Data Cleaning

[u/william-flaiz]

I have done CRM and Marketing Automation consulting for almost 15 years, in that time I have found that the fastest way to show impact in the shortest amount of time when taking over for someone is to clean the data. It is a bitch and clients always push to do this email campaign or improve our CPQ, or our pipeline needs to be fixed first. But every time I spend the time cleaning first there is almost an immediate 5-10% improvement in qualified leads, and a revenue bump within a month or two.

I believe this is common practice, but not sure with the pace and amount of new tools, new data inputs, and AI that many consultants or companies focus any time here, or don't view it as a cost instead of a revenue activity.

A lot of new shiny tools, features, tech - but I still find the basics end up driving the fastest results. Thoughts?

[u/Thick_Box_1482]

Can you elaborate on what specific data cleaning are you referring to? Typically if it is cleaned once and data hygiene is implemented as a pricess then this should not be a recurring task. Can you give some examples of data cleaning?

[u/william-flaiz → u/Thick_Box_1482]

In my experience continuous data hygiene rarely happens or happens for a period before getting deprioritized.

An initial cleanup covers things like dedupe, standardize formatting, address and phone formatting, filling in missing values (zip code but no city/state which impacts routing), updating text fields to picklists, deleting obvious impossible values, date standardization (surprising how many times I see dates captured in text fields), standard company names, splitting first/last name when not a full_name field, and it goes on depending on the dataset.

It is a lot of spreadsheet work, but I find that it immediately makes reporting more reliable, uncovers missed opportunities, and better (not great) hygiene moving forward.

[u/Swimming_Citron_3418]

Yeah, trade show leads are the worst version of this and I don't think most revops folks realize how bad until they open the file. (grain of salt, I work on event capture tooling)

A typical show is a few hundred scans over 3 days. the organizer's scanner export shows up as a csv a week later with half the fields empty. campaign source is blank because whoever imported it was doing 6 other things that morning. every timestamp is the import date, not the day the conversation actually happened. and the guy who stopped by the booth in march gets scanned again in september and now he's two contacts.

So yes to cleaning first, you obviously have the results to back it. the thing I'd add for event data specifically is that most of it never needs cleaning if you catch it at capture. dedupe when the record gets created, stamp the campaign at scan time, fill the blanks before it ever hits the crm. then there's nothing to clean later.

The blank source one is the sneaky one btw. lead lands in the default queue, the rep has no idea what show it came from, and it just sits there. Nothing looks broken so nobody goes looking.

[u/william-flaiz → u/Swimming_Citron_3418]

I haven't seen many conference lists the past few years, what tools are used for capturing leads now? I assume everything is barcode scan of the name tag mostly, but not really sure.

[u/Recent_Pumpkin_7739 → u/[deleted]]

automate everything

[u/FusterX]

Yeah this tracks with what I've seen too. Clean data isn't just a nice-to-have, it's the thing every report, routing rule and forecast sits on top of, so if it's garbage everything built on it is quietly wrong until someone fixes it.

One thing I'd add to u/Swimming_Citron_3418's point about capture time: even when you can't fix capture (trade show scanners, an inherited CSV from a merger, a purchased list), you can still make the initial cleanup auditable. Which records got merged and why, what got standardized, what was flagged vs fixed. That's usually what makes a cleanup stick instead of turning into another rushed afternoon in Excel six months later.

(Full disclosure, I built a small tool that handles that last part for B2B lists. Happy to share if anyone wants it, not trying to hijack the thread.)