Keeping Your CRM System Up To Date

Back from holidays and feeling refreshed? What better time to look over your CRM system and make sure it is up to date with your business. Keeping your CRM system up to date by cleaning out old data and removing old contacts will ensure that you are getting the most out of your CRM system. It might even end up saving you some money!

Before you remove anything make sure to back-up the data, just in case you get a bit too carried away with the clean! At least then any accidental deletes can be reversed. To back up your data you need to be logged in as the administrator and go to, Setup, then Download My Data. After you are done backing-up your data you can go through the user list and remove any old users that might no longer work for your company or who no longer use the CRM system. Now you are ready to start going through your system!

Review Your CRM Fields

Do you still use all of them? Some fields might have been set up for a specific task that is no longer relevant. To remove a field go to, Setup, Manage Custom Fields and delete the ones you do not need.

Remove Contacts That You No Longer Have Contact Details For

Do you have contacts with no email or phone number attached to them? It might be time you deleted those. If you are unable to contact them they will not be a potential sales leads anyway. To find these contact go to Contact, click on the header “email” or “phone” and it will show you all contacts that are missing either. You can update their contact details or remove them. You might find that once you remove contacts you then have accounts with no contacts attached to them at all, you can go ahead and remove these accounts as well.

Delete Old & Outdated Data

Focus on possible wins, and remove old contacts if there has not been any activity in a long time. Remove any contact whose email bounces. It might be that the contact has left the company or has a new email address.

If you are starting to reach the limit of your storage capacity you might want to review some of your old documents and delete old linked accounts – anything more than 2 years old you can probably be removed. You might want to go through old prospects and presentations stored in old business accounts, but make sure to take care with invoice and contracts as you may need these in the future.

Delete Old Email Templates

If you are only using a couple of the email templates you have created then there is no need to keep the rest. End any marketing campaigns that have been completed but are still flagged as active.  Delete any prospects, suspects or opportunities which were not properly closed. You might have created entries to include prospects, suspects or opportunities which no longer exist, make sure to delete these. Have a look to see if you have logged tasks that are no longer relevant and remove those.

Go Through Your Reports

Get rid of reports that you no longer need. If you have old reports that were created and then never used, this is the time to get rid of those.

If You Are Using Advanced Reporting

You can run a report that will show you which accounts have not had any activities added since a selected date. Or, you could just add a temporary checkbox Custom Field on the account and tick all those you don’t want anymore. Our support team can delete these accounts for you if you send them an email.

Make sure you review the dashboard and that it is updated with the statistics you actually need to see each day.

Your CRM should now be tip-top and ready to go!