Data Hygiene
Data Hygiene is The practice of maintaining clean, accurate, and deduplicated data in CRM and marketing systems. Includes deduplication, normalization, enrichment, and decay management. RevOps owns this as a continuous process.
Data hygiene is the work nobody wants to do and everybody suffers without. Every report, every routing rule, every scoring model, every forecast is only as good as the data underneath it. And B2B data degrades fast. People change jobs (30% annual turnover in contact databases), companies get acquired, phone numbers change, emails bounce. If you aren't actively maintaining your data, it's actively degrading.
RevOps owns data hygiene because RevOps feels the pain when it fails. A lead routes to the wrong rep because the account's industry field is blank. A forecast is off because duplicate opportunities inflate the pipeline. An enrichment vendor charges you to update records that already exist under a different spelling. These aren't edge cases. They're Tuesday.
The Hygiene Playbook
- Deduplication: Merge duplicate accounts, contacts, and leads on a recurring schedule. The average CRM has 10-25% duplicate records. Tools like Clay and dedicated dedup solutions help, but you need matching rules that account for "IBM" vs "International Business Machines."
- Normalization: Standardize field values. Industry picklists, state abbreviations, title hierarchies, company name formatting. If your reps can free-text the industry field, you have 47 versions of "Software."
- Enrichment: Fill missing fields from third-party providers. ZoomInfo, Apollo, Clearbit. Schedule recurring enrichment, not just one-time imports.
- Decay management: Flag and quarantine records that bounce, disconnect, or go stale. A "clean" database today is a dirty database in 6 months without maintenance.
- Governance: Validation rules, required fields, picklist enforcement. Prevention is cheaper than cleanup.
For tools that help with data quality at scale, see our tools directory. Data hygiene is foundational to everything else RevOps does, from lead scoring accuracy to forecast reliability.
Frequently Asked Questions
How often should you clean CRM data?
Dedup scans should run weekly (automated). Enrichment refreshes should happen quarterly for active accounts, semi-annually for the rest. Full data audits at least twice a year. The key insight is that data hygiene is a continuous process, not a project. If you clean your database once and declare victory, you're back to dirty data within two quarters.
What's the ROI of data hygiene?
Hard to measure directly, easy to see when it's absent. Quantify it through proxy metrics: lead routing accuracy (fewer misroutes = faster follow-up), email deliverability rates (clean data = fewer bounces), enrichment spend efficiency (no paying to enrich records you already have), and forecast accuracy (clean pipeline = reliable numbers). Gartner estimates bad data costs organizations an average of $12.9M per year.
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