The Dangers of Bad CRM Data

Here’s an unfortunate truth: crappy CRM data is the norm — not the exception.

Incomplete, inaccurate, and outdated records litter CRMs. And that has troubling ripple effects, from wasted marketing dollars to inaccurate pipeline forecasts to reps chasing dead leads.

But the damage doesn’t stop there.

For other tools that connect to CRMs, like partner relationship management tools (PRMs), bad data becomes an even bigger headache, fueling confusion among partner managers, frustrating partners, and making it nearly impossible to run an efficient partner program.

To understand more about this problem, we turned to our partner community. Below, we share their stories and practical tips for maintaining a tidy CRM (and PRM) over time. But first, we explore how CRMs can get so messy in the first place.

Why Does CRM Data Get Bad?

No one intends to fill their CRM with junk, but it happens to the best of us.

Here are the usual culprits:

You’re Lacking Process

When people are in a hurry (and even if they’re not), they tend to leave things out and make mistakes. Without clear standards in place, it’s easy for them to:

Create leads without checking if the same one already exists.
Submit opportunities without filling out important fields.
Use an inconsistent naming convention, causing confusion and duplication.
Sync accounts and contacts to your PRM — even if they’re not partner-related.
Dump whole tradeshow lists into your CRM without understanding which leads were actually interested in your product, and which ones just wanted swag.

While these things may seem minor in the moment, they can cause major headaches for teams that rely on clean data to find partner co-selling opportunities, run efficient co-marketing campaigns, and manage partner relationships.

Nahuel Moreno, a Salesforce developer, founded a whole company, Deploforce, for this very reason. “I’ve seen how inconsistent data structures cascade into partnership disasters. One SaaS company I worked with had their partner data split across three different objects, with duplicate accounts, inconsistent naming conventions, and zero validation rules.”

That meant their partner managers were making decisions based on reports showing partners who didn’t actually exist. Meanwhile, real, high-value partners appeared as ‘inactive,’ and eventually left the program.

There’s Been Admin Turnover

When Salesforce or HubSpot admins leave, institutional knowledge often goes out the door with them. New admins that come in to replace them may not be aware of certain system gaps, let alone that there’s even a connection between your CRM and PRM.

Unknown errors can pile up, and the longer they sit there, the harder they are for you — and the new admin — to untangle.

There Are No Expiration Dates

Marketing teams are goaled based on the qualified leads they bring in. That makes sense: all their work is focused on getting those leads in the door.

That said, if a marketing lead has been lying dormant for over a year and a partner happens to re-engage them, it doesn’t make much sense for marketing to claim that they influenced any resulting deals.

After all, if it weren’t for the partner, that lead could have been sitting in Salesforce or HubSpot for who knows how long.

Brian Wichinski at Cloudian shares,“I’ve been in situations where marketing wants to collect as much data as possible, which is good, but most of the contacts and leads they’ve collected haven’t been doing anything for years.

We’ll go to a partner event, log deals into Channeltivity, and realize there’s already a Salesforce record — it hadn’t been deleted after a full 12 months of no response.”

Some PRMs, like Channeltivity, catch these duplicates. But they can still be a pain to clear out of your CRM. And the more dupes you have in there, the bigger the clearing-out project becomes.

Why Bad CRM Data Hurts Your Partner Program

When sloppy, inaccurate data from your CRM spills over into your PRM, there’s a higher chance that you:

Lose Credibility With Partners

Nothing erodes a partner’s trust faster than when they find out you don’t know your own history with them.

Aamir Qutub at Enterprise Monkey shared that, back when he was at a different SaaS company, he and his team had lined up a meeting with what they thought was a new strategic partner — but they had pitched them six months earlier.

“Turns out, we had completely dropped the ball. They didn’t trust us enough to give us a second chance.”

Incorrect data about revenue-driving activities, like deal registrations or referrals, can harm your reputation, too. Not only does it make you look like you don’t have all your ducks in a row, it can also affect commission calculations and even spark channel conflict.

For Kent MacWilliam at VictorEric Design+Build, having a messy CRM meant every task became an ad hoc project, and important things — like recognizing and rewarding partners — slipped through the cracks. “Thinking back, this wasn’t fair at all to the partners because we didn’t distribute perks, especially discounts and reciprocal business, with much consideration.”

If you’re really invested in a partnership, promos and payouts are things you definitely don’t want to mess with.

Struggle to Motivate Partners

Bad data in your PRM makes it harder to show partners how much progress they’ve made toward your joint goals. And if they’re not quite where they need to be, inaccurate data is not what’s going to motivate them to do better.

Brian explains,“You want to show partners that you can keep them accountable for the revenue they’re driving. If you don’t have accurate data to show them, your asks fall flat.”

Reliable data is what gives you the leverage you need to have honest conversations, set realistic expectations, and keep partners engaged. Without it, partners are left guessing where they stand — or they check out altogether.

Geoff Tucker, founder of Data Ops Group, had a client who suffered significantly from inaccurate partner prioritization based on fundamentally flawed data in HubSpot:

“I discovered they’d been undercounting contributions from key partners by nearly 40% due to data quality issues. They were on the verge of terminating relationships with some of their most valuable partners.”

Slow Your Team Down

Bad data doesn’t just threaten partner relationships; it can impact team budget and productivity, too. For example:

Partner marketing teams might spend time and dollars getting in front of unqualified partners or prospects instead of spending that money on high-ROI campaigns.
Partner team members might invite no-fit prospects to joint partner events, wasting space and budget on people who were never going to buy anyway.
Partner managers may think a peer already has a solid relationship with a prospect, but it’s really just someone who attended one webinar (and left early). They introduce that cold lead to a partner — who quickly realizes the lead is not a fit at all. That partner probably won’t trust that PM to help them out again.
Partner ops folks might track partner activity in Excel or Google Sheets because they don’t trust their own CRM or PRM dashboards. They could’ve been using that time to jazz up the Partner Portal or perfect a QBR deck.

Eventually, this can lead to smaller annual partner budgets, more scrutiny from leadership, and even team retention issues.

How to Clean Up Your CRM Data

If your CRM is in rough shape, don’t panic: clean up is possible. In fact, there are many ways to go about it. Here are a few different strategies people in your shoes have used to get back on track:

Go Scorched Earth

If you really want to be sure you’re starting from a good foundation, you can start from scratch.

Delete all records from 5+ years ago. If those leads or opportunities are meant to come back, they will. With all that old data gone, you can refocus on the records that matter most right now and start thinking about how you want to restructure your CRM data moving forward.

Plus, your system will be running a lot faster without thousands of records bogging your CRM (and its integrations) down.

Put Your CRM on Pause

This one is also hard to do, logistically, but hitting pause on your CRM can give you breathing room to identify the root causes of data issues — and stop the band-aiding cycle.

Adrien Kallel at Remote People, for example, froze all data entry for a few weeks to triage duplicate records. “Sounds dramatic, but necessary. We ran a massive deduplication project using native Salesforce tools plus some custom scripts. It took about 3 weeks to merge 2,400 records.”

By stopping new data from flowing in, they could focus entirely on clean up — and figuring out how to prevent bad data from reappearing in the future. For them, this meant:

Making certain fields required to avoid incomplete data
Adding validation rules to flag errors before they get saved
Creating proper lead routing workflows to make sure partner-sourced opportunities were routed to the right person

This approach may not work for larger companies with tons of people using your CRM and PRM every day. But you could try to do a smaller, shorter version of this with specific objects or record types.

Take a Data Archeology Approach

If a big bang-style clean up isn’t realistic, you might consider what Geoff calls “data archaeology,” which involves mapping every field and property to understand how information flows between systems now (and whether that should change in the future).

With that information on hand, you can start to clean up your CRM in waves.

“I’d tackle active partner relationships first, then historical data. I’d use a combination of HubSpot-native deduplication tools, custom workflows for data validation, and manual verification processes.”

From there, you can start to architect stricter data governance protocols. More on that next.

5 Tips For Keeping Your CRM Clean

A one-time clean up is the first step toward a healthier CRM, but keeping your CRM healthy is not a one-and-done exercise. As Brian puts it:

“Your CRM is like a garden. You have to weed it. Otherwise, those weeds will multiply. It’s something you have to constantly be aware of.”

Here are 5 ways to keep your CRM in check:

1. Governance From the Get-Go

Without rules, every person enters data in a different way. Developing standard operating procedures with the help of other teams can help you get off on the right foot post-clean up.

Aamir suggests making it a multi-team effort: “We set up a cross-functional‘data integrity squad’ with sales, partnerships, and IT. We introduced clear field validation and sunset policies for inactive entries.”

At Remote People, Adrien implemented a ‘two-person rule’ for bulk imports“one person uploads, and another reviews before it goes live.”

To keep all GTM teams accountable, try appointing one or two data stewards who build hygiene reports and review them at your weekly or monthly meetings.

2. Institute a Tiering Process

You don’t treat every lead or partner the same because they’re in your system. You pay special attention to the ones that are most likely to create value. And those are usually the ones that have recently expressed a genuine interest in your company or your product.

Per Brian, “I think we can all agree that requesting a demo or a meeting is more of a tier 1 action. That lead should go straight to a seller or reseller. But if a lead has been dormant for a year or more, ask yourself: How long do you want to track dead things?”

Tiering or prioritizing records (and deleting the ones that don’t matter after a certain point in time) helps you:

Focus time and resources on the highest-value contacts and partners.
Reduce noise in reporting and forecasting.
Avoid channel conflict over stale or dubious leads. Brian warns, “The situation you want to avoid is telling a partner that a deal is unregisterable because it was part of a conference list from 3 years ago. That’s the last time they’ll want to sell for you.”

To start, define what actions push a lead or partner into each tier (meeting booked, recent purchase, engagement within 90 days). Then align your data retention policies accordingly.

3. Lean Into Automation

Most CRM tools have built-in data cleaning workflows that can flag duplicate, missing, or incomplete records. PRMs like Channeltivity have them, too.

Make a point to use those features to the fullest extent so that at least the manual time you spend is actually focused on clean up, not just identifying problem areas.

And if you think you need to buy a third-party tool, make sure you know exactly what your biggest data quality issues are (duplicates, formatting, enrichment) so you’re spending money on something that’s truly a bang for your buck.

4. Set Up Recurring Audits

Even though tools can catch most issues for you, it’s important to do extra checks once in a while. Consider having each partner manager run through a checklist every month to:

Verify all child records are in good shape.
Confirm all the contacts are up to date.
Determine whether partner account/organization and deal registration/opportunity statuses are syncing back and forth between the PRM and CRM appropriately.
Partners haven’t flagged any incorrect or outdated information.

You could even all hop on a call to do it together. Or, to expedite the process, have them build and save reports in your CRM and PRM so that all they need to do is hit refresh and do a quick comparison.

5. Train New Hires

Even the best systems crumble if people don’t know how to use them properly. Make a point to walk them through all of your CRM and PRM best practices during their first few weeks on the job, so they get used to your process.

It’s a good idea to have a list of data standards and governance rules somewhere accessible, and have a process for updating everyone on system changes, not just new hires.

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