If your CRM is full of outdated contacts, incomplete fields, or duplicate records, you’ve got a silent sales killer on your hands: poor data hygiene. For SMEs, this is one of the most common and costly CRM mistakes. It’s the difference between hitting the bullseye with precision targeting or wasting resources shooting in the dark.
Many businesses add contacts to their CRM without a consistent process. Over time, this leads to:
- Multiple records for the same customer.
- Old email addresses and phone numbers.
- Missing purchase or engagement history.
Why It Hurts Sales and your business in the long run!
When your data is inaccurate:
- Campaigns are less effective because they’re targeting the wrong people.
- Marketing costs increase due to wasted sends.
- Customers receive irrelevant or repetitive communications, damaging trust.
How to Fix It:
- Run a full CRM audit every quarter to identify and merge duplicates.
- Standardise data entry: define how fields like “First Name,” “Country,” and “Phone” should be formatted.
- Use automation to flag incomplete profiles or outdated information.
- Integrate tools to reduce manual entry and human error.
A mid-sized retail brand we worked with discovered 38% of their CRM entries were duplicates. After a two-week clean-up and implementing automation to prevent duplicates, email deliverability improved by 22%, and campaign revenue increased 14% — without adding a single new lead.
Your CRM is only as powerful as the data in it. Cleaning your database isn’t glamorous, but it’s one of the fastest ways to improve customer retention and ROI.
📩 Want us to clean, optimise, and monetise your CRM? You know what to do 😉
