're a HubSpot user, try their new AI-driven deduplication tool.
If you don’t do this, you’ll likely get high hard and/or soft bounces. Not doing this will only taint the quality of your CRM and simply a waste of space. If you have a CRM that charges you based on the number of contacts you have, surely you’d only want to keep emails that will ultimately reach your prospect or customer’s inbox… right?
A quick and effective way to fix this is to use NeverBounce, an email verification tool that separates out incorrect, invalid and spam email addresses from for you.
2. Purchasing Email Lists
This is a big no no. Purchasing email lists of people who haven’t shown any interest at all in your product/service and haven’t given consent to store their data is a highly ineffective and not GDPR-friendly.
Instead, you should conduct your own marketing and sales activities and attract the right audience that is profitable for your business. This way contacts on your email list have shown legitimate interest in your offerings and will most likely want to hear from you again.
This is what’s called first-party data - Consumer data that businesses collect through their own business activities and “own”. This includes information such as first name, last name, email address, website interactions, purchase data and more.
Tip: Ensure that you have consent to store their data and permission to contact them by having GDPR-compliant forms. Luckily, this is free for HubSpot users!
3. Not Segmenting The Database Before Import
One of the biggest mistakes is opting for the easy option of dumping your existing contacts into your brand new CRM. Have you ever caught yourself thinking “It’s not important now, I’ll get back to this later. I need to focus on building my email list first”?
I’d highly recommend you segment your database before importing. It can be as simple or complex as you’d like. Perhaps try starting with leads vs customers, SMBs vs mid market vs enterprise or topics interested in. This will differ according to your business offering.
4. No Personas
A buyer persona is the semi-fictional representation of a business’s ideal customer. Not identifying or incorporating this early on means you aren’t thinking about what information you want to collect to funnel audiences into your positive and negative buyer persona buckets.
5. No lead scoring
As you’re already setting what attributes makes a positive and negative buyer persona, consider setting up negative and positive lead scoring too. Lead scoring, if set correctly, can help sales teams to prioritise leads based on their score.
6. Too Many Hands In The Mix
Another common mistake is having too many cooks in the CRM kitchen. What often ends up happening is each person has their own strategy, information isn’t passed on, little to no consistency, and double handling of work. Data just gets messier and messier as time goes on.
What you should do instead is document what the contact and company properties mean, how it’s being used, why it’s being used, who has access to make changes and how to share information with the team when a change has been made.
If you are an existing HubSpot user, you can easily limit edit and view access for each individual to safeguard the data.
7. Not Taking Into Account Business Processes & Not Automating
If you have a marketing automation software like HubSpot that’s connected deeply with a CRM, you should also consider what automations or workflows to keep your CRM squeaky clean.
Some examples might include updating the value of a property when a user does a certain action, changing lifecycle stages when users meet the new conditions, sending your team an internal notification and updating fields when a deal is at a different deal stages.
8. Not Considering Integrations
Ah ha, integrating your CRM with other third party software and platforms such as ERP, call tracking, Xero, ZenDesk, AskNicely and more can enrich your CRM data.
It helps to give more context to your prospects and customers, a more holistic view of your customers’ journey and how you can proactively create better experiences. Having data all in one place can have monumental impact business strategies and decisions.
9. No Consistency
In addition to point #6, a lack of consistency can very quickly result in duplicate properties and inaccurate data. Not sure about you but that sounds like a ticking time bomb to me. Eeek!
10. No Ongoing Strategy
This is a biggie. Importing data into the new CRM is half the battle won. The other half is ensuring you have a process for ongoing CRM management and quality control documented for easy reference.
This is going to be particularly useful when a team member goes on holiday or changes jobs - there’s only so much a single handover can cover! A good CRM is flexible and scalable so remember this is an iterative process.
A favourite tip of mine is before doing anything new, ask yourself “Why am I doing this?”. If you have a clear reason why you’re doing that particular action and are aware of the consequences, you’re most likely doing on the right track.
Getting your CRM cleaned up and setup can help you jump leaps in your HubSpot journey - instead of spending time working it out on your own. Whether you are SMB or mid-market business, we can help you. It’s time to turn your CRM into your data gold mine. Book a time on my calendar & let's chat!