CRM data lies quietly. It doesn’t throw errors; it just nudges every report a few degrees off true until decisions get made on numbers nobody would defend if they looked closely. Here are ten checks. Score a point for each one that’s clean. Under seven, your reporting is telling you a story, not the truth.
The ten checks
1. Duplicates. Can the same company appear as several records? If yes, every account-level metric is overstated.
2. Stale open deals. How many open opportunities haven’t been touched in sixty days? These inflate coverage and forecast.
3. Fictional close dates. Are close dates real estimates, or dragged to the end of the quarter on autopilot? Fictional dates make forecasting theatre.
4. Blank required fields. What percentage of key records are missing source, owner, or amount? Blanks silently drop out of segmented reports.
5. Unrouted leads. Is there a queue of leads matched to no owner? That’s leakage you can’t see in a summary.
6. Inconsistent stage definitions. Does “stage 3” mean the same thing to every rep? If not, stage reports are noise.
7. Source attribution gaps. Can you trace a meaningful share of pipeline back to a first source? If a big chunk is “unknown”, your channel numbers are guesses.
8. Manual overrides. How much reporting relies on someone editing a spreadsheet after export? Every manual step is a place for the truth to drift.
9. Orphaned contacts. Contacts attached to no account or deal — invisible to account reporting, quietly padding your database size.
10. Reconciliation gaps. Do marketing’s and sales’ numbers agree? If “leads sent” and “leads received” don’t match, something’s leaking between systems.
What the score means
Nine or ten: your data is decision-grade. Seven to eight: usable, with known soft spots. Below seven: you’re making calls on numbers that wouldn’t survive scrutiny, and the fixes are almost always process, not tooling.
The good news is that data hygiene is one of the most recoverable problems in RevOps — it’s tedious, not hard. A free health check will tell you which of these ten is costing you the most.
Related reading
See cleaning up CRM data without breaking reporting and what closed-loop reporting is.