CRM hygiene
CRM hygiene is keeping the records in your CRM accurate, complete and free of duplicates, so the people using it can trust what they see. That means one record per person and company, current deal stages, an owner on every deal and contact details that still work. Records decay on their own, so hygiene needs a routine.
Why it matters
Everything you build on the CRM depends on it. Follow-up reminders go to the wrong person when the owner field is stale. Reactivation emails go to people who left the company. Pipeline reports count the same deal twice. Once people stop trusting the CRM, they keep their own lists in spreadsheets and notes, and the CRM gets worse because nobody updates it.
An example
Take an implementation shop where a long-standing client contact moves to a new company. The old record keeps their old email, and when a sales lead meets them again at the new company, they create a fresh contact. Now the history of a good relationship sits on a record nobody will look at, and the new deal starts from scratch.
How a system handles it
A system makes hygiene a weekly routine instead of a yearly cleanup. It matches every new record on a key, usually the email address, before creating anything, so duplicates don't get in. It fills the required fields when a record is made, and once a week it lists what's gone stale: deals without an owner, contacts whose emails bounced, stages that haven't moved. A person decides what to merge or close, and the system makes the change.
Questions
How often should I clean my CRM?
A short check every week works better than a big cleanup once a year, because bad records keep coming in while you wait. When the weekly list is short, going through it takes a few minutes.
Who should own CRM hygiene?
One person, with the time written into their week. The system can do the checking, and a person still decides what to merge, because two records that look alike aren't always the same person.
Related
- Dedupe keyA dedupe key is the field a system uses to decide two records are the same person or company. Which key to pick, an example, and what goes wrong without one.
- Source of truthThe one system whose copy of a record wins when two tools disagree. Why it matters for opt-outs and phone numbers, and how a one-way sync keeps it that way.
- Lead reactivationLead reactivation means going back to leads and past clients that went cold, with a reason to talk now. Why it matters and how a system keeps it running.
- Records from forms and emailed PDFs, kept in one place that stays rightA system I built that keeps the right version of each customer record in Airtable. Forms and emailed PDFs feed it, and HubSpot copies from it.