What is CRM Hygiene?
The practice of maintaining clean, accurate, and complete data in your CRM through regular audits, deduplication, and data standards.
Definition
CRM hygiene covers everything that keeps your customer database accurate and usable: deduplicating records, standardizing field values, removing stale data, merging duplicate accounts, validating contact information, and enforcing data entry standards. B2B data decays at roughly 30% per year as people change jobs, companies merge, and contact information goes stale. Without active hygiene, your CRM becomes a liability instead of an asset.
Why It Matters
Bad CRM data cascades. Reps call wrong numbers. Marketing emails bounce. Lead scoring models produce garbage. Forecasts are built on phantom pipeline. Reporting becomes unreliable. The cost of bad data isn't just wasted time. It's every downstream decision that gets made based on wrong information. Studies estimate that bad data costs companies $12.9 million per year on average (Gartner).
Example
A RevOps team runs a quarterly CRM hygiene process: merge 2,000 duplicate contacts, remove 500 records with invalid email addresses, standardize job titles across 10,000 records (so 'VP Sales' and 'Vice President of Sales' are the same), and update 800 company records that had stale employee count data. The result: lead scoring accuracy improves 15%, email bounce rate drops from 8% to 2%.