Beyond improving data accuracy and fueling better decision-making, removing bad data from your CRM also increases trust among your sales reps. As a team, they want to know they can trust the data given to them by their CRM to score the sale.
Purge helps enable this — by removing bad data from your systems according to the rules you’ve outlined in the Define phase and the data analyses you applied in the Analyze phase.
Here’s where data quality rules and analysis begin to truly reshape and reframe your data infrastructure. It frees up bandwidth and creates a solid foundation for the next phases of growth.
The CRM Hygiene Series
This blog is part of a comprehensive series of guides that dive deeper into each of the five steps in the CRM data hygiene process. Navigate to each step to learn more about each step, including how to apply them, why they’re necessary, and the technical aspects of it all below.
A Key Challenge: Addressing Precision and Unintended Data Loss
Purging bad data demands meticulous identification and removal of only the inaccurate or irrelevant data without affecting valuable customer data fields at scale.
This means you need a way to guarantee precision — otherwise, you risk lowering data accuracy, directly affecting revenue. At this point it’s also key to consider the solutions, including software or data services, necessary to purge unneeded records and keep them out of your systems in the future.
With the help of a robust data management solution, follow this three-step process to successfully purge your database of bad, unneeded data:
1. Remove Duplicate Records
What this step does: This step eliminates redundant data, making sure each customer or prospect has one single, unified record. It involves comparing records based on predefined criteria to detect and resolve redundancies.
Why it matters: Removing duplicate records helps prevent confusion in sales and marketing efforts, reduces the risk of sending mixed messages to the same contact, and ensures accurate reporting and analytics.
Best practices: Use CRM tools with built-in mass deduplication capabilities or invest in specialized software to automate the detection and merging of duplicate records. It’s important to set clear rules to determine which records to keep and which information to consolidate — it’s the best way to retain the most complete and up-to-date data.
Additionally, schedule automated deduplication processes as part of your ongoing data maintenance routine to prevent duplicates from accumulating over time and bloating your CRM. Using survivorship field values helps decide which data to keep during deduplication — like the latest job title or the highest annual revenue — ensuring records stay current and reflect growth. Master record criteria set the standard for which details are most important, such as the latest engagement or highest transaction.
This improves your CRM’s accuracy and value by keeping the best information while removing duplicates — keeping your data clean, useful, and actionable.
2. Mass-Delete Businesses and Professionals Outside TAM
What this step does: Identifying and removing records from your CRM that fall outside your Total Addressable Market (TAM) allows your database to focus on high-potential leads and customers.
Why it matters: Keeping any data that’s irrelevant to your TAM clutters your CRM and takes away resources you could be using to sell to your target market — diluting sales focus.
Best practices: Use segmentation tools within your CRM to filter and identify records that do not match your TAM criteria based on industry, geography, company size, or other relevant firmographic and demographic factors.
Before deleting, run a thorough review to confirm that these records truly do not offer value. Finally, automate routine mass-deletion workflows to keep your CRM clean.
3. Mass-Delete Outdated Records
What this step does: This step targets and eliminates records that are no longer accurate or relevant to your business. These can include anything from contacts who have moved on from their companies, businesses that no longer exist, or outdated contact information — all at scale.
Why it matters: Outdated records make your CRM less effective, which leads to wasted marketing efforts, bounced emails, and poor customer engagement. Keeping your database current enhances your outreach strategies and the accuracy of your analytics.
Best practices: Regularly run data validation exercises. You can do this by using email verification tools and public records to identify obsolete information.
Engage in periodic outreach to contacts to confirm or update their details. Automation is key here. To maintain your data cleaning work, create a systematic approach for archiving or deleting outdated records. As a result, your database remains a dynamic tool that truly drives business growth.
Next Step in the CRM Hygiene Process: Enhance
The Purge phase is where you get rid of all data that isn’t useful to you – en masse. You only want to keep the data that improves the accuracy of your marketing and sales motions, accurately informs your strategic business decisions, and helps you maintain your efficiency gains.
The idea is to keep a living CRM that’s constantly being updated with customized rule-based workflows — a CRM that’s always primed for competitive outreach.
As we move forward in our five-step CRM hygiene process, the next step, Enhance, is where we will enrich and build upon the relevant data left after a thorough purging process.
Learn why Enhance is the next step in our CRM Hygiene process.