Mastering CRM Hygiene with Clay: A Game-Changer for GTM Teams 🧼💼

In the world of Go-To-Market (GTM) strategies, a clean, up-to-date Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is often viewed as the holy grail. It's a goal that every team aspires to achieve, yet it often remains elusive. At Clay, we're changing that narrative. We're empowering teams to finally realize their GTM dreams by providing the tools and processes needed to maintain a pristine CRM.

🏗️ The Foundation of CRM Excellence

Before we delve into the technical aspects of building up-to-date CRM workflows in Clay, it's crucial to understand the most common issues that plague CRM hygiene across companies. Our experience working with thousands of GTM organizations has revealed that regardless of the CRM platform—be it HubSpot, Salesforce, or PipeDrive—most CRM problems stem from three primary issues:

1. Too many cooks in the kitchen
2. Too many sources of data
3. Out-of-date or stale data

Let's explore each of these challenges and how Clay helps address them.

👨🏽🍳👨🏽🍳Taming the Kitchen: Streamlining CRM Updates

As organizations grow, the number of people interacting with the CRM naturally increases. BDRs, SDRs, AEs, sales ops personnel, and marketers all need to operate from a single source of truth. However, each team often has its own processes and methodologies for updating the CRM, leading to inconsistencies, duplications, and data gaps.

At Clay, we believe the solution lies in consolidation. By minimizing the number of manual data points required from team members, we can significantly reduce errors and inconsistencies. Our recommended approach involves creating a specific route or form through which all manual CRM updates must pass. Team members only need to provide core data points—such as name, company, and LinkedIn profile—while Clay takes care of the rest, ensuring that all necessary data points are properly enriched across all functions in the company.

🏢 Unifying Data Sources: The Clay Data Cleanroom

The second major challenge arises from the multitude of data sources feeding into a CRM. Outbound motions, inbound website signups, webinar registrations, and conference attendee lists all contribute to a diverse influx of data. This often results in duplications due to the lack of robust deduplication processes.

Our solution at Clay is to route all data, regardless of its origin, through a single, clean data warehouse—Clay itself. For instance, when the outbound team wants to reach out to a new lead, we first gather the information in a Clay list. We then check whether the lead's email or other identifying information already exists in the CRM. Only if the data is truly new do we create a fresh opportunity in the CRM. This approach effectively positions Clay as a gatekeeper, preventing duplicate and inaccurate data from various sources across your company's web presence from polluting your CRM.

🔄 Keeping Data Fresh: Automated Enrichment Cycles

The final hurdle in maintaining CRM hygiene is dealing with out-of-date or stale data. Many large GTM organizations resort to quarterly or even monthly data refresh processes, which are often time-consuming and laborious. These processes may update the right records, but they don't solve issues like team members looking at outdated information.

At Clay, we've developed a best practice to address this challenge. We recommend adding a "last enriched by Clay" date to every record in the CRM. This date, coupled with customizable rules for refresh frequency, allows for intelligent, automated data updates. For example, if you want your core data enriched quarterly, Clay can calculate the days since the last enrichment for each record pulled from your CRM. Only when that number exceeds 90 days would the enrichment process run again, updating the "last enriched" date.

🚀 Embracing the Future of CRM Management

By leveraging Clay's capabilities, GTM teams can finally achieve the dream of a consistently clean and up-to-date CRM. Our approach not only solves the common pitfalls of CRM management but also streamlines processes, reduces manual labor, and ensures data accuracy across the board.

As we continue to innovate and refine our tools, we're excited to see how organizations will further optimize their CRM hygiene using Clay. The future of GTM strategies is here, and it's built on the foundation of pristine, reliable customer data.

Stay tuned as we dive deeper into the technical aspects of building these game-changing CRM workflows with Clay in our upcoming posts. Together, we're revolutionizing the way GTM teams manage and leverage their most valuable asset—their customer data.