“Nutshell is super user-friendly and intuitive
“I would highly recommend Nutshell
“Easy to use and... wait for it ... 100% buy in!
“Nutshell is both simple and powerful
Using a customer relationship management (CRM) system can significantly improve the way your company organizes and analyzes customer and lead data, tracks interactions with customers, streamlines sales processes, and more. However, unlocking the full benefits of a CRM is only possible when you implement the right strategies. These include ensuring the quality and accuracy of your data, managing and organizing your data, creating custom fields and data forms, setting up access controls and permissions, and regularly reviewing and optimizing the CRM system.
Whether your company is considering investing in a CRM or is looking for ways to optimize its current CRM use, this playbook provides a solid foundation for ensuring you get the most out of your CRM investment.
Read through this guide for an overview of the best practices for using a CRM system and check out the linked resources for additional information!
1. Clean, Consistent Data Means Smarter Decisions: Accurate, deduplicated, and well-structured CRM data enables better segmentation, automation, and reporting—fueling more precise targeting and faster sales cycles.
2. Customize and Structure Your CRM Around Your Workflow: Use custom fields, tags, and standardized processes to mirror your actual sales and marketing workflows. This improves team adoption, lead visibility, and campaign effectiveness.
3. Protect and Optimize Over Time: Set permissions to safeguard sensitive customer data and regularly audit your CRM setup to refine automations, forms, and integrations as your business evolves.
A crucial best practice for using a CRM system is ensuring the accuracy and quality of the data you collect and store. You need accurate customer data so your sales representatives and marketing team can make strategic decisions to grow your business. After all, a CRM is the most useful when it’s able to provide you with a complete picture of your contacts and the leads moving through your sales pipeline.
To learn strategies for protecting the quality and integrity of your CRM data, check out this helpful resource:
Your CRM data may be accurate—but can your team easily and quickly find what they need? If you’re spending too much time looking for the right records, your CRM isn’t living up to its full potential.
Organizing your CRM’s information in an easy-to-access format ensures that it’s accessible to your sales reps when they need it. That way, your team saves time searching for data and everyone is on the same page regarding your customers’ and leads’ information.
How do you get data into your CRM in the first place? There are several ways to collect data from customers, including integrating your CRM with other tools. Two essential methods for gathering information about your leads and customers are custom fields and data forms.
Custom fields enable your team to manually record information in your CRM or import data from a platform where it’s already stored, such as from a CSV spreadsheet or other sources of data like a productivity platform or another CRM. Data forms allow you to collect customer information from form submissions on your website and sync the data with your CRM. Finally, validating the data you gather from customers ensures that the data you collected is accurate.
Read how to create custom fields and data forms:
Attacks against CRM data are harmful to your customers and your business. To protect your customers’ and leads’ information from malicious actors, you need to be sure you’re taking the appropriate security measures.
One aspect of data security is implementing user controls and permissions in your CRM platform. By creating access controls and permissions, you take control of who can see sensitive customer information. Enforcing these measures ensures that only authorized users can access, edit, and work with your CRM data.
Read more about access controls and permissions below:
With your CRM set up, your data organized and accessible, and security measures in place to restrict users’ access, you want to be sure that your CRM continues to bring your team value over time. After all, software designed to streamline your sales process and make customer relationship management easier should live up to its claims.
A final best practice for using your CRM is regularly reviewing and optimizing the system to be sure the platform is performing adequately and meeting your company’s needs. Check out the article below to learn how to review your CRM’s efficiency, identify areas for improvement, and adapt your system to perform as it should.
Discover steps for optimizing your CRM platform below:
When you need a CRM that will make it easy for your company to take the reins and collect, manage, organize, and optimize your data, turn to Nutshell. Our Ann Arbor-based customer support team is always friendly, fast, and helpful, and we include free customer support in every Nutshell package.
With so many powerful features to explore, Nutshell provides the tools you need to grow your business. To see for yourself, get a free 14-day trial.
Table of Contents
The top reasons for CRM failure include poor planning, lack of user adoption, unclear goals, and insufficient training. When teams don’t understand the CRM’s value or receive inadequate support, adoption plummets and ROI never materializes. Success requires clear objectives, strong change management, and ongoing team engagement.
Track key metrics like pipeline velocity, sales cycle length, conversion rates, and customer retention. Monitor adoption rates and data quality scores. Compare results month-over-month to spot trends. Share CRM-generated insights in team meetings to demonstrate value. Most importantly, establish baseline metrics before implementation so you can measure improvement accurately.
Start with comprehensive, role-specific training tailored to each department’s workflows. Provide ongoing support and celebrate early wins. Identify peer advocates within your team to champion adoption. Make CRM usage a company policy for all new leads. Foster a culture where questions are encouraged, and regularly gather feedback to improve processes based on actual team needs.
Conduct quarterly data audits to identify duplicates, outdated records, and incomplete information. Perform monthly spot-checks on critical fields. Clean data continuously as part of daily workflows—don’t let it accumulate. After major system changes or integrations, do a thorough audit. Regular maintenance prevents small issues from becoming expensive problems.
Allowing duplicate records, inconsistent data entry formats, incomplete contact information, and outdated records to accumulate. Teams often fail to establish naming conventions or data standards. Poor integration between systems creates conflicting data. Lack of ownership means no one enforces data quality. Prevent these by setting clear standards, automating validation, and assigning accountability for data maintenance.
Join 30,000+ other sales and marketing professionals. Subscribe to our Sell to Win newsletter!
