What Is CRM Hygiene?

CRM hygiene is the ongoing maintenance that keeps a CRM accurate enough to rely on: resolving duplicates, correcting stale records, keeping ownership and lifecycle fields current, and validating what gets entered. It is not a clean up project. A CRM that has been cleaned once and not maintained is back where it started within a year.

What it covers

Duplicate resolution. Identifying and merging duplicates, and adjudicating which record survives when both hold different information
Validation. Checking new and changed records against your rules, so errors are caught on entry rather than found later
Ownership and lifecycle. Keeping owners, stages, tiers and status fields current, because these are what reporting depends on
Stale records. Identifying records that have not been touched, verifying or retiring them
Enrichment. Filling gaps against a defined specification on a schedule
Bulk loading. Controlled imports, with deduplication before rather than after
Practice management and matter systems. The same maintenance in the systems professional services firms actually run on, not only in a sales CRM
Configuration review. Noticing where the system's setup is causing the data problem

What it does not cover

We do not decide your data model. Which fields exist, what your stages mean, what a tier represents: those are your definitions. We keep records consistent with them.

We do not change records on assumption. Where two records disagree and neither can be verified, it is escalated rather than resolved by guesswork.

We do not reconfigure your system. We will tell you where the configuration is producing bad data. Changing it is your decision, and usually your administrator's job.

It is not a one off clean up. We can do a remediation exercise, but the value is in the maintenance afterwards. Without that, the exercise repeats every couple of years.

Who normally owns it

Everyone and no one. Every user affects data quality and none of them is accountable for it. The CRM owner, if there is one, usually owns the system rather than the data in it.

The symptom is always the same: somebody runs a report, the numbers look wrong, and everyone reverts to their own spreadsheet. At that point the CRM has stopped being a system of record and become an expensive address book, and getting the trust back is considerably harder than keeping it.

How Clandon supports it

We run CRM maintenance to a documented method on a schedule, inside your system, with formal quality checking. Where the same problem keeps recurring, we will show you what upstream is causing it.

Related resources

What Is Data Enrichment and Verification?

Filling the gaps in a dataset, and checking that what is already there is still true.

What Is Pipeline Maintenance?

Keeping a pipeline current enough that the reporting off it can be trusted.

CRM Hygiene Checklist for Deal Teams

The checks that keep a deal team's CRM usable, and how often each one needs doing.

When did you last trust a report straight out of your CRM?

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