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What Is Data Hygiene and Why Is It Important?
Data hygiene in a sales or GTM (Go-To-Market) organization refers to maintaining CRM data accuracy, consistency, and relevance. It involves processes like identifying and fixing CRM data entry errors, removing duplicate records, and standardizing contact information.
Why is all this important?
Proper data hygiene enables your sales or GTM team to work with clean, reliable data that promotes targeted outreach and informed decision-making. But that’s not all — we’ll dive deeper into the benefits of implementing data hygiene practices later.
Now that you know the basics of data hygiene, we’ll walk you through proven tips to ensure your data remains accurate and up-to-date.
10 Data Hygiene Best Practices to Implement in 2025
Maintaining clean data is a continuous process that requires practical and reliable strategies. In this section, we’ll cover the best practices we always implement to ensure data accuracy and consistency:
- Conduct Regular Data Audits
- Deduplicate Data
- Standardize Data
- Segment Data Properly
- Validate Data at the Point of Entry
- Automate Data Cleaning
- Back-Up Data and Implement Security Protocols
- Establish Data Governance Policies
- Understand Data Lifecycles
- Integrate Your CRM With the Right Tools
1. Conduct Regular Data Audits
Conduct routine data audits to identify and correct inaccuracies, inconsistencies, or outdated information within your CRM.
For a sales or revenue ops team, a regular data audit ensures that the data driving customer engagement, sales forecasting, and pipeline management remains accurate. This approach minimizes missed opportunities by maintaining a clean, reliable database to support sales objectives and customer segmentation strategies.
2. Deduplicate Data
Remove duplicate records from your CRM to prevent confusion and redundancy. This good data hygiene practice helps maintain accurate information, which improves customer interactions and streamlines team workflows.
For GTM teams, deduplication reduces the risk of double-counting leads or sales entries, ensuring cleaner data for reporting and analysis.
3. Standardize Data
Establish consistent data formats across systems, particularly in your CRM, to simplify data entry and analysis. To get started, set unified formats for dates, addresses, phone numbers, and lead qualification fields.
For a sales team, consider standardizing fields using sales methodologies like MEDDIC, MEDDPICC, or BANT to support better pipeline tracking and deal qualification.
4. Segment Data Properly
Segmentation enables more targeted prospecting and provides actionable insights for forecasting and pipeline management. Additionally, it allows you to tailor outreach to specific customer groups and refine sales strategies.
So, how do you get started with this strategy?
Organize CRM data by key criteria such as demographics, behaviors, or preferences. This will make it easier to identify and effectively engage your target audience.
5. Validate Data at the Point of Entry
Implement validation rules within your CRM to ensure the data you enter is accurate, complete, and aligned with sales objectives from the start.
This can be a good data hygiene practice that reduces the likelihood of incomplete or incorrect data accumulating. Ultimately, this strategy will help your sales team maintain high data quality and simplify reporting.
6. Automate Data Cleaning
Leverage CRM automation tools to regularly clean dirty data and catch errors before they impact outreach, reporting, or insights. This will allow your sales or revenue ops teams to focus on high-value tasks while maintaining consistent data quality in the background.
7. Back-Up Data and Implement Security Protocols
Establish secure, regular data backups to prevent data loss from system failures or breaches.
Backups preserve critical sales data by safeguarding CRM information, like customer interactions and pipeline statuses. Meanwhile, security protocols protect customer data from unauthorized access, which supports both compliance and customer trust.
8. Establish Data Governance Policies
Develop clear data governance policies that assign specific responsibilities within the team to maintain CRM data hygiene. In a sales or revenue ops context, this could involve setting required Salesforce fields or defining mandatory data entry standards, which ensure consistent practices across the organization.
Ultimately, effective data governance policies enforce data quality standards and promote ethical data handling.
9. Understand Data Lifecycles
Familiarize yourself with the lifecycle stages of CRM data — from data collection to archiving or deletion. This will help you easily identify outdated information and ensure that only accurate data is used to drive decision-making.
10. Integrate Your CRM With the Right Tools
Choose data management tools and plugins that integrate seamlessly with CRM systems like Salesforce or HubSpot.
Why?
Robust plugins like Scratchpad help you automate data cleansing, data validation, and updates. They can also streamline CRM data management, which would minimize manual work and errors.
By applying these good data hygiene practices, you can unlock a range of benefits that extend beyond data accuracy.
6 Essential Benefits of Applying Proper Data Hygiene Methods
Implementing good data hygiene strategies translates into improved performance and fewer data errors. In addition to that, it comes with these key benefits:
- Improved Decision-Making: Clean data leads to more accurate and informed decisions within your sales and GTM teams. With reliable CRM information, sales leaders can confidently forecast, allocate resources effectively, and develop strategies that align with customer needs.
- Increased Efficiency: Good data hygiene strategies reduce the time spent managing and correcting bad data. For sales and revenue ops, this efficiency boost frees up resources — allowing your team to focus more on activities that drive growth and customer engagement.
- Enhanced Customer Relationships: Accurate data helps tailor customer interactions and improve overall satisfaction. Also, clean CRM data allows sales reps to approach each customer with relevant information, which fosters stronger relationships and loyalty.
- Better Compliance: Clean data helps your sales team adhere to privacy standards and makes it easier to comply with data protection regulations like GDPR.
- Cost Savings: Implementing good data hygiene tactics ensures efficient resource use and reduces the costs associated with correcting data errors.
- Optimized Marketing and Sales Efforts: Good data hygiene tactics allow for better targeting and segmentation, which leads to more effective marketing and sales campaigns. Additionally, clean CRM data enables precise outreach, which helps your team reach the right prospects and increase engagement.
While the benefits of data hygiene are clear, you might encounter a couple of obstacles when cleaning dirty data in your CRM.
3 Critical Challenges of Maintaining Data Hygiene (and How to Overcome Them)
Here’s a look at the challenges that come with ensuring your data remains clean, along with tips on how to manage them:
1. Inconsistent Data Entry
Inconsistent CRM data entry, such as variations in formatting for phone numbers, can lead to poor data hygiene and inaccuracies. Without a standardized approach, sales reps might record information differently, which would cause friction in reporting and analysis.
To tackle this, implement strict data entry standards by establishing clear guidelines on how information should be recorded. Also, conduct regular training sessions to ensure all team members understand and follow these standards.
2. Data Decay Over Time
Data naturally decays because contact information, roles, and preferences change. This can be challenging since sales tasks like outreach and follow-ups require up-to-date and accurate information.
Additionally, outdated data can lead to misdirected communication, which could impact engagement and pipeline accuracy.
To address this, schedule frequent data updates within your CRM. From there, regularly validate contact information, such as phone numbers, email addresses, and company roles, to keep data clean.
3. High Volume of Data
Working with large datasets increases the likelihood of errors — making it hard to maintain accuracy and consistency across records. This is especially challenging in CRM systems where volume and detail are crucial to decision-making.
To manage this, use tools that can help clean bad data, validate large datasets more efficiently, and reduce manual errors. For example, if you’re using the Salesforce CRM, you can use Scratchpad to purify your CRM data and streamline your sales processes.
Keen to learn more?
Clean Your CRM Data Effortlessly and Boost Productivity With Scratchpad
Scratchpad is a powerful Salesforce add-on that improves CRM and pipeline hygiene by streamlining pipeline management for frontline sales reps. It also serves as an AI sales agent that delivers enhanced visibility into pipeline data for Ops and sales leaders.
Scratchpad seamlessly integrates directly into existing workflows — offering instant visibility and control over the sales process and CRM data enrichment.
With this tool, you can quickly identify gaps in the open pipeline and track changes in real-time, ensuring data stays clean, accurate, and up-to-date.
Below are some of the key features and benefits of Scratchpad:
- CRM Hygiene Monitoring System: CRM hygiene has never been easy. With Scratchpad, sales leaders can easily see where their sales process is falling behind or which reps aren’t performing as expected.
- Data Accuracy and Insight: The tool helps you maintain accurate data in Salesforce. This enables better analysis, segmentation, and sales prospecting based on reliable information — which is critical to targeting the right accounts.
- AI Sales Agent: Scratchpad’s AI Sales Agent monitors your virtual sales calls and autonomously updates Salesforce with crucial details (like MEDDIC, next steps, and more). It also generates easily shareable sales call summaries and transforms these conversations into valuable insights.
- Unified Sales Workspace: Scratchpad brings together sales notes, tasks, Kanban boards, and more in one place — making it a centralized hub where you can easily manage all sales activities.
- Zero Boards: Scratchpad provides sales reps and managers with daily to-do lists so they never forget to follow up on leads or opportunities in the pipeline.
- Process Adherence: Scratchpad enhances process adherence by streamlining Salesforce interactions, which ensures every sales rep maintains essential processes efficiently. It offers intuitive views and workflow tiles — making it easier for sales professionals to manage and correct customer data in real-time. This is critical for maintaining the accuracy needed in Target Account Selling and CRM workflow automation.
- AI Sales Sheets: Get a spreadsheet-like experience that syncs with your CRM. With Scratchpad, you can see changes in pipeline as they happen. With our quick, intuitive commands, you can also quickly search and edit any field in Salesforce from anywhere on the web.
- AI Inline Coaching: AI-powered guidance ensures your reps follow your sales update protocols. Scratchpad provides prompts for missing information and suggests improvements, helping you maintain data quality and process adherence.
- Sales Notes: This is your centralized hub for sales notes that syncs with Salesforce. You even get AI generated call summaries to simplify data capture while maintaining the human touch that’s necessary for customer interactions.
And there you have it — those are some of the many ways you can leverage Scratchpad for data hygiene purposes and for streamlining sales processes.
Still have more questions about cleaning your CRM data?
Let’s demystify them.
2 FAQs About CRM Data Hygiene
Implementing good data hygiene practices might often seem like a complex undertaking, but it doesn’t have to be. To ensure you’re on the right track, let’s explore the answers to some frequently asked questions:
1. What Does the Data Hygiene Process Look Like?
Here’s a breakdown of the steps to follow when cleansing your CRM data:
- Conduct a Data Audit: Start by reviewing your entire database to identify inaccuracies, duplicate data, and outdated information. If you ensure consistent CRM data entry practices from the start, you can reduce the need for extensive audits and make it easier to maintain reliable data within your CRM.
- Data Cleansing: Remove duplicate data, standardize data formats, and correct any errors you found during the data audit. To reduce the need for frequent data cleaning, establish strong data entry protocols (like standardized formats) from the start.
- Data Validation: Validate the cleaned information to ensure it meets data quality standards before storing or using it. This minimizes the risk of incorrect information and helps maintain accurate insights in your sales process.
- Automation: Use automated tools to clean and validate data, minimize manual work, and reduce errors.
- Backup and Security: Implement regular backups and security protocols to protect your data from loss or unauthorized access. Routine backups ensure data integrity and safeguard your CRM information.
2. What Are the Different Data Cleansing Methods?
Here’s a look at essential methods to maintain clean, reliable, and actionable data:
- Deduplication: This involves identifying and removing duplicate entries to keep each data point unique within the database. Deduplication prevents redundant communications and improves reporting accuracy in your CRM.
- Standardization: This ensures consistency in data formats, such as dates, addresses, or contact details, across all records. Standardized data simplifies communication and follow-ups for sales teams.
- Validation: This process checks existing data against predefined rules or external databases to confirm accuracy. Validation ensures your sales team works with reliable data for outreach and engagement.
- Data Enrichment: This supplements existing data with additional information from external data sources to increase completeness. Enriched data provides deeper insights into prospects, which improves targeting and personalization.
- Error Correction: This involves identifying and correcting incomplete or incorrect data entries, such as misspellings or wrong values. Error correction maintains CRM accuracy and reduces miscommunication.
- Data Normalization: This method converts data into a common format or structure for consistency, especially when merging datasets. It allows your team to analyze and manage information smoothly across different data sources.
Fuel Your Sales Success With Clean and Reliable Data
By implementing the data hygiene best practices we’ve covered, you can ensure your CRM data remains a valuable asset that powers informed decision-making. Ultimately, effective data hygiene allows your team to operate more efficiently and deliver a better customer experience.
Need a tool that simplifies data hygiene and enhances CRM accuracy?
Look no further than Scratchpad.
Here’s why:
Scratchpad allows you to quickly identify gaps in your open pipeline and track changes in real time, ensuring your data remains clean and accurate. It seamlessly syncs with Salesforce and supports better analysis, segmentation, and targeted prospecting based on reliable data.
Try Scratchpad for free and take control of your CRM data quality today!
