Data Hygiene is The ongoing process of maintaining clean, accurate, and standardized data in CRM and marketing systems through deduplication, enrichment, validation, and governance practices.
Data hygiene is the least glamorous and most impactful thing RevOps does. Every downstream process, routing, scoring, reporting, forecasting, territory planning, is only as good as the underlying data. Garbage in, garbage out isn't just a cliche in revenue operations. It's the root cause of most ops failures.
Core Data Hygiene Practices
Deduplication: Merge duplicate accounts, contacts, and leads. Average CRM has 10-25% duplicate records.
Standardization: Consistent formatting for company names, titles, addresses, phone numbers. "IBM" vs "I.B.M." vs "International Business Machines" breaks every report.
Enrichment: Fill in missing fields from third-party data providers (ZoomInfo, Clay, Apollo).
Validation: Verify emails, phone numbers, and addresses are deliverable and current.
Decay management: B2B contact data decays at 30% per year. People change jobs, companies merge, phone numbers change.
The Cost of Bad Data
Gartner estimates that bad data costs organizations an average of $12.9M per year. In RevOps specifically, bad data means: misrouted leads (lost revenue), inaccurate forecasts (broken trust), failed email campaigns (deliverability damage), and wasted enrichment spend (enriching records that already exist).
Deduplication should run continuously (daily or weekly automated scans). Enrichment refreshes quarterly. Full audits at least twice a year. The best RevOps teams treat data hygiene as an ongoing process, not a project.
