CRM cleanup playbook: restoring a system people believe

Week 1 — Diagnose and freeze

1. Score the system

   Run the CRM health check with two or three people independently, then compare. Divergent scores are themselves a finding: it means the team does not share a view of how the system behaves.

2. Count the decay

   Duplicates, records with no owner, owners who have left, deals open past their expected close, contacts untouched for a year, required fields with a single dominant value. Numbers, not impressions.

3. Announce the freeze and the plan

   Tell the team what is changing, why, and when it ends. A cleanup that arrives as a series of surprise field deletions loses cooperation immediately.

Week 2 — Definitions

This is the week that determines whether the project works. Everything else is mechanical.

1. Draft stage definitions

   Entry event, exit condition, stall limit per stage. Draft them from how the best rep actually works, not from a template.

2. Run the classification test

   Three people classify ten live records independently. Below ninety percent agreement, rewrite and repeat. This test is the whole quality gate.

3. Agree the qualified definition with marketing

   If marketing hands leads over, the qualification criteria belong to both functions — see marketing and sales disagree on lead quality.

4. Write the archive rule

   For example: no activity for ninety days and past expected close moves to closed-lost with a structured reason. Publish it before running it so nothing looks arbitrary.

Week 3 — Structure and data

1. Cut required fields

   Keep only fields consumed by a live report or an automation. Everything else becomes optional or is removed. Export before deleting; keep the export for a quarter.

2. Deduplicate, then prevent

   Merge with a deterministic winner rule — oldest record wins, newest values fill blanks. Then add entry-side matching so the problem stops recurring.

3. Apply the archive rule

   In one batch, on a stated date, with the reason recorded. Announce the count afterwards so the pipeline drop surprises nobody.

4. Reassign orphans

   Records owned by departed staff go to a named current owner, not to a shared queue.

Week 4 — Make it worth using

1. Give reps something back

   Auto-created next tasks, a view that answers what to do now, one-click logging, prefilled context on the record. Adoption is a value exchange, not a policy.

2. Rebuild four reports

   Pipeline by stage with age; stage-to-stage conversion; breach list; source to revenue. Publish these and retire the rest.

3. Set the hygiene cadence

   A named owner, a monthly thirty-minute pass, a short checklist. Hygiene without an owner decays back within two quarters.

4. Re-score and publish the result

   Run the health check again with the same people. Publishing the before-and-after is what buys you the mandate for the next change.

What not to do

• Do not migrate mid-cleanup. Fix definitions on the current system; move clean structures later if a move is genuinely warranted.
• Do not delete without an export. Somebody will ask about a record from 2023, and the answer needs to be better than an apology.
• Do not mass-email the archived contacts to 're-engage' them before the archive. That converts a data problem into a deliverability problem.
• Do not let the freeze slip. One urgent field becomes six, and the project ends with the same clutter under new labels.

Related work

The underlying failure is described in the CRM nobody trusts, and the design principles in CRM architecture.