Facing Data Quality Challenges? 13 CRM Audits to the Rescue

How to Setup & Run Your Contact CRM Audits

A few key notes before we jump into the contact audit you should set up.

1. You will need to filter your data, save it, and name it so it’s easily findable in your CRM.
2. Set time aside on your calendar to run these CRM audits. Block yourself as busy for 1 hour a week to start. I personally recommend your quietest day of the week at the earliest part of the day before you get into your heavy workload.
3. Grab the link from the saved filters in your CRM and paste them into your calendar. This enables you to easily find the audits and waste no time.

Below are the contact CRM audits you can run to keep your database in tip-top shape:

Table of Contents

1. Lifecycle Stage Unknown

Identify contacts that have not yet been categorized by their position in the buying cycle, so that you can tailor your communications accordingly.

Filter where Lifecycle (e.g. Lead, Contact, MQL, SQL, etc.) = unknown

2. Unknown Country

Identify contacts that do not have a country listed and update accordingly. We want to ensure we can filter data by country for data analysis, territory planning, targeted marketing campaigns, and more.

Filter where Country = unknown

3. Proper Country

If you don’t have a dropdown select for country, you should check for contacts that have an improper country listed. I would recommend that if you don’t already have a standardized list of country names somewhere, that you grab a list from the Internet to copy and paste.

Filter where Country ≠ United States, Canada, Japan, etc.

4. Unknown State/Province 

Ensure that all contacts have properly identified states or provinces listed so that you can filter and target appropriately. You might only care about states in the United States or you might also care about provinces in places such as Canada or Australia. If you care about all three:

Filter where Country = United States AND state is unknown

OR

Country = Canada AND state is unknown

OR

Country = Australia AND state is unknown

5. Proper State/Province

Just as noted in Unknown State/Province above, if you need states and provinces listed for various countries, confirm that your database has all of them listed properly. 

Filter where Country = United States (or US, USA, etc. – however you standardized it) AND state/province ≠ AK, AL, AR, etc. 

OR

Country = Canada AND state/province ≠ ON, AB, QB, etc.

OR

Country = Australia AND state/province ≠ NSW, QLD, VIC, etc.

6. No Associated Company

Identify contacts that aren’t associated with a company to ensure that you can properly segment your data.

Filter where Associated Company = unknown

7. No Associated Deal

Check that any contact that is listed with a Lifecycle of Deal/Opportunity is actually tied to a deal/opportunity. This is a great CRM audit because you may find that contacts are accidentally removed from deals. Other times, it may help you to discover that a deal was accidentally deleted.

Filter: contact Lifecycle = deal AND associated deal = unknown

Another iteration, which depends on your CRM is:

Filter: contact Lifecycle = deal AND # of associated deals = 0

8. Proper Owner

You want to ensure that contacts are assigned to the proper owner so that they receive the proper attention and follow-up.

This filter is probably the most extensive because you have to adjust it every time you have a new rep join. This filter set up depends on how you organize your territories. For this example, I will assume that the team’s territory is organized by state and country.

For United States based Reps:

Contact Owner = rep name AND state ≠ *insert state names*

For Reps outside the United States that get assigned an entire country, use:

contact Owner = rep name AND country ≠ *insert country names*

Notice how we use the does not equal symbol. Here, we tell the system to show us a certain rep assigned to the WRONG state or country. We do not need to see the proper associations. We need to see the wrong ones.

9. Unknown Owner 

To ensure we have the right owner for each contact, we must also check where there is no one assigned.

Filter: Contact Owner = unknown

10. Lead Source Type Unknown

Many systems automatically track where leads and contacts come from. However, it’s a good idea to check that your contacts properly tie to lead sources. You want to ensure that you understand where your most valuable leads come from.

Filter where Lead Source = unknown. 

11. Campaign Source Cleanup

Campaigns are often associated with contacts before they are associated with deals. Check that campaign data, especially from newly created campaigns, flows into the contacts as it should. Your marketing team likely puts a great deal of effort into its campaigns, and they want to understand which ones are effective and how much their efforts contribute to your business.

This filter is really dependent on your system and the level of data you capture. In some systems, you can filter on the campaign itself while others you can filter on the contact object. Here, I assume the latter, where you can check the number of contacts in your results against the campaign page itself.

Filter where Associated Campaign = *name of newly created campaign*

12. MQL & No Activity

You want to identify leads or contacts that are ranked as marketing qualified, but where there is no outreach activity yet. We do this because we want to ensure that our team reaches out to our best leads.

Filter where lifecycle = marketing qualified leads (or whatever you call them in your system) AND last activity date = unknown.

13. Newly Created Contacts – Last Week

This is a bit of a catch all to ensure that you didn’t miss anything with any of the above CRM audits.

Ensure that all new contacts added to your CRM have standardized data filled out (e.g. state, country, etc.) and are properly assigned to team members.

Filter where create date = last week and then sort by the necessary fields.

Wrap Up – CRM Audits

Think about other contact data that is unique to your system and set up an audit for those key pieces of data such as job titles, birthdays, or favorite sports teams. It’s important to have accurate data in your system so your teams can execute as quickly and efficiently as possible.