Data hygiene
Boost GTM growth with 6 data hygiene habits that keep your CRM clean, accurate, and driving revenue (without costly, end-of-quarter cleanups!)
GTM teams can accelerate growth with these data hygiene habits
Your CRM is either your revenue engine or your biggest liability.
And the difference? Habits.
High-growth GTM teams don’t “spring clean” their database twice a year.
They build habits that make data hygiene the rule, not the exception.
So, what is data hygiene?
Data hygiene simply refers to well-kept, clean and quality data. It involves fixing the bad data, filling the gaps, and killing the junk so your GTM team can actually trust the numbers.
What numbers exactly? You may ask.
For marketing: cost per lead, email deliverability, conversion rate, and campaign ROI.
When targeting is off, ad spend rises while qualified leads drop.Email lists bloat with junk addresses, tanking open and click-through rates.Without accurate lead-to-revenue tracking, your attribution model turns into guesswork.
For sales - the connect rate, opportunity creation, win rate, and quota attainment.
Reps might call dead numbers, email the wrong contacts, or collide on accounts because ownership isn’t clear.
For operations: system uptime, sync accuracy, and reporting reliability.
Integrations might fail more often, duplicates can trigger cascading errors, and dashboards contradict each other. That’s not going to impress any investor.
The sentiment spreads fast: we can’t trust the system, and when the very system meant to drive revenue forward becomes the bottleneck, every GTM motion slows to a crawl.
6 high-value data hygiene habits
1. Lock the front door
Most “bad data” problems aren’t the result of negligence, they’re the end result of a system without rules.
You need to standardize how data gets entered across every team and tool. Field formats, naming conventions, picklists - make them non-negotiable.
That way, when HubSpot ↔ Salesforce syncs, they’re speaking the same language.
2. Set cheap guardrails
Big cleanups are expensive. Cheap prevention isn’t.
Turn on duplicate detection in Salesforce and disable auto-company creation in HubSpot.
Go a step further and enforce data validation, (aka) make key fields mandatory before a record can be saved.
3. Build it into the GTM motion
If hygiene lives on a to-do list, it dies on a to-do list.
Drop duplicate reports, missing field checks, and completeness audits into your regular GTM cadence. Do it weekly. Do it monthly. Just do it. Assign a data owner with the authority to enforce standards and back them when they call out bad inputs.
4. Protect the single version of the truth
Your CRM is only as valuable as the trust people put in it. If leadership stops believing the numbers, they start building their own shadow spreadsheets, and that’s when the whole system collapses.
Keep one clean, consistent source of truth and guard it like its pipeline itself.
The payoff of investing in data hygiene
When your CRM is clean, forecasts stop lying to you. The numbers you present to the board actually hold up in the real world, and your teams rarely fall back on excuses, and end-of-quarter fire drills.
With that kind of accuracy, your teams can focus on what matters - targeting the right accounts, and moving the needle with precision.
If you want that level of clarity and control without spending months untangling the mess, read our HubSpot + Salesforce Data Quality & Deduplication article to stop data quality issues at the door.
Or skip straight to the fix - book a RevBlack Demo and we’ll show you how to turn your CRM into a precision revenue engine that marketing, sales, and ops can trust.
