How to improve your contact management system to optimize your business

Whether you use CRM software or Contact Management Software, your data is at the heart of your business. All your teams use your CRM:

• Your marketing teams: to nurture your leads and feed your Sales teams
• Your Sales teams: to convert your leads
• Your Customer Support teams: to have all the information about your customers
• Etc.

According to Nucleus Research, the increase in productivity of a company using CRM is estimated at 15%, because it allows simplifies Sales. This statistic shows us the importance of improving your contact management system. But how?

The benefits of a contact management system for your Data Management

By using Contact Management Software or Customer Relationship Management Software, you can reduce human error, save time and provide your teams with up-to-date customer data.

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A contact management platform provides your company with a digital address book where you can store and manage contact information. A well-organized customer data directory simplifies access to information for all your teams.

You can find below some of the best Contact Management Software with very different pricing:

• Hubspot CRM
• Zendesk
• Streak
• Nextiva
• Salesforce
• Pipedrive

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6 tips to improve your contact management system and Data Management

‍A Customer Relationship Management tool is useful for all the coworkers who will address a customer. From lead generation to Customer Support. Each team will have its specific needs (business needs are not the same as marketing needs). You need to be aware of them before starting to improve your contact management system and data management.

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1. Take a look at your sales pipeline and customer journey

• To improve your pipeline management, sum up all of your touch points with your leads/customers
• List all the information you need to reach your targets and achieve your goals by asking your teams. It can be for example phone numbers for your Sales Team, LinkedIn profile and social media information for your Growth Team, customer interactions, and customer information for your Customer Support Team, ...
• Once you have this information you can optimize your sales processes: who acts when? With what information? For what purpose?
• Contact Management Tools can be a mess if coworkers do not know their roles. To help you organize you can define access rights in most CRM platforms. It will prevent coworkers to get lost in the multiple features and compromising your data

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2. Create your perfect customer contact card with the contact data needed

• Set up the criteria you want to appear on your contact database
• Last name, first name, job title, company… This is the basic contact information that you need to address your sales leads, new contacts, and customers
• But what else do your team needs? Create your own custom fields according to your needs
• For instance, your Customer Support Team may need to know when was the last follow-up or phone call with the Sales Team, the communication history with this customer, the list of articles read in the help desk, or the pricing of his plan, ...
• The list of contact data will not be the same depending on the type of contact: salespeople don’t need the same information on a business contact as a marketing people for his lead management  

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3. Keep your contact record up-to-date by optimizing your contact management solution

• Important fact: 25 to 30% of your CRM data becomes outdated every year
• You lose 50% of your customers and leads data every two years
• That’s why keeping your contact record up-to-date in real-time is so important
• Discover how LoneScale’s workflows can update your contact information to grow your sales pipeline

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4. Think about integrations, for real

• Make your life easier by integrating your stack with your CRM system
• For instance, you can connect your email provider to your CRM to keep track of all the interchanges with a prospect
• You can also connect your cold emailing tool and marketing automation to your CRM solution to help you track your sequences
• Once again, think about the needs of all your teams before making integrations in your CRM tool
• Streamline your integrations: bring only the information your teams need to where they need it

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5. Automate, score, and personalize

• To save time automate your process:

>> test to automate tasks one by one

>> iterate and adapt according to your tests

• For example, you can:

>> automate your lead scoring with personalized criteria

>> use scoring properties to make your contact automatically evolve in your sales pipeline, and pass from MQL to SQL

>> automate the import of a contact list into your marketing tools and the filling of your email marketing with personalized variables

>> push notifications to your salespeople when a hot lead is updated

>> enrich your marketing tools with the contact information

6. Reportings and metrics

• Most of the CRM solution on the market allows the creation of personalized dashboards: create your own template according to your needs and goals and measure your performance to improve your:

>> sales pipeline

>> sales management

>> conversion and retention rates

>> marketing campaigns

>> and the customer experience in general

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We won’t tell you again how important is your CRM configuration and data for good and efficient work.

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That’s why you need to perpetually close this loop. Make sure everything runs smoothly and is up-to-date with your needs.