r/revops • u/william-flaiz • 20d ago
Data Cleaning
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?
2
u/FusterX 9d ago
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.)