5 Steps for CRM Data Standardization

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Have you ever gone to use data from your CRM, maybe in marketing automation, only to find that inconsistencies in the data are causing issues and embarrassing errors that could harm your company's reputation? Everyone has.

Standardized data, often referred to offhand as data normalization, is a critical piece of the puzzle when it comes to ensuring CRM data quality. Standardizing data improves data quality and fix many common data issues on its own.

A lack of standardization results in low-quality data. Companies lose 12% of their potential revenue, on average, due to bad data.

This causes many issues, including:

Harm reporting and forecasting by making your data difficult to telephoner au danemark search and filter. Standardization makes data queries and filtering easier and more predictable.
Embarrassing marketing automation errors that harm your reputation. Ever sent an email to “jane” instead of “Jane”? Or worse yet, refer to someone as “{First Name}”? These small errors break the veil of one-to-one personalization and harm your company’s reputation.
Balloon your marketing budgets. Inconsistent data can cause you to send bad emails, send direct mail materials to the wrong address, and ultimately cause a lot of waste in your marketing budget.
Break integrations with important software. For example, inconsistent phone numbers could cause problems with a sales team’s auto-dialer software, leading to missed opportunities.
Slow down data cleansing processes. When data has inconsistencies , there are many different types of issues that can crop up. These can be difficult to identify in the CRM or in Excel with VLOOKUP and will slow down your teams as they require by-hand editing to rectify them.
For these reasons, data standardization in your CRM system is absolutely critical for teams across your organization, including marketing operations, sales operations, and revenue operations teams. Most business processes can be improved with improvements to data quality.

In this article, we’ll break down a simple step-by-step process that companies can follow to put them on the path toward standardized CRM data.