Customer Relationship Management (CRM) hygiene is the practice of maintaining clean, accurate, and organized customer data within a CRM system. This process involves regularly weeding out duplicate and incomplete records to ensure the information is reliable and up-to-date. Proper hygiene prevents a CRM from becoming an ineffective database, which can lead to poor customer experiences and flawed business insights.
Maintaining a clean CRM is an ongoing commitment, not a one-time task. Establishing clear data governance policies and consistent processes is crucial for long-term success. These practices ensure your customer data remains a valuable asset for your entire team.
Clean CRM data boosts your team's productivity and effectiveness. It enables reliable automation and allows for faster, more accurate decision-making. This frees up your team to focus on strategic initiatives instead of manual data cleanup.
Pristine data is also crucial for delivering a superior customer experience. It allows for better personalization in marketing and ensures support teams have a complete interaction history. This leads to higher customer satisfaction and retention.
While related, CRM hygiene and customer data management serve distinct functions in handling customer information.
Poor CRM hygiene often stems from a few common, yet critical, oversights that degrade data quality.
Maintaining CRM hygiene doesn't typically require standalone software. Instead, it relies on the powerful features built into modern CRM platforms and integrated applications. These tools work together to automate data cleaning, ensure consistency, and provide a single source of truth.
How often should we clean our CRM?
A quarterly deep clean is a good baseline, but daily or weekly automated checks for duplicates and errors are essential. This proactive approach maintains data integrity and prevents major issues from accumulating over time.
Who is responsible for CRM hygiene?
It’s a shared responsibility. While a data administrator or RevOps team might lead the effort, everyone who uses the CRM—from sales to marketing—plays a role in maintaining data quality through consistent data entry.
Can automation completely handle CRM hygiene?
Automation is a powerful ally but not a complete solution. It handles routine tasks like deduplication and standardization, but human oversight is still crucial for setting rules, auditing data, and managing complex or nuanced errors.
A drip campaign is a series of automated messages sent to prospects or customers over time to nurture leads and drive engagement.
Learn about business process management, including benefits of implementing BPM, steps to effective BPM, common BPM mistakes to avoid, & BPM tools and software.
A go-to-market (GTM) strategy is an action plan that outlines how a company will reach target customers and achieve a competitive advantage.
A Sales Manager leads a sales team, setting goals, analyzing performance, and developing strategies to drive revenue and meet targets.
Customer segmentation is dividing customers into groups based on shared traits. This allows for more targeted and effective marketing efforts.
Site retargeting is a marketing strategy that shows ads to people who have previously visited your website but left without converting.
Account-Based Sales Development (ABSD) is a focused strategy where SDRs target key stakeholders within specific, high-value accounts.
The buyer's journey maps the path a potential customer takes, from first becoming aware of a problem to making a final purchase decision.
A Content Delivery Network (CDN) is a system of distributed servers that deliver web content to users based on their geographic location.
Sales prospecting software automates the process of finding, contacting, and tracking potential customers to help sales teams build their pipeline.
Intent-based leads are potential customers whose online actions—like searches or content engagement—signal a clear interest in buying a solution.
Sales automation uses software to streamline and automate repetitive, manual sales tasks, freeing up reps to focus on selling.
Data cleansing, or data scrubbing, is the process of detecting and correcting inaccurate records from a dataset to improve data quality.
Direct-to-Consumer (DTC) is a business model where companies sell products directly to customers, bypassing traditional retail middlemen.
LPI, or Lead Per Inquiry, is a key metric that measures how many leads are generated from each inquiry in a marketing campaign.
Learn about bad leads, including identifying bad leads, warning signs of bad leads, impact of bad leads on sales, & strategies to minimize bad leads.
NoSQL ("Not only SQL") databases offer a flexible alternative to relational models, excelling at managing large and unstructured data sets.
Inside sales metrics are quantifiable measures used to track the performance, activities, and effectiveness of an internal sales team.
The marketing mix is the set of marketing tools a company uses to sell products, defined by the 4Ps: Product, Price, Place, and Promotion.
Learn about buyer intent, including understanding buyer intent signals, strategies to capture buyer intent, & buyer intent vs. customer interest.
Internal signals are data points from your own systems, like website visits or product usage, that indicate a customer's buying intent.
Voice broadcasting is an automated system that delivers a pre-recorded voice message to a large list of phone numbers simultaneously.
A firewall is a digital barrier that protects a network by monitoring and controlling traffic, blocking unauthorized access and malicious content.
Enrichment is the process of adding third-party data to your existing customer profiles to get a more complete picture of your leads.
The awareness stage is the first step in the buyer's journey, where a potential customer realizes they have a problem or an opportunity to explore.
A buying committee is a group of stakeholders within an organization who are jointly responsible for making major purchasing decisions.
Data warehousing is the process of storing and managing large sets of data from various sources for business intelligence and reporting purposes.
CRM analytics is the process of analyzing data from your CRM to uncover insights that help you better understand and serve your customers.
Contract management is the process of creating, executing, and analyzing contracts to maximize performance and minimize financial risk.
Inbound sales attracts interested prospects who've engaged with your brand, letting sales reps connect with warm leads instead of cold outreach.
A competitive landscape is an analysis of your direct and indirect competitors, revealing their strengths, weaknesses, and market positioning.
Sales pipeline reporting is the process of analyzing sales data to track progress, identify bottlenecks, and forecast future revenue.
A sales sequence is a series of automated touchpoints sent to prospects over time to guide them through the sales funnel.
Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI) measures the revenue generated by a marketing campaign relative to the cost of that campaign.
Event marketing is a strategy where brands engage directly with target audiences through live events like trade shows, conferences, or webinars.
Predictive lead generation uses data and AI to find prospects most likely to buy, helping teams focus their efforts on high-value leads.
Conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who complete a desired goal, like a purchase or sign-up, out of the total number of visitors.
Digital Rights Management (DRM) is technology that controls access to copyrighted digital content, restricting its use, modification, and distribution.
Target Account Selling is a focused sales strategy where teams identify and pursue a specific list of high-value accounts.
Compliance testing ensures a product or system adheres to specific regulations, standards, or policies set by governing bodies or organizations.
Sales and marketing analytics involves measuring and analyzing performance data to maximize effectiveness and optimize return on investment (ROI).
Integration testing is a software testing phase where individual modules are combined and tested together to verify their interaction.
A Single Page Application (SPA) is a web app that interacts with the user by dynamically rewriting the current page rather than loading new pages.
Warm outbound is a sales strategy for contacting prospects who've shown interest in your brand through prior engagement, like website visits.
Sales pipeline velocity is a metric that measures how quickly deals move through your sales funnel to generate revenue for your business.
Expansion revenue is the extra money a business makes from its current customers via upgrades, new products, or additional services.
A Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) is a secure, isolated section of a public cloud. It lets you provision your own logically isolated resources.
Closed Lost is a sales term for a deal that didn't go through. The prospect decided not to buy, or the sales team disqualified them.
Lead enrichment software adds crucial data to your leads, like contact info and firmographics, to help you better understand and engage them.
Data-driven marketing uses customer data to inform marketing decisions, optimize campaigns, and deliver personalized experiences to consumers.
Loyalty programs are marketing strategies designed to reward repeat customers. They offer incentives like discounts or exclusive access to encourage retention.
A hard sell is an aggressive sales technique that uses high-pressure tactics to push a customer into making an immediate purchase decision.
AI marketing uses artificial intelligence to analyze data, automate decisions, and deliver personalized customer experiences at scale.
A demand generation framework is a strategic process for creating awareness and interest in your product, ultimately driving new business.
Customer engagement is the ongoing, value-driven relationship a business builds with its customers to foster brand loyalty and awareness.
Multi-threading allows a single CPU core to run multiple independent threads (or tasks) at the same time, boosting efficiency and performance.
CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) software is a sales tool for creating accurate, configurable quotes for complex products and services.
Adobe Analytics is a leading web analytics solution for gaining real-time insights into user activity across websites and mobile applications.
CRM integration connects your CRM software with other tools, creating a unified system for all your customer data and business processes.
Omnichannel marketing creates a seamless, unified customer experience by integrating a company's various communication and sales channels.
Sales and marketing alignment means both teams work in sync, sharing goals and data to boost lead quality, conversions, and company revenue.
A sales pitch is a persuasive presentation of a product or service, aimed at convincing a potential customer to make a purchase.
An Application Programming Interface (API) is a set of rules that lets different software applications talk to each other and share information.
De-duping, or data deduplication, is the process of eliminating duplicate copies of data within a dataset to improve accuracy and save space.
Sales metrics are quantifiable data points that track and measure a sales team's performance against specific goals and objectives.
Net new business is revenue from customers who have never purchased from your company before. It’s a crucial indicator of sustainable growth.
A lead generation funnel is a systematic process that guides potential customers from initial awareness of your brand to becoming qualified leads.
Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a digital marketing strategy that uses paid tactics to increase a website's visibility in search engine results.
Customer relationship marketing is a strategy for building lasting connections with customers to foster long-term loyalty and engagement.
AI in sales uses smart technology to automate repetitive tasks, analyze customer data, and help sales reps close deals more efficiently.
Average Customer Life is the average time someone remains a customer. It's a key metric for predicting revenue and measuring customer loyalty.
Lead routing is the automated process of distributing incoming leads to the right sales reps based on predefined criteria.
Lead generation is the process of identifying and cultivating potential customers for a business's products or services.
An objection is an explicit expression by a prospect that presents a barrier to moving forward in the sales process.
A Digital Sales Room is a private online space where sellers share all relevant content with buyers to streamline the sales cycle.
Sales workflows are a set of automated actions that streamline the sales process, helping teams engage leads consistently and close deals faster.
A decision-maker is an individual with the authority to make significant choices for a company, especially regarding purchases or strategy.
Guided selling simplifies complex sales by giving reps step-by-step instructions and data-driven recommendations to close deals faster.
Sales compensation is the total pay a salesperson receives, including salary, commissions, and bonuses, structured to motivate performance.
Regression testing ensures that new code changes don’t negatively impact existing features. It's a key step to maintain software quality after updates.
Account View-Through Rate (AVTR) is the percentage of target accounts that see an ad and later visit your website without clicking on it.
Edge locations are globally distributed data centers that cache content close to users, reducing latency and delivering web content much faster.
AppExchange is Salesforce's cloud marketplace, offering a vast ecosystem of apps and expert services to extend Salesforce functionality.
Learn about B2B marketing attribution, including challenges in B2B marketing attribution, & key metrics for effective attribution.
Latency is the delay between a user's action and a system's response. It's the time it takes for a data packet to travel to its destination.
A Customer Data Platform (CDP) centralizes customer data from all sources to create a complete, unified profile for each individual customer.
A custom API integration is a bespoke connection between software, enabling them to communicate and share data to meet unique business requirements.
A sales champion is your internal advocate at a target company. They believe in your product and help you push the deal forward to close.
Click-through rate (CTR) is a metric that measures the percentage of people who click on a specific link, ad, or call-to-action.
Lead conversion is the process of turning a prospect into a customer by getting them to complete a desired action, such as making a purchase.
Stress testing is a type of software testing that determines a system's robustness by pushing it beyond its normal operational capacity.
Affiliate marketing is a performance-based model where affiliates earn a commission for promoting another company’s products or services.
A Request for Information (RFI) is a formal process for gathering information from potential suppliers before issuing a more detailed proposal.
Git is a distributed version control system that tracks changes in code, allowing developers to collaborate and manage project history effectively.
Yield management is a dynamic pricing strategy that adjusts prices based on demand to maximize revenue from a fixed, perishable inventory.
A messaging strategy defines what your brand says, how it says it, and where it says it to connect effectively with your target audience.
Account mapping is comparing your customer list with a partner's to find common prospects and unlock new sales opportunities.
Load balancing is the practice of distributing incoming network traffic across a group of backend servers, ensuring no single server is overworked.
Omnichannel sales is a strategy that integrates all physical and digital sales channels to create a seamless, unified customer experience.
Inside sales is a remote sales process where reps sell products or services via phone, email, and other digital tools instead of in person.