Interactive guide
Keep Your CRM Data Trustworthy
Your CRM can pass every lifecycle rule and still be wrong. Two records for the same person split their history. A former customer's account still reads Customer two years after they churned. An opt-out is getting sales emails because opt-out and Do Not Call live in different fields nobody reconciled. None of that shows up on a field-population dashboard.
You will build a CRM Data Reliability Plan: identity and duplicates, normalization, consent and DNC, departures, enrichment eligibility, conflict resolution, spend controls, build-versus-buy, and continuous review, using tools you likely already own before it asks you to consider building anything custom. The lab saves your progress in your browser.
Start with a broken answer
What Makes CRM Data Trustworthy?
Chapter 1 of 11 · 8 min
The learning path
Ten policies, each written against a record that actually broke: two spellings of Marcus Webb, a phone field with five formats in use, a customer who opted out, a champion who changed jobs mid-evaluation. The last two chapters decide what you buy rather than build, and what keeps any of it working a year from now.
Audit, identity, and consent
- 01What Makes CRM Data Trustworthy?Reject field-population rate as sufficient proof and name the dimensions a trustworthy population actually needs.8 min · exercise
- 02Run a Baseline Data AuditScope a scan with a severity model and capture the six baseline metrics the rest of the guide improves against.12 min · exercise
- 03Find and Prevent DuplicatesSet match thresholds, an adjudication tier, survivorship rules, and a protected-record check.15 min · exercise
- 04Standardize and Validate RecordsCover manual entry, bulk import, and integration writes with one normalization rule, not three different ones.12 min · exercise
- 05Handle Consent, Opt-Outs, and DNCKeep marketing consent, opt-out, sales DNC, and CS/transactional eligibility independent of each other and of lifecycle.12 min · exercise
Decay, spend, and keeping it working
- 06Handle Job Changes, Departures, and ChurnPreserve history on a departure, route a stale account to review instead of guessing, and reopen a re-engaged record without erasing why it was closed.15 min · exercise
- 07Enrich the Records That MatterDefine eligibility and moment-of-use triggers instead of a blanket nightly refresh, then cap what enrichment is allowed to spend and who signs off on an ambiguous result.14 min · exercise
- 08Resolve Conflicting ValuesSet the overwrite rule for CRM-vs-provider conflicts and block an unsafe merge.12 min · exercise
- 09Choose What to Buy, Configure, Connect, or BuildScore each broken capability against all four acquisition paths before deciding to build anything.12 min · exercise
- 10Establish Continuous Checks and Quarterly AuditsSplit what runs continuously from what runs quarterly, and handle a failed scan safely.10 min · exercise
- 11Capstone: Repair a Broken CRM PopulationRun every seeded condition through the assembled plan at once and validate all 12 checks.14 min · exercise