Keep a CRM database clean, month after month
A clean database is not one with no problems; it is one where the same six checks run every month and the fixes are routine. Duplicates merged, sources filled, stages honest, owners assigned, dead addresses suppressed, values standardised. This article gives the monthly routine, the thresholds that tell you when to act, the sunset rule for people who never engage, and how MarqIQ runs the checks for you. For your own findings, open the Data Audit.
The six monthly checks
| Check | Act when | The fix |
|---|---|---|
| Duplicates | More than 2% of people appear twice | Merge by email; then fix the form or import that creates them |
| Source filled | More than 10% of new records have no source | Require the source at every entry point; backfill from first-touch data |
| Stage honest | Any stage moved backwards, or two fields play lifecycle | One field, forward only, set by rules — see Structure your lifecycle stages |
| Owner assigned | More than 5% of MQLs have no owner after a day | Routing rule plus a daily unowned report |
| Reachable | Hard bounces above 1% of a send, or unsubscribes above 0.5% | Suppress bounces; run the sunset series; stop importing lists |
| Values standard | One field holds more than five spellings of one thing | Standardise countries, states, job titles; a picklist where free text was |
The sunset rule: who to stop emailing, and when to delete
- No open or click in 6 months: move to the win-back series (three emails over two weeks).
- Still silent after the series: suppress from marketing email. Keep the record — they may return through a form, and sales history has value.
- Hard bounced twice, or unsubscribed: suppress at once; never re-add through an import.
- Delete only what you must: personal data you have no basis to hold (a GDPR request, a test entry, a competitor). Deleting quiet people erases the attribution history every report rests on. MarqIQ’s erasure screen handles the requests you do have to honour.
Stop the problems at the door
- Forms: required business email, hidden source fields, validation on country and phone.
- Imports: a template with the source column filled, run through dedupe before it lands.
- Integrations: one system owns each field; the others read it. Two writers is how a source gets overwritten.
- Free text: picklists for industry, country, job level. Free text is where the fifteen spellings come from.
How MarqIQ runs the checks
The Data Audit runs every check above on every sync and ranks what to fix first, with the records behind each finding one click away. Duplicate detection finds the same person under different addresses, within and across tools. The Suggested Plan turns the findings into a quarter plan of what to fix. One fix can be made as a change set today: filling empty first-touch fields in HubSpot and Marketo, shown record by record, approved by a workspace admin, and undoable for 30 days. MarqIQ does not merge records. Standardised values are written from Normalization on Enterprise and Partner, or on a 7-day feature trial, with no approval step and no undo. Ask “what should we clean up first” or “how many contacts have no source” for your own numbers.
Next steps
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