How to clean up your sales data
It’s important to get your sales data up-to-date – always. Having the best quality information will allow you to get the most value out of your CRM and produce the best possible sales forecasts.
Here are a couple of quick ways QuarterOne can help you to spot if something is wrong with your data. Once a week, we’ll also send you an email highlighting anything we think needs investigating (because we are super helpful like that!).
1.Open deals appearing in past months – the QuarterOne dashboard chart allows you to easily see old open deals hidden in your sales data.
2. Deals without close dates – deals without close dates are automatically added to the “Unallocated” column of the Pipeline grid.
To see these deals go to:
Pipeline page -> click Customize Grid -> select Unallocated from the menu that appears.
4 Simple steps to clean-up your sales data
1. Close lost old deals where the prospect / customer is no longer engaged in the buying journey. If the prospect isn’t responding to communications and there is no clear plan to move the conversation forward, the deal probably needs to be taken out of the pipeline or pushed back up the funnel.
2. Add missing close dates for open and booked deals appearing in the ‘Unallocated’ column of the Pipeline grid (see point 2 above). The QuarterOne app needs to know at least the month you expect deals to close before including in the forecast. Deals without close dates will not appear in forecast unless they are added manually.
3.Update close dates for open deals, particularly those appearing in past months (see step 1 of section above). Be realistic about the close timeline – if it frequently takes 3 months for contracts to go through legal approval or your customer goes into shut-down at Christmas, don’t forget to factor this in.
4.Backfill missing historic sales data so you can view your current pipeline alongside the past performance. Ideally back-date deal “create dates” and “close dates” so QuarterOne can more accurately calculate your historic sales velocity.
Haven’t tried QuarterOne yet? Sign-up for a free trial, it takes minutes to connect your CRM and you’ll see straight away the extra value it will bring to your CRM data.
