topic Re: What’s the best approach to cleaning up CRM data? in Tips, Tricks & Best Practices

What’s the best approach to cleaning up CRM data?

JOnwah — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 06:32:53 GMT

I was listening to an episode of Ops Cast where the guest made an interesting point: doing a full data clean before reporting can be a hassle—and by the time you’re done, you might only be 10% better off. Instead, they suggested building small reports and cleaning just the relevant data as you go, which can lead to more consistent, incremental improvements.

I’m about to kick off a CRM data-cleaning project myself and want to make sure I’m approaching it the right way.

How have you approached CRM data cleanup in the past?

Would love to hear any case studies, best practices, or lessons learned.

Re: What’s the best approach to cleaning up CRM data?

karstenkoehler — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 06:46:43 GMT

Hi @JOnwah,

Great question – I'd argue that this depends a lot on the fields you're planning to clean up, the stakeholders involved, the automation that is referencing these fields etc.

For example, a clean-up might involve making sure that the single-line text country field is cleaned up and doesn't include values like "DE", "Deutschland", but only "Germany". However, if country data is secondary to your business processes (not required for routing, not relevant in reporting), there's no point in cleaning it up.

Similarly, if you're running a low-touch, product-led SaaS product, it's going to be a lot of work to clean up bounces and the return on that time investment might not pay off. Generating a new user will very likely yield a better payoff than a human investing the time and energy to follow up on an incorrect email address.

Keeping that in mind, could you provide a bit more context about what exactly you want to clean up?

Very broadly, I'd do the following things:

Make a list of fields that are critical to business processes
Identify stakeholders and processes which are either affected or referencing these fields
Report on the current status of these data (fill rate, assumed rate of invalid values etc)
Define processes for one-time or ongoing clean-up (through reminders, reports, required fields, enrichment, automation)

The idea is not to make this not a cat and mouse game but figure out processes that don't just look at the symptom and fix the symptoms but treat the causes.

Best regards

Re: What’s the best approach to cleaning up CRM data?

HybitHi — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 09:54:45 GMT

Can you point out the episode of OpsCast, please. I want to give it a listen.

Re: What’s the best approach to cleaning up CRM data?

JOnwah — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 06:15:51 GMT

Hey @karstenkoehler thanks for sharing that. For context, I've joined an organisation that's been using HubSpot for over 6 years but not exactly adhering to best practices. I'm still carrying out my audit, but so far I can see there's a lot of duplicate company info (there can be 3 versions of a company with different spellings 🤣), outdated and complex workflows that don't pair objects and records accordingly. I've noticed it affects deal stage/ pipeline reporting as well as our marketing efforts. A lot going on like a said, so trying to peel back and figure out where to start

Re: What’s the best approach to cleaning up CRM data?

JOnwah — Wed, 16 Apr 2025 06:17:21 GMT

Hi @HybitHi, sure here's the episode link - https://open.spotify.com/episode/2Vn5yXAPLfOJqprunljeEF?si=ecq6dmpuQ5epVx2U_dTQDQ

Re: What’s the best approach to cleaning up CRM data?

TrevorPreston — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 09:35:52 GMT

Hey! Saw the thread and wanted to comment on my experience because I feel it's a very overlooked point. When I joined our company 2 years ago we had 100K contacts in total in our Hubspot with more than 50% that felt completely outdated and useless 😅 obviously our bounce rate was overly high whenever we sent campaigns and it was impacting our domain.

Started looking for solutions online and found Findymail's crm enrichment tool Datacare that plugs directly into Hubspot and cleans and updates old data with fresh ones + enriches companies + track job changes. At first I thought it was too good to be true but few months later and our bounce rate is around 1%, our campaigns are performing much better and our database is now much more accurate (we went from 100K to around 82K).
Findymail is also a smaller team and it was super easy to talk to them and get things rolling