Overheard my coworker on a conference call about our CRM data and it flipped my thinking

I was against spending time cleaning up old leads in our system. Figured it was busywork that didnt matter. Then I heard my coworker Mark say on a call that he found 40 duplicate contacts just from last month alone. He said the sales team kept sending emails to dead addresses and blamed the system. That hit me because Ive been frustrated with low open rates for months. I went back and looked at my own lists and found 12 entries I made twice just from typing fast. It made me realize the mess is on us not the software. Has anyone else found that cleaning their own data fixed bigger problems than they expected?

2 comments

2 Comments

jamie9401mo agoMost Upvoted

Our CRM had over 300 contacts with "test" in the name from when people were just clicking around. Nobody ever bothered to delete them so they just sat there for years dragging down every report we ran. I spent a Saturday filtering through and nuking those along with old interns who left three jobs ago. The next month our email deliverability jumped 22 percent and the sales team stopped complaining about bounced messages. Sometimes the boring cleanup work is what actually moves the needle.

lilya761mo ago

Honestly I gotta push back a bit here. Cleaning out test contacts is fine and probably needed, but I think you're giving that single Saturday way too much credit for the 22 percent jump. Email deliverability is a whole system thing, like how warm your sending domains are, bounce rates from recent campaigns, your overall reputation with ISPs. Nuking old contacts that had been sitting dead for years wouldn't magically fix deliverability overnight unless your list was completely rotten. Plus if your sales team was complaining about bounces from those interns who left three jobs ago then they were probably emailing garbage addresses anyway. Feels like the big win was finally making them stop slacking on list hygiene more than the actual cleanup itself.