The 6 pillars of CRM data quality
How to keep your CRM data clean & reliable.
How to maintain CRM data quality in HubSpot and Salesforce
A CRM only works as well as the data inside it.
Every campaign, workflow, and report depends on records that stay accurate and complete.
When fields go missing or duplicates pop up, you’re sacrificing deals to subpar systems.
Strong data hygiene makes automation, alignment, and forecasting possible (and much quicker.)
Why CRM data quality helps or hurts
The numbers tell the story:
- 53% of top-performing salespeople say they have higher confidence in their CRM data than their peers (LinkedIn State of Sales Report, 2020).
- Personalization remains one of the top tactics for improving email performance (HubSpot, 2024).
- Segmented campaigns can deliver up to 6x higher conversion rates than non-segmented ones (Campaign Monitor, 2023).
High-quality data builds confidence in sales, enables deep personalization in marketing, and directly impacts revenue growth and forecasting accuracy.
The 6 pillars of CRM data quality
- Completeness
How much do you really know about your customers?
Aim for 85–90% field completion across contact and company records.
Fit indicators such as company size, industry, and lifecycle stage should be filled for most leads.
- Uniqueness
Duplicates drain time and trust.
Use native tools or workflows like HubSpot’s duplicate management or Salesforce’s matching rules to keep each record unique and traceable.
→ Learn how to manage duplicates during a HubSpot and Salesforce sync.
- Timeliness
When was this record last updated?
Around 18–25% of B2B contact data becomes outdated every year (ZoomInfo, 2023).
Refresh data at least once a year, or twice if your market moves quickly.
→ Explore our CRM data cleanup guide if you want a solid start to fixing your data quality problems.
- Validity
Skip the purchased lists.
Rely on first-party or permission-based data that complies with GDPR, CCPA, and CAN-SPAM. Invalid or non-compliant data will skew your reporting and escalate your risk for hefty fines.
- Accuracy
Even verified data decays.
We recommend you audit key fields regularly, such as emails, job titles, company names, and regions, and enrich them using trusted sources like Clearbit or Apollo.
- Consistency
Consistency turns data into a shared language.
Define entry rules, train users, and track adoption reports to keep logic uniform across systems and teams.
Where Dirty Data Comes From
- Outdated information: contacts move, titles change, and companies merge.
- Manual entry errors: typos or inconsistent formats slip through without validation.
- Duplicate records: multiple touchpoints fragment a user’s history.
- Inconsistent sources: disconnected tools break naming standards.
- Lack of governance: unclear ownership leads to uneven habits.
- Migrations: poor mapping or prep during HubSpot and Salesforce migrations can corrupt or lose data.
If your CRM data feels unreliable or if you’d like a second opinion on where your systems might be losing data quality or consistency, reach out to us.
We’ll investigate the scope of your concerns and reach out to you with our recommendations as soon as we can.
