As we’ve said, there is a lot of data involved with a CRM. When you’re feeling clueless, that amount of data can sometimes feel overwhelming. So, in this episode, we talk about how to manage all of that.

00:21 Andy Shore: Hey, everybody, welcome back. We’re gonna finish up our conversation talking about the data in your CRM, and we’ve talked about all the individual different types of data, and the way you can look at it, and sort it, and how it’s gonna help you. But the amount of data is also a factor that comes into CRM, and sometimes you have a lot of it that you need to take from one place or another or sort all of it. So I know you said we should talk about that mass data transfers and that side of it when it’s like the large scale projects with your information.

00:55 Paul Rijnders: Yeah. So ideally, you’ve got the time to work with one record at a time. And when I say one record, what are we talking about? Are we talking about a person? Well, that’s a contact record, right? Or a lead record. Are we talking about a deal you’re trying to close? Well, that’s an opportunity record. Are we talking about a task that you’ve gotta do? Well, that’s an activity record. So ideally, you’ve got all the time in the world and you’re sitting in your desk and you’re saying, “Okay, let me open this activity. Okay, what do I need to change here? Okay, let’s mark this one to done. Alright, what’s next? Alright, activity number two, I think I did that one, let’s close that one.” [chuckle] Well you can imagine if you had 100 activities, you’d burn an hour or two hours just doing that if that changed one by one.

01:36 PR: Well, what if you could just look at all the activities over there, nod them over, or maybe create a view that lets you see activities that only exist under certain conditions, and then you can mark them all done because you’ve done them all already. So you could grab 10, 20, maybe you could click with a touch interface like you can on our CRM. You can see a list of 100 and just click only the ones that you wanna click, or click one and select them all, and then mass update that activity status to closed, or mass update the opportunity to the next stage, or mass update somebody’s state. We did a lot of this this past week because we had some information that was coming in from a source, and the country name was a little bit different than what had been coming in before. Before, everything came in as United States. Now all of a sudden, some new information came in, making all the countries United States of America. Well, that’s cool. Technically, they’re the same thing, but we want our views to be really, really tight and we want people to expect to see the same thing.

02:36 PR: So, once we got the API information fixed and everything coming in just as United States, well, let’s go in there and just mass select everything that’s United States of America and just change that to United States. If we had to do that one by one to a couple thousand records, that would’ve taken all day. But as it is, with that mass update feature, it took less than a couple of minutes to do that.

02:57 AS: The more we’ve been talking about data and the different things we could do, it’s just like CRM is really kind of the brain of your business aberration. It’s what remembers it all for you, it’s what stores it or you, and it’s there for the recall when you need it.

03:13 PR: It is, and it’s great that if you can… The key is, how can I get the information in front of me that I wanna see? And if you wanna change it all, of course, you can change it one at a time and that’s an individual attention. But let’s just say that there’s a case where you say, “Alright, well, you know what, Gina is… ” I used Gina last time, so let’s not use Gina. Raquel. Raquel is now taking over all the contacts that were formerly owned by Bill. Why? ‘Cause Bill’s going on vacation for a month, he’s gonna go find himself in the Himalayas, so Raquel is gonna own these things for a while, so what are we gonna do? Well, we can just grab all his contacts and we can just transfer the ownership to Raquel if we want to. Or, she could just make a view that says Bill’s contacts and then she can work with all those in mass and she can oscillate between her contacts and Bill’s contacts and get in that headspace ’cause she’s the one looking at the view that’s based on those conditions.

04:13 PR: So, yes, you should be able to work with your information individually and you can click on any one of those records, work on them individually, but it helps if you can have some kind of view where you can bring them up that all satisfy certain condition, and if you wanna change them all at a time, the CRM should let you do that, which, these do.

04:30 AS: Yeah. It’s gonna save that low man on the totem pole, whether it’s a new hire or an intern from having to do hours and hours of manual data entry.

04:40 PR: Yeah, exactly.

04:41 AS: In one fell swoop, it’s all done. You can give them other tasks.

04:46 PR: And so, the payback on top of this, it helps with this incoming data. If you can have some of these things you might do mass update anyway if you can have these updated for you. For instance, let’s say this: You know that all your records have been uploaded via… You do the math, the import feature, right?

05:06 AS: Mm-hmm.

05:06 PR: So you’ve uploaded 20,000 records, and now that you updated those 20,000 records, you’re gonna go through and say, “Okay, well, every last name that starts with A, B or C, that’s gonna be owned by Jimmy.” Now somebody’s gotta go on there and say, “Okay, well, sort by last name and let’s see A, B, C,” and they gotta select all those. Now they can mass update those to Jimmy. That’s great, they can do that, but that still takes time. You could even save more time by creating some kind of assign rule ahead of time that says, “Hey, if the last name starts with A, B, or C the owner is Jimmy.” That way every time someone imports those records 100 at a time, 1000 at a time, 20,000 at a time, the system already does that updating for you. And it’s not just owner, they can update a field, they can update almost any information you want based on criteria that you set. So, the mass updating could be personal or better yet, the system can do it for you. Just make sure you write good rules, ’cause it’s gonna happen fast.

06:07 AS: Yep, definitely. That all makes sense to me. And on behalf of all our listeners, I’ll thank you for switching away from Gina because it spared them my non-existent Martin Lawrence impressions, so that’s…

[chuckle]

06:21 PR: Wait a minute.

06:21 AS: That’s what my brain was triggering.

06:23 PR: Can we hear it?

06:23 AS: No, it doesn’t exist, I cannot do impressions. But the second you say Gina, that’s going in my head, it just doesn’t translate to coming out of my mouth. It moved us away from that in the right direction.

06:36 PR: Can I just add something? When you said Martin Lawrence, for some reason, now I know Martin Lawrence and the Martin Show, obviously. But I got stuck on Martin Short. So when you’re saying this, I had Martin Short’s face in my head and I was like, “Does he talk about Gina ever?” [chuckle]

06:53 AS: Yeah, although that would be funny. Now, the idea of Martin Lawrence doing damn Gina is gonna… Or, Martin Short doing damn Gina will make me laugh for a while. Additional tangent aside, we appreciate you guys for listening and we’ll catch you next time. Bye.

07:08 AS: Thanks for listening to Clues for the Clueless CRM Marketer, brought to you by Benchmark. Tune in next time. Until then, you can get clued in by connecting with us on social media, The Benchmark Blog, or by going to benchmarkcrm.com. Bye.