Regardless of whether you currently have a CRM implementation, or are thinking of adopting one at some point in the future, there are a few things which you can do which will not only help you with your CRM adaptation but will also make your contact management so much easier and beneficial to your organisation.

One big hindrance to a good working system is the lack of policy for data capture and treatment. There are many aspects of this which may seem small or insignificant, and yet can have a genuine impact on the efficiency of your organisation and data. You may have people that are on first name terms with their contacts, and compile a great list of contacts, which ultimately are useless to anyone else. Somebody else might only collect email addresses and attaches them to company records without noting a contact. Someone else created a spread sheet with person and company name contained in one field.

The scenario I am painting is a fast growing collection of databases that have no cross compatibility. Your organisation has no intelligent way of sorting or displaying the data, so using this information becomes hard work and as a result you have a redundant database.

Encouraging a uniform approach to data entry is beneficial to all – you have information that anyone can use without having to adopt somebody else’s mindset. You are able to sort and re-arrange the information in a manner that suits you – for example grouping people from the same postal area together, sorting records into an alphabetical list, or sorting potential customers according to their industry.

Sales Pitch: OpenCRM encourages you to keep data in a logical and clever manner. By making certain fields mandatory you can ensure that this vital information is never missing from a record. As well as encouraging best practise for data management, we are also able to assist new clients in exporting, sorting and importing data into an OpenCRM system.