CRM hygiene

The four maintenance jobs

Deduplication

Prevented at entry by matching on email and phone, not cleaned up quarterly.

Ownership

Every open record has a current owner; records owned by departed staff are reassigned, not left.

Ageing

A published archive rule closes records that have clearly stopped moving, with a structured reason.

Field discipline

Required fields limited to those a live report or automation consumes. Every other required field buys a fictional value.

Why hygiene is a value exchange, not a policy

Teams maintain data that helps them. If the CRM creates their next task, shows the context they need and saves them a search, hygiene largely maintains itself. If it only feeds a report they never see, no mandate will hold for longer than a quarter.

A monthly hygiene pass

• Duplicates created since the last pass, and why the entry-side rule missed them.
• Open records with no owner, or owned by someone who has left.
• Deals past their expected close date with no recent activity.
• Required fields with a single dominant value — a sign people are choosing the fastest option.
• Automations that failed silently since the last review.

Thirty minutes, one named owner, on a fixed date. Hygiene handled as a quarterly project always arrives after the reporting has already been distrusted.

Repair sequence: the CRM cleanup playbook. Diagnosis: the CRM health check.