Most CRM cleanups fail for the same reason: someone tries to fix everything in one pass, runs out of momentum in week two, and the instance drifts back to where it started within a quarter. This is the sequence we run instead — thirty days, four phases, each one locking in before the next starts.
Reports built on bad data just make bad data easier to see faster. Before touching a single dashboard, we fix lifecycle stage consistency and lead source attribution at the record level.
A CRM cleanup that starts with dashboards is treating the symptom. Start with the record, and the dashboards mostly fix themselves.
Manual hygiene doesn't survive contact with a busy sales team. We put validation rules and workflow-based enforcement in place so the same mess can't quietly reaccumulate — required-field validation on deal stage changes, duplicate-prevention rules on contact creation.
The sprint ends with a named data owner, a monthly hygiene checklist, and a dashboard that tracks the handful of hygiene metrics that predict decay before it becomes a rebuild.