Salesforce CRM Hygiene

Salesforce is only as useful as the data inside it, and it does not maintain itself. Hygiene work means resolving duplicates, keeping ownership and lifecycle fields current, validating what gets entered, and retiring what has gone stale, so that reports can be run and trusted.

What this is used for

Salesforce holds the record of companies, people, relationships and opportunities, and the reporting the firm runs off them. Its flexibility is the reason it suits so many businesses and also the reason data quality degrades: almost every field is optional unless somebody decides otherwise.

The operational work inside it

Duplicate identification and merge adjudication across accounts, contacts and leads
Ownership and lifecycle fields kept current as coverage changes
Validation on creation, so errors are caught at entry rather than found later
Stale record identification, then verification or retirement
Scheduled enrichment against a defined field specification
Controlled bulk loading, with deduplication before import rather than cleanup after
Classification and tagging against the firm's taxonomy
Report and dashboard field checks, so the things driving decisions stay consistent

What good looks like

Somebody runs a report and uses the number without checking it first. One company is one record. Ownership reflects who is actually covering what. Nobody keeps a private spreadsheet because the system is good enough to rely on.

Common problems

Duplicates created at entry. Someone types a company name slightly differently and a second record appears. Cleaning afterwards is far more expensive than preventing it.

Optional fields that reporting depends on. If a dashboard relies on a field nobody has to complete, the dashboard is wrong and nobody knows by how much.

Merges done in bulk. Automated merging loses history and picks the wrong survivor. Duplicates need adjudication.

Configuration causing the errors. Where the same mistake recurs, the cause is usually the setup rather than the users.

Stale ownership. People leave, coverage changes, and records stay assigned to someone who is no longer there.

How we work in it

We work in your Salesforce instance, under access you grant and can revoke, to your data model and your taxonomy. We do not reconfigure your system: where the setup is producing the problem, we show you what and why, and the change is yours to make. Specialists and analysts are allocated to your business and are not shared across clients.

Related resources

What Is CRM Hygiene?

What clean CRM data actually means, and what it takes to keep it that way.

CRM Hygiene Checklist for Deal Teams

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

Working Inside Client Systems

How we work in a client's own stack, including proprietary systems, and what access looks like.

Is your Salesforce data reportable?

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