Owning Your Data

Your Data Is a Half-Eaten Sandwich

Bears don’t come for you. They come for your snacks. They notice the wrapper, the sandwich you left lying around, and you just happen to be nearby. Your data works the exact same way. The cleanup you skip now is the “I’ll just do it later,” and later never comes.

Owning your data means two things: it’s complete, and it’s in a form you can export and use. Here’s the week’s work.

Step 1: Sort the pile

Open Cloze, go to People, and hit the funnel button at the top of the list. Scroll down to Sort By, click it, then scroll to the Organizing group. Two options in there do the work:

• Contacts to Classify. People you still need to tag: who they are and what they are.
• New and Untouched. Everybody added recently that you haven’t organized in any way.

Pick either one. They’re both just a door into the same pile.

Watch the click path above, it’s 65 seconds.

Step 2: Or go straight at what’s missing

Don’t want to sort at all? Use the search bar at the top of People:

• missing:email finds everyone in your database with no email address.
• missing:phone does the same for phone numbers.

Then call or email and ask for the piece you’re missing.

Step 3: Fill each one out

Same four moves as always, no new tricks:

1. Segment. Who are they. Buyer, seller, ABC. Don’t know? Sphere, or archive.
2. Stage. Where are they. Warm, hot, in-contract, closed, lost.
3. Tags. Nets cast wide (Past Buyer, Triple-A). Spears are for action (Seller-Henderson).
4. About Us / Ford. Family, occupation, recreation, dreams. The blanks are your next conversations. This is the “if we want to be really clever” one.

Full detail on all four is in Completing a Contact.

Step 4: Prove you own it

Complete data you can’t get out isn’t owned, it’s borrowed. Export your contacts and confirm the fields you just filled in actually came along.

Your assignment this week: Sort by Contacts to Classify and start filling them out. Segment, stage, tags, and the About Us if you’re feeling clever.

Transcript (sales meeting segment)

So this weekend I'm going camping in bear country, and despite my manly and really exuberant appearance, I got to be honest with you: I am an inside person. I prefer walls and thermostats and doors that lock and keep things with claws out.

And so because of that trip, I've been doing some research on camp hygiene to make sure that I don't get eaten by a bear. And it reminded me of something that we haven't talked about in a while, and that's data hygiene. So it's a super exciting topic, and that's what we're talking about today on Tool Time.

So here's the thing about bears. They don't come for you, they come for your snacks, and you just happen to be laying around. So they'll notice the little wrapper, they'll notice a half-eaten sandwich you got laying around. And your data is the exact same way. The time you don't spend now cleaning that up, or the "I'll just do it later," turns out later never comes.

And that's why I want to give you a little bit of a challenge this week. The challenge is owning your data, and we do that by making sure it's complete and in a way that we can export and use.

So your challenge this week is super easy. In Cloze, you can organize them by the Contacts to Classify. These are the people you've never touched or messed with or did anything with. But you can also sort them by a bunch of other ways. There'll be a nice little QR code that you can scan so you can see all the different ways in which you can handle this.

But all you have to do is go into Cloze, sort by Contacts to Classify, and start filling them out. Do the things we always do: our stage, our segment, our tags if we want to do them, put our About Us if we want to be really clever.

So that's your assignment. Get to work. We'll see you all next week. And if something happened to me, just know I died doing what I loved: running from bears. Have a great one.