How to make sure every contact in your CRM stays up-to-date

It's easy for contacts in your CRM to become outdated. It's not always easy to keep up with all your contacts, especially if they change roles or departments or email addresses. Your contact data can be out of date before you know it, meaning you're missing opportunities and making mistakes.

Regular maintenance is the only way to be sure you always have the most up-to-date information

Regular maintenance is the only way to be sure you always have the most up-to-date information about your contacts. The best way to do this is by creating a maintenance schedule, which involves checking each contact's details every week or two.

When updating a contact, it's important that you complete all fields (e.g., phone number) and update any old ones (e.g., email address). This will ensure that every piece of information about your customer is as accurate as possible—and help prevent any problems down the line when they try contacting you or vice versa.

Use LACRM's "Sort by date contact was last updated" option to pull up contacts that are stale.

Less Annoying CRM has a specific filter and sort option that allows you to pull up a list of contacts based on when they were updated in LACRM.

Here's a tutorial on how to run that sort on your account.

If your main task for the hour or day is to update your contacts, you can select the "Make this the default option" checkbox when you are running the sort. This ensures that even if you leave the page to work on updating your contacts, you'll come back to a list that is sorted based on who you need to update first.

Review inactive records regularly, and decide whether they're still worth keeping.

Once you've got your contacts in order, it's time to start reviewing them. Reviewing means finding out whether any information needs updating or deletion. If a contact is totally irrelevant now, delete them outright. If not, put them into an "Inactive" group so they don't clutter up the main list and you can filter out that group later on if necessary.

Create monthly recurring events to serve as reminders for everyone to keep maintaining their assigned contacts.

Any CRM is only as useful as the data you put into it. You need to keep your contact database up-to-date, and your team needs to be reminded of this as well. This will allow you to get the most out of your CRM and make sure that everyone on your team has access to the correct information they need when they need it.

The simplest way for you and your team members to remember who needs updating is to create a recurring event in your LACRM calendar to remind everyone to review their assigned contact list.

Keeping a CRM updated is not one single person's job -- it's everybody's jobs.

In sum: You’re the one who can keep your database up-to-date, and that means doing it regularly.

The more time passes between updates, the longer you’ll have outdated contacts. This can lead to lost opportunities and wasted resources—and worst of all, it might mean that your contact information isn’t accurate when a potential customer calls or emails! So don't let your CRM get stale; make sure everyone on your team is keeping their assigned contacts fresh.