A truly “tamed” CRM doesn’t just look neat — it runs smooth, stays accurate, and doesn’t make you swear under your breath. But here’s the catch: taming a CRM isn’t one heroic click. It’s a habit.
This post is your first step. We’re tackling the quick‑impact clean‑up jobs that instantly make your CRM more usable: deleting obvious junk, merging duplicates, and closing zombie deals. These won’t solve everything — but they’ll give you momentum.
Once you’ve nailed these, you can move on to the bigger beasts: stopping bad data at the source, enforcing naming rules, building automations, and actually getting your team to use the system the same way.
Think of it like tidying the kitchen before you start deep‑cleaning the house — faster, easier, and oddly satisfying.
Kill the “Test Test” and “asdf asdf” crowd.
Purge bounced emails.
Unsubscribes? Only if marketing already stores them elsewhere — avoid legal nightmares.
Find fast: search “test,” “asdf,” “zzz”; filter by Bounced; run “last activity date” > 1 year.
Tradeoff: delete too aggressively and you’ll nuke useful history.
Risk: keep junk and your reporting becomes fiction.
Same person, three records. Fix it.
“Jon” vs. “John,” “Acme Co” vs. “Acme Company.”
Same email, different owners — clean it.
Find fast: use CRM’s duplicate detection; sort alphabetically; export to Excel for email matching.
Reassign anything owned by inactive users — ghost‑town leads help no one.
Tradeoff: merging can overwrite fields you need.
Risk: leave them and sales calls the same lead twice.
No activity in 90+ days = dead.
Deals frozen in one stage forever.
Pipeline with no owner.
Find fast: filter by last activity or last modified; dashboard “Oldest Open Deals.”
If not ready to close, shove them into a “Revisit Later” stage.
Tradeoff: closing too soon might cost late‑stage deals.
Risk: leaving them means a bloated, fake pipeline.
Do this clean‑up regularly — weekly for high‑volume data, monthly if your CRM is quieter.
Consistency makes future audits painless.
We’ll run the purge, merge the clones, bury the zombies, and lock the doors so the mess doesn’t come back.
Your CRM will stop making you cry.
You’ll get all the credit without touching a single “delete” button.
Cleaning your CRM feels great — until the junk starts creeping back in.
Part 2 of our Taming Your CRM series will cover:
How to block useless records at the door.
Field rules that actually stick.
Automation that enforces good habits without nagging your team.
Because prevention beats another weekend with your head buried in a spreadsheet.