How to clean your CRM (a weekly routine)
Clean your CRM with a weekly 20-minute sweep: merge duplicate contacts, fix or remove undialable phone numbers and bounced emails, close or revive deals that have not moved in 30 days, and retire tags nobody uses. Small weekly passes beat the giant annual cleanup that never actually happens.
The weekly 20-minute sweep
Same day every week, timer on. The routine matters more than perfection.
- Minutes 1-5: duplicates. Merge them, keeping the record with the richest history. Two cards for one human means missed context on both.
- Minutes 6-10: dead contact data. Numbers that fail to dial, emails that bounced this week. Fix what you can, strip what you cannot, so the bad data stops wasting future you.
- Minutes 11-15: stale deals. Anything with no activity for 30 days gets a decision: close it as lost with a reason, or schedule one honest revival touch. No third option.
- Minutes 16-18: orphans. New leads with no tag, no owner, or no next task. Every record gets a next step or it is not really in your pipeline.
- Minutes 19-20: log the counts. Duplicates found, deals closed, numbers fixed. Watching those numbers shrink week over week is the proof the system works.
Why does dirty CRM data cost real money?
You call numbers that no longer ring. Your emails bounce, which trains inbox providers to distrust your domain. Your pipeline says 12 live deals when 5 are real, so you forecast revenue that never lands and skip the prospecting you actually needed.
Worst of all, you stop trusting the tool. Once you doubt the data, you stop logging to it, which makes the data worse, and within a quarter you are back to memory and sticky notes.
Rules that keep a CRM clean in the first place
Cleaning is the cure. These are the vaccines.
- One intake path: every lead source writes to the CRM the same way, with the same required fields. Duplicates are born when sources multiply.
- Enrich by filling blanks, never overwriting. Automated data should add to what you typed, not stomp on it.
- Every open deal carries a next task with a date. A deal with no next step is already stale; you just have not noticed yet.
- Pick naming conventions for tags and stick to them. "warm-lead", "Warm Lead", and "warmlead" are three tags doing one job badly.
- Archive instead of deleting. Old context answers questions years later; deletion just burns the library.
A CRM you do not trust is just a slow spreadsheet.
Let the team run this for you
Orbit has a janitor on staff. Sam runs a weekly hygiene sweep for duplicates, undialable phone numbers, and stale deals, and hands you the findings as cards you approve, edit, or dismiss. Ivy keeps new records complete by enriching leads with email, socials, and background, filling blanks only and never overwriting what you wrote. The 20-minute sweep becomes a 5-minute review.
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Frequently asked questions
How often should you clean your CRM?+
Do a 20-minute sweep weekly for duplicates, dead contact data, and stale deals, plus a deeper quarterly pass for tags, fields, and pipeline stages. Weekly is the magic interval: problems stay small enough to fix in minutes, and the habit actually survives.
What counts as a stale deal?+
A common standard is any deal with no activity for 30 days: no call, email, note, or stage change. Stale deals deserve a decision, not pity. Either close them as lost with an honest reason or schedule one real revival touch with a date on it.
Should you delete or archive old contacts?+
Archive. Deleting destroys history you will want later, like what was quoted, who introduced whom, and why the deal died. Archiving keeps records out of your active views and searches while preserving the story for the day that contact comes back to life.
What causes duplicate contacts in a CRM?+
Multiple intake paths writing independently: a web form, a CSV import, a manual entry after a call, and a saved LinkedIn profile can each create the same person. Funnel every source through one intake flow with matching rules, and merge weekly so survivors stay rare.
How do you keep phone numbers and emails usable?+
Validate at entry, then act on failures fast: when a call hits a dead number or an email bounces, fix or strip the data that same week. Stale contact data compounds quietly, and bounced emails hurt your sender reputation on every future send.
Let the janitor do the sweeping
Sam flags duplicates, dead numbers, and stale deals every week. You approve the fixes in minutes. Free plan, no credit card.
Free forever plan. No credit card. No spam.