Spring Cleaning: A Guide for Marketers

How long has it been since you cleaned up Google Tag Manager?  Or since you removed those old tracking pixels?  Does everyone with CMS access still need it?  Is there a ghost former employee still automatically emailing accounts in the CRM?  Marketing and sales are no exception to the rule that an ounce of tidying up prevents a landmine of headaches!

Spring is the season for getting things in order and cleaning up!  Conventional wisdom says, “Setup new programs, test them, then either scale if it works or cut it off if it doesn’t work.”  Look, as a marketer who is frequently testing and measuring, I wholeheartedly believe that’s good advice for many businesses.  However, if we’re missing the “then clean up afterwards” part of the story, we’re skipping over an important part!

Before we dive in too deeply, please don’t bite off more than you can chew.  If any marketer tries to do everything all at once, they will quickly get overwhelmed.  Eric Reed and I recommend flagging a few important ones to yourself and taking care of those.  Prioritization here is key!  I’d rather see you clean up three things than recognize 20 and not address any of them.

First, let’s think about our sales tech stack:

We’ll ease our way in: are there any automated campaigns with out-of-date language?  Are all of the offers being sent out up to date?

When a salesperson or customer success manager leaves, how are their accounts redistributed in the CRM?  Depending on the size of your sales team, this exercise alone may take some time and effort to accomplish!

Anyone that unsubscribed from your email or call list without using the unsubscribe button?  No joke, I used to do a lot of direct mail and people would call in and ask to be removed from the mailing list!

Have you signed up for ZoomInfo, LinkedHelper, Lusha, Cognism, or any other platform to get contact information or build your database?

If you have memberships, licenses, or other assets that you are paying for, but your sales team isn’t using, it may be time to pare back the subscriptions.  Pro tip: many software companies like this provide free trials, so it’s possible that you or your sales team have random subscriptions floating around in the ether.  Evaluating the value of past free trials can be a great way to see if it’s time to reevaluate elements of your sales tech stack.

And of course, the digital marketers…

Even free subscriptions like Pixabay or Canva or the like are probably worth cleaning up!

Further, if you are like evry single other company in the world, then you have a team of people with access to front end technology like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or other social media.  When is the last time you did an audit to ensure no former employees, old vendors, or other random folks had access?

Then we move into Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, etc.  Is everything still set up and filtered the way it should be?  Are there any old holdovers that need to be removed?  With the recent GA360 to GA4 migration, are all metrics (ex. completions) tied to activities that are truly valuable to you?

Finally, consider the myriad marketing subscriptions you may have forgotten about.

·         Call tracking (ex. Call Tracking Metrics, Invoca, CallRail)

·         Website user tracking (Hotjar, CrazyEgg)

·         Competitive research (SpyFoo, SEMrush)

·         SEO analysis (Ahrefs, MOS)

·         Online mentions tracking (Muckrack)

·         Listings management (Birdeye, Podium)

And that doesn’t include files!  If you are like most marketing and sales teams, your team members are using some “Frankenstein’s monster” combination of OneDrive, Box, DropBox, Google Drive, and beyond.  Having a clean digital asset manager (DAM) may be a massive time saver whenever someone is looking for a particular file!

Any relationships that need to be cleaned up?

What about any potential buyers that said, “We’re not ready today, but let’s reconnect in 6 months?”  Sometimes that account executive leaves and the prospect is never contacted again.  In some instances, the salesperson just gets caught up with more promising accounts.

When the buyer leaves a longstanding partner organization and moves on, what is being done for the organization and how is the relationship with the individual being kept warm?  Sometimes a text or email 3-6 months after a career move can rekindle a great relationship and lead to a new partnership!

Marketers are somewhat notorious for chasing new shiny objects, but we occasionally need to make sure we are cleaning up after ourselves!  Again, don’t feel the need to run through each and every one of these.  Instead, pick a few that are relevant to you and your organization, and commence cleaning!