Data Hygiene
Data hygiene is the ongoing practice of keeping business data, especially CRM and marketing records, accurate, complete, consistent and free of duplicates.
Also called: CRM hygiene, CRM cleanup, data decay
Why it matters
B2B data goes out of date constantly, a process often called data decay: people change jobs, companies are acquired, emails stop working and titles change. Poor hygiene breaks lead routing, inflates bounce rates, skews reports and wastes sales time on contacts who have left. Clean data makes every automated workflow and every report more trustworthy.
Good hygiene combines rules at the point of entry, such as required fields, standard formats and duplicate checks, with regular cleanup: deduplication, verification of emails, re-enrichment of stale records and removal of contacts who have left. Assigning a clear owner for data quality, often in RevOps, keeps it from being nobody's job.
Example
A RevOps manager finds that a quarter of the contacts in the CRM have not been updated in two years. She merges duplicate company records, verifies the remaining emails, re-enriches job titles, and marks contacts who changed jobs so their accounts can be reassigned. She then adds a required-field rule to new lead forms.
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