Assess and Verify playbook

• Read our data management strategy playbook for help with creating a data management strategy.
  • CRM data management and strategy playbook
• The DemandTools modules referenced in this playbook are for versions 5.X.X. Please be sure to update your software.
• We recommend setting up a sandbox environment to test data manipulations prior to implementing them in a production environment. You don’t want to make changes that adversely affect your CRM data quality.
• If you are trying to solve a specific data problem, review the product training documentation in the Validity Help center or get answers to your questions from Validity’s data experts during office hours.
  • Validity Help Center
  • DemandTools office hours
  • GridBuddy Connect office hours
• For technical issues regarding your software, please contact Validity support.
  • support@validity.com

A clear data management strategy will help to improve your CRM data quality and support achieving your desired business outcomes. With a clean CRM database, many businesses achieve better: 

• Accuracy in sales forecasts and reporting
• Data privacy compliance
• Targeting for marketing
• Operational efficiency

• Terminology
• Assessment frequency
• Assessing your CRM’s data quality
• Verifying email addresses
• Prioritizing which data problems to fix first

• The following terms are used within the Assess feature. 

  • Record quality: An overall quality metric based on the total records that the report includes.
    • Validified: records without flaws, with validated email addresses.
    • Acceptable: records with negligible issues or emails that could not be 100% validated.
    • Limited: records with minor content issues in evaluated fields or records with acceptable content, have invalid emails or that are duplicates.
    • Insufficient: records with serious content issues or duplicates with limited quality content.
    • Unactionable: records with major missing or malformed content and bad quality duplicates.
  • Assessment problem categories: The classification of your data problems determined when using the Assess feature.
    • Duplicates: Another record exists with similar values in one or more fields.
    • Malformed Data: Records are missing or missing values or characters.
    • Missing engagement points: Records with missing or malformed contact data such as names, phone numbers, or addresses.
    • Missing business segmentation: Records with missing or invalid fields like role, industry, or company size.
    • Incomplete decision support: Records with incomplete or missing fields used in business reports and processes.
    • Invalid emails: Email addresses identified as invalid by BriteVerifiy’s email verification service.
      •  

  The following terms are used within the Verify feature. 

  • Email verification
    • Valid: The email has a valid account associated with it. Safe to Mail.
    • Invalid: The email is invalid. Do not Mail.
    • Unknown: The email address may be valid, but the associated domain is not responding. This could be a temporary status for domains having intermittent issues or a permanent issue for dying domains. There will be some bounces from the Unknown category so consider the following before mailing:
      • If your ESP's bounce threshold is 5% or less: Do not Mail.
      • If your ESP has given you a dedicated IP: Mail Slowly.
    • Accept-All: Accept-All emails are when a server is set to receive all emails at a specific domain. It appears as if all the emails are Valid at that domain, but the company has a firewall or another spam tool that may remove the email message or send a bounce message at a later time. Since it's possible there will be some bounces from the Accept-All category, please consider the following before mailing:
      • If your ESP's bounce threshold is 5% or less: Do not Mail.
      • If your ESP has given you a dedicated IP: Mail Slowly.

Assessment frequency

Assessing your data helps track your data cleaning efforts and helps spot new problems and sources of bad data.

Data health

How often you assess your data health is determined by factors such as data intake rate and company size. We recommend doing a full assessment at least once per quarter but doing an assessment each month may be beneficial to some companies with a lot of data problems.

Email verification

As people move jobs or abandon email addresses, they can quickly become out of date. You may need to verify email addresses more or less frequently depending on your business needs. 

• Businesses that send email daily or several times per week should verify email addresses several times per week.
• Businesses that send email weekly or monthly should verify email addresses weekly or 1-2 times per month.
• Strive to verify email addresses when they are imported into your CRM.

Assess & Verify 

The DemandTools Assess feature identifies data problems and organizes them by object and problem categories. Use this feature as a high-level review tool to determine the scope of your data problems, to help prioritize which problems to fix first, and to track your data cleaning progress.

The DemandTools Verify feature identifies valid and invalid email addresses. Focus on verifying email addresses that are a higher risk such as new addresses or old addresses that stopped engaging with your email. If an email address engages with your email regularly, then the email is valid and there is no need to verify it.  Use this feature as part of your regular data cleaning activities and remove or suppress invalid email addresses frequently.


 

Prioritize which data problems to fix first

All businesses’ data issues are unique, so you should prioritize which data issues to fix first based on severity as well as those that have the largest impact on your business. Use the playbooks listed below for instructions on fixing specific data problems.

If you are unsure of where to start: 

• Merge duplicate records: Merge duplicate records first. Duplicate records are a big problem in most businesses and merging them can have an immediate positive impact.
  • Dedupe playbook
• Standardize your data: Standardize your data next as this fixes some common malformed data problems and helps to improve the accuracy of CRM reports.
  • Data standardization playbook
• Fix malformed data: Fix malformed data next to ensure data is accurate and actionable.
  • Malformed data playbook
• Address missing data: Address missing data next to ensure data is actionable.
  • Missing data playbook