Either you know someone or are someone who lets the CRM get bad. But let's be honest, it was probably a team effort. I personally have been the person who let the CRM get bad. I understand how it happens. I have also been the person cleaning up said CRM spending hours filtering through stale leads, broken companies, and duplicate contacts. 

As someone who has been on both sides, I understand that one missed update easily becomes two, two becomes ten, ten becomes "we don't really trust the CRM data" which becomes "so why are we even using it."

The CRM hygiene audit SOP is the least glamorous thing in this playbook and probably the most important. Thirty minutes, every Monday morning, before the week gets away from you. You're looking for seven things: deals with no owner, deals with stale close dates, deals missing a next step, deals with no value recorded, duplicate contacts, closed-lost deals with no reason recorded, and contacts not attached to a company.

That's it. Seven checks. Thirty minutes. Every week.

The reason this matters beyond the obvious is that everything downstream depends on it. Your pipeline review is only useful if the pipeline data is accurate. Your forecast is only trustworthy if the deal stages reflect reality. Your board reporting is only credible if someone has been keeping the source data clean.

CRM hygiene is infrastructure. Nobody claps for infrastructure until it breaks.