Is Your Data Ready?

Data strategy is critically important for a successful CRM implementation project.

It can be tempting to move every piece of data your organization has ever collected into the new system “just in case” you need it someday. But there are significant downsides to moving too much data (and moving bad data) into a new system. You may incur hefty storage fees to keep useless or underutilized information. Storing some data can even expose you to risks.

We’ve seen the market shift to placing greater emphasis on data certainty, which focuses more on accurate data over volume of data to help you build more targeted strategies based on how your constituents engage with your organization. While culling the data may initially seem difficult, migrating irrelevant, redundant, and otherwise unhelpful information is actually worse. Paring down the data will ultimately leave the organization in a better place.

Transition is also a good time to revisit your data governance processes—or take the opportunity to establish them if you don’t yet have them—and as you are integrating information from different systems to establish protocols for who is empowered to access and make decisions about data.

This topic is both complex and important. We invite you to take a deeper dive about how to prepare your data for an implementation and how to take a more strategic approach to data migration.