Year End Data Cleaning to give 2023 more impactful results!

As the year comes to an end, it’s time to review, clean up, prepare for the new year, launch new products, build new OKRs and goals, and re-energize our teams! It’s a lot!  But it’s really important to analyze & clean this year’s data (contacts, sales, marketing, data flow) to ensure a productive new year.  Understand what worked, what can be improved, and what clutter to remove to help marketing and sales see the path line in creating new year quarterly and yearly goals.  

Year-end data cleaning is important on so many levels. It’s the perfect way to check all points in your CRM from contacts and companies to data flow and reporting. Much like companies have a year-end financial audit, there should be a year-end CRM audit to implement new strategies in a cleaner state. When you clean your CRM, you improve data & lead visualization, improve processes, improve customer experience - which increases sales & revenue.

What does Year End Cleaning Data entail?

At the end of each year, we reflect on what worked and what didn’t so we can build a strong foundation for our budgets, product enhancements, and marketing initiatives for next year. Projects and initiatives that didn’t work as intended are either thrown in the bin, or are adjusted to make them work better. 

The exact same thing should be done with your data and workflows, but I’ve found that it’s very rare a company will actually “throw out the trash” or remove data or processes that didn’t work. They tend to want to build upon it. The result? They “hoard” their data. They don’t want to let it go because – you know – it could be worth something later… Sounds familiar?

This says a few things:

• Your CRM data / processes aren’t evolving as the company evolves.
• Your CRM environment is cluttered and prevents sales from seeing their strongest leads.
• Most likely it takes longer to complete tasks as you need to literally weed out irrelevant information.

Contrary, cleaner data provides these advantages:

• Individual Contributors (Sales, Account Executives) see leads, pipeline, & upsells better in clearer reports which EQUALS more sales & revenue.
• Managers have a better understanding of employee’s activity for better coaching, closing tactics & timelines, and vision on selling roadblocks to fix for the new year.
• ELT have a better understanding in new year initiatives & buildout, instead of over-hiring and lay-offs.
• Marketing has better insight on stronger campaigns & ROI (Return on Investment or Revenue)
• Product has a cleaner vision on building new products and services. 

So, how do you set yourself up for success? How do you ensure you can efficiently and effectively commit you or your team to do spring cleaning? It’s important as the new year goals are set, take at least 3 days to go through the following steps:

1. STAKEHOLDERS: Work with department leaders & teams - understand new year needs
2. CHECKLIST: Create a plan of action and checklist
3. DATA: Clean the data first
4. STANDARDIZE: Locate items easier by standardizing names
5. FLOW: Fix & automate data flow
6. REPORTING: Create New Year Dashboard Reports
7. DELETE: Consider deleting anything unused processes

Steps to take to Clean Data

STEP 1: Work with Department Stakeholders

Stakeholder: Department leaders (Sales, Marketing, Executive Team, Product, Tech) who build initiatives and manage teams that use the CRM and CRM data. Gather information on new year initiatives & goals.

What to ask: Start by asking the leadership team and individual contributors about their past CRM experience, their needs and their wishlists.  Ask them open ended questions (giving them room to talk) over yes-no questions.  Here are some examples: 

• What worked & what hasn't this past year?
• What are the new year goals?
• What is your overall experience or trust with the current data and the flow of data?
• What is your wishlist for automation and reporting?
• What data are you missing? What processes are out of date?

Best Practice Tips:

• Don’t make any assumptions. Just listen closely, take notes, and ask clarifying questions.
• Don’t leave out any departments. Listen to everyone who touches data from your front office to the back office teams.
• Give your leaders some head’s up so they can come to this meeting prepared. 

STEP 2: Create a Checklist - Plan of Action

Now that you’ve gathered the information, it’s time to start mapping out your plan. Turn your gatherings into priorities, and plot out a checklist of what to accomplish, timelines and even hiring temporary help. Here are some items to add to that list:

• Data scrub
• Contacts
• Companies
• Property Scrub
• What isn’t being used anymore?
• What new properties do you need?
• List Scrub
• Workflow and FORM scrub
• Marketing Email Scrub
• Dashboard Scrub
• User Permissions Scrub

Best Practice Tips: 

Start using a naming standard DEPARTMENT - LIST NAME - DATE

• Example: B2B New Prospect Campaign List - Dec 2022
• Department: The Department: B2B (Enterprise), B2C (e-comm), Inbound, HE (higher ed), NP (non-profit), MKT (Marketing), etc.
• List Name: The list contents.  Please make it simple
• Date: The Month and Year to help (in the future) on what is old needs review.

STEP 3: Start with Data

Now that you’ve gathered information and created a plan, it’s time to look at your data. We all agree that data is vital to an organization – but only useful data is. So what data is useful to your organization? Some big questions to consider when reviewing data:

• Does sales & marketing have all required properties to effectively perform?
• Does your data have required properties to launch new products / services?
• Does the data flow with force (flows within the organization to give excellent customer experience) or with friction (preventing a positive customer experience)?
• Does reporting reflect the right data for owners and leaders to make impactful decisions?

Then it’s time to look at the data - Start with CONTACTS and COMPANIES.  Create lists to see the number of issues and what potential solutions.

Here are a few examples of lists and solutions:

• # of Contact NO phone numbers or emails => Data is not useful (delete or fix)
• # of Contact / Company without location => Need for territory planning (fix)
• # of Contacts with email bounce => Data is not useful (delete or tag)
• # of Contacts missing lead source => Tag lead source for better reporting
• # of unassigned Contacts/Companies => Why is this happening? Tag in workflows going forward
• # of Contacts/Companies overlapping owners => Why is this happening? Fix workflows not overlap
• # of Companies missing key fields (state, employee count) => Is data useful (hire temp to fix)

STEP 4: Naming Standardization within CRM

Why should you standardize naming convention in your CRM? It’s cleaner to see your data, understand which department it is in, if it is old or new, and will be a lifesaver for the HubSpot Super Admin or Operations Support team when they need to debug issues or create new processes to prevent departmental overlap.

Best Practice Tips 

Imagine you have a room cluttered with papers. It can be hard to find specific items in a cluttered room and will probably cause headaches, frustration, & issues. The same goes for your CRM. If your data, systems, and processes are unorganized, it’ll create big problems for debugging later on.  So, best practice tips is to be proactive and organize while you build!

For naming lists, workflows, forms, emails, templates, etc.: Start using a naming standard DEPARTMENT - NAME - DATE

Example LIST: B2C New Prospect Campaign List - Dec 202

Example FORM: B2B Demo Request Form - Jan 2021

Example EMAIL: NP Holiday Special for Non-Profits - Nov 2019

Department: Which Department uses this or data flow?

• B2B - Business to Business
• B2C - Business to Consumer or ECOMM
• HE - higher ed
• NP -non-profit 
• GOVT - government
• MKT - Marketing
• PROD - Product

Name: What does this list or workflow or form have in it? Make it simple

• New Prospect List
• Payment Process Flow
• New Product Holiday Email

Date: When was this created or updated? Is this new or old / out of date? The workflows, forms and lists should be reviewed or considered for deletion. 

For Workflows and FORMS dependent on each other: FORM and WORKFLOWS: Forms, typically, have an associated workflow. By adding (Form) or (WF) at the end of the naming label, it will help operations debug and find issues earlier. 

Example: MKTG Pop-Up Blog Form Dec 2022 (WF)

• WF at the end indicates there is an associated WF

Example: MKTG Pop-Up Blog Workflow Dec 2022 (FORM)

• FORM at the end indicates there is an associated FORM

Export everything into a master list, just in case you need it, with notes.

For Naming FOLDERS: Filing and storing common processes and department folders will create a balanced and calming environment when issues do occur. 

• Create department folders and store similar WFs, Forms, Lists, etc.
• Create folders for specific data processes in WFs. 

Example: HE Payment Process workflows

• Add YEAR in folder names
• Add OUT OF DATE folder for review. Group any out of date workflows into an Out of Date folder.  Review these workflows to determine if you can delete them or restructure them. 

STEP 5: Review the Data Flow 

When you are taking a road trip, you most likely plot the method you want to get to your destination.You may even incorporate certain areas of interest you want to stop and see. We do this with data too. When data comes into the CRM, you need to plot out how it should get to the destination and which areas it will stop and process more. When a CRM has already been built, it will be important to check these data flow processes to ensure they are still pertinent and impactful for everyone who touches the data. 

Best Practice Tips: 

• Plot out Marketing Leads: Are you tagging the source? Are you assigning owners? Are we doing anything with them? Where is the end process? Are we reporting on them appropriately?
• Plot outbound calls: Are you tagging these appropriately? Are owners assigned automatically? How do each sales owner compare with processing these? Where is the end process? Are we reporting on them appropriately?
• Plot out Service: Are we tagging these? Are owners assigned? Do we have processes in place to show each step through the end result? Are we reporting on these? 

STEP 6: Review the Dashboard Reports

There are 3 major dashboard levels you will want to develop.

1. ELT - Executive Leadership Team Dashboard: Big Picture, how sales is trending, company goals vs actuals and will we hit our company goals?
2. Management Dashboard: Visualization of how managers can message to ELT and mentor their teams.
3. Individual Contributors: Individual goals vs actual revenue, individual KPI (key performance indicator) goals vs actuals, pipeline, hot leads, renewals, etc. 

You will need each of these for 3 departments that touch CRM data:

1. Marketing
2. Sales
3. Service
4. Other - any other departments who use the CRM & work with the data

Best Practice Tips:

• Review dashboards with stakeholders and individual contributors
• Additional Questions to ask and understand:
• Do the dashboard reports reflect new year incentives and initiatives? 
• What old reporting can you update or delete?
• What new reports can you add to help teams hit new OKRs (Objective and Key Results - Company wide)?
• Make updates
• Review again and get signoff

STEP 7: Delete – to delete or not delete?

Should you delete, update or store in an out of date folder will be the big question.  It will be important as you are going through the above steps to mark any OLD or USELESS data, data flow processes, and reports as such. Then go through and determine, should we delete or should we fix or should label as ZZZ and keep?  I can’t answer this for you. 

Best Practice Tips: OLD or USELESS:

1. Determine which (below) is outdated or not usable.  
2. Determine how removing it would impact your CRM in other areas.
3. Create recommendations to review with Stakeholders
4. Determine timeline and resources
5. Update, delete or store in ZZZ (ZZZ is an easy way to label a folder with out of date processes. When you sort folders alphabetically, it will list last).

• Contacts or Companies without contact phone or emails - should you delete or try to find? 
• Out of date LISTS - Can you delete if you don’t plan on using it as you can recreate lists. 
• Unused FORMS - Can you delete? Are workflows using this?
• Unused WORKFLOWS - Can you delete or store in a ZZZ folder to review in 6 months. 
• MARKETING, SEQUENCE - Keep to see trends? Store in specific folder
• DASHBOARD - Can you delete old reports?
• PROPERTIES - determine where they have data, do you use it? Do you refer to it anywhere else?  This is a larger project - but can be fixed. Too many unused properties cause visual issues for sales, service and marketing. Gather all stakeholders to determine deleting. 

End Results

As we look to the new year, we create new year resolutions, determine what internal fixes we want to accomplish for ourselves, and how we want to kick off the new year.  Do the same with our CRM. 

1. Take a screenshot of Year End Results, revenue, % of leads worked, % leads closed, and highlight any issues or friction you had for the year.
2. Gather insight from end users and stakeholders.
3. Fix issues to create data flow.
4. Clean up old garbage that is cluttering the space and preventing you to hit your goals
5. Restructure naming conventions, standards and filing to help you see where you are at today
6. Add new improved processes and flow to your CRM.
7. Determine a game plan to help your end users, your teams, and your company have a cleaner platform, better processes, and more impactful data to overachieve company wide goals. 
8. END OF NEXT YEAR, take a screenshot of Year End Results, revenue, % of leads worked, % leads closed, and compare YOY (year over year) of increased lead handling, lead closing, survey customers for better customer experience percentage and constantly strive to improve. 

Best Practice Tips:

• Download a FREE Copy of Data Checklist Guidance Document
• Reach out to me for 15 min (free) quick consultation to help you get a game plan. 

About the author: Mari Manglaras has 30 years - Data Nerd and Financial Reporting experience (Trifecta leadership experience Engineering, Sales and Operations). Engineer (Database SQL, Access, Data Flow, and Financial Data Reporting extensive XLS and CRM), evolved into a successful Sales leader (5 startups acquired, consistently 200% to goal), and CRM Operations and Strategy expert in HubSpot and Salesforce (increasing sales 300-400%). She is an advisor and consultant with B2B, B2C and HE companies focused in FinTech, Education, Healthcare, MFR, Transportation and Cannabis. She is a co-creator for the HubSpot Operations Hub. 

Currently, she is partnered with The Digital Dragons developing and supporting client growth actions including solutions engineering, lead architect, RevOPs and sales strategy.  The Digital Dragons provides HubSpot solutions for scaling B2B businesses in healthcare, health & wellness, construction services and tech.