Bad data isn’t just inconvenient but; it’s a silent killer of businesses. Companies in the U.S. lose an estimated $3.1 trillion per year because of bad data. That is unbelievable in costs tied to misaligned opportunities, failed outreach, and wasted resources.

It gets worse. Almost 30% of CRM data goes bad each year, due to hiring and firing, bad contact details, or changing roles. The data in your database is decaying every day, at a severe cost to the efficacy of every sales and marketing effort and outreach.

And even worse, sales reps are spending, on average, 17% of their time, or 1 day per week (basically a full workday), updating and inputting CRM systems. That’s valuable time wasted getting trapped into fighting with CRM systems instead of leading great conversations and closing deals.

When you factor in that businesses lose an average of 12% of revenue because of bad data, it becomes clear: data cleaning is no longer a nice-to-have; it’s imperative.

Detections like outdated phone numbers, revoked records, and incomplete profiles affect your SMS delivery, email marketing, sales calls, and outreach campaigns.

In this guide you will learn about 8 best practices to clean up your CRM, improve the quality of your data and protect your business results.

Why is CRM Data Cleaning Essential for Business Success?

Clean CRM data is the basis of every successful marketing, sales, and customer support initiative. If you repeatedly send outreach with outdated, duplicate, or incorrect information in your database, you fail to make as many opportunities, spend too many resources, and deliver a poor customer experience.

Here are a few reasons why CRM data cleaning is essential to business success:

• Increases Campaign Validity: Valid contact information ensures that your SMS and cold calling campaigns are reaching real, active customers.
• Increases Sales Team Focus: Clean data allows sales teams to focus on qualified leads instead of dead ends.
• Lowers Compliance Exposure: Clean data allows users to remove any numbers that may be listed on the DNC list, and even validate the different types of phones to help avoid painful violations to organizations.
• Increases Customer Experience: Accurate information provides a bridge to more personalized and timely communication.
• Improves Data Decision-Quality: Clean, and complete data can deliver reliable reports and resulting insights.

How to Know When CRM Data Cleaning Is Needed (Key Signs to Watch For)

Not sure if it’s time to clean your CRM?  If any of the signs below sound familiar, then your data may be preventing your business from succeeding.  These signs shouldn’t be ignored, as they can lead to poor performance on your campaigns, frustrated teams, and lost revenue.

Here are some of the main signs it’s time to clean data in your CRM:

1. High Bounce Rate on SMS or Email/Cold Outreach campaigns

   When you are not reaching your intended recipients, it usually means you have invalid or outdated contact numbers and emails in your CRM.

2. Duplicate Records Often

   You see the same contact multiple times, but with different information?  You are petrifying your sales and support teams, while treating the customer with no clarity in their experience.

3. Missing or Incomplete Contact Details

   You have missing fields, no phone numbers, or unverified data. This can hurt your ability to segment and grow your personalized campaigns.

4. Inconsistent Data Formatting

   When your phone numbers or names are formatted differently, it can reduce your ability to automate or report effectively.

5. Frequent Complaints or Unsubscribe Rates

   If your outdated or incorrect messaging is harming your communication, it can cost you the customers faith and trust.

6. You are not reaching SMS contacts properly

   Due to not having your data valid, you may be unknowingly messaging landline numbers or numbers on a DNC list.

Here are 8 proven CRM data cleaning best practices to improve accuracy, boost outreach performance, and stay compliant:

1. Audit Your CRM for Inaccurate and Incomplete Data

Before you can fix anything, you need to know what’s broken. Start with a full audit of your CRM to identify the most common data issues that affect performance and accuracy.

Here’s what to look for during your audit:

• Duplicate records that confuse your sales team and inflate your contact count
• Blank or incomplete fields like missing phone numbers, emails, or names
• Outdated phone numbers that lead to failed SMS delivery or wrong outreach
• Invalid formats that make automation and segmentation difficult

To make the process easier, consider using phone number validation tools or CRM data cleaning services that automate these checks. For more detailed phone validation, services like Landline Remover can help identify mobile, landline, VoIP, and even DNC-listed numbers.

2. Validate Phone Numbers with Data Verification Tools

Valid phone numbers are critical to any SMS marketing or outreach campaign. If your CRM contains landlines, VoIP numbers, or contacts in the Do Not Call registry, your messages can’t be delivered. You can also get into trouble legally, and unnecessarily.

That’s why validating phone numbers plays an important role in your overalldata cleansing for CRM process.

The goal is simple:

✔ To find out which numbers are mobile and are capable of receiving texts

✔ To identify or remove all landlines, VoIP numbers, and risky contacts

✔ To verify DNC status to comply with TCPA regulations

By using Landline Remover API services with CRM tools, it can be quick and easy. These services will scan your list of contacts and give you meaningful information like: phone type, carrier, and compliance risk. This will help you avoid message failures, wasting your credits, and trouble with the law. Validating phone numbers ensures that your CRM is filled with contacts you can actually contact. It can improve deliverability, increase engagement, and protect your brand.

3. Standardize Data Entry Formats

Inconsistent data entry creates confusion and slows automation that ultimately affects your reporting accuracy. If the information in your CRM is being recorded in a standard way, you know every contact record has a standardized manner and organized entry which makes them easily manageable.

The first thing to do is to dictate formatting rules for your organization, and typically you will want to do this for the most common fields that will be affected:

• Phone numbers should be in E.164 format (in other words +1 555 123 4567 rather than 5551234567 or (555) 123-4567)
• Names for every contact (for example first letter capitalized, no all caps)
• Email addresses (proper syntax, domain validates)
• Address fields (Street, city, zip in the order you expect but don’t expect more standardization than this)

If your data is going to be consistently formatted it will result in better segmentation, effective automation pre- and post- campaign, and better accuracy in your campaign reporting.

Most CRM systems will allow you to dictate field validation rules, drop down menus and/or input masks to assist your CRM users to maintain formatted fields. In addition, you can add in data cleaning tools that assist by automatically correcting field formatting issues, and catching event errors in real time.

Standardization is always an easy, and important part of a good CRM data cleaning. A standardization approach keeps your database clean, organized and ready for action.

4. Remove Duplicates and Merge Records

Cleaning duplicates will help you find better, more feasible campaign efficiencies, present your sales team a more clear view of each contact in their pipeline and guarantee that your team is working with accurate data.

Ongoing data cleaning of your CRM will require deduction removal. Deduplication is identifying which records are the same person, but have the same name, email, or phone number and are saved in different places.

Here are some helps and tips to ensure you do this correctly:

• Search for a unique identifier instead of their name or title (email or phone number)
• Merge records separately, so that you don’t lose any additional data.
• Make some decisions around rules – which will be easier to follow if you continue to make duplicates.

Most well-known and widely used CRMs provide the tools to remove duplicates and merge records (HubSpot, Salesforce, Zoho, etc.). You can also use third-party options for CRM data cleaning or deduplication, which will automate this process at scale.

5. Identify and Flag Litigator or High-Risk Numbers

Not all phone numbers are equal to message. Some phone numbers may be tied to professional litigators that actively look for businesses that are in violation of communication laws – particularly SMS marketing. Text these numbers, and you will not only be risking the chance of a lawsuit, but also, a pretty hefty fine.

This is why identifying and flagging high-risk numbers is also going to be part of the data cleaning process in your CRM. By screening your contact list, this will help reduce legal exposure while protecting your business from unwanted claims.

You should also be using a phone number validation tool that has a litigator scrub functionality. There are many tools to remove landlines or similar that will allow you to see what numbers are flagged as high risk, VoIP, or known litigators.

Doing this simple extra step increases deliverability, decreases legal risk, and reduces reputational risk to your company. It helps continue to improve SMS messaging deliveries, while also keeping your brand protected.

6. Segment and Clean Data Based on Use Case

Not every team uses CRM data the same way. Sales, marketing, and support all rely on different types of contact information to do their jobs effectively. That’s why cleaning and organizing data based on its purpose is so important.

For example, your sales team may need accurate phone numbers and lead source details, while your marketing team depends on location, preferences, and engagement history. Your support team might prioritize customer status and case history.

• To keep things organized and accurate
• Build cleaning rules specific to each team’s needs
• Tag contacts by source, stage, or department
• Segment lists to avoid overlapping or irrelevant outreach

This approach ensures that each team works with data that’s clean, relevant, and ready for action. It also helps prevent confusion and errors, which often happen when everyone uses the same contact records without proper segmentation.

By aligning data cleaning with your use cases, you get better results across your entire business and make your CRM much easier to manage.

7. Automate Data Cleaning Workflows

Data cleaning by hand is a slow and sometimes unreliable process. Automation can help you have clean, reliable, and valuable CRM data at your disposal without you having to do anything.

By leveraging automated workflows, webhooks, or APIs, you can perform real-time to validate and clean the data as it enters your CRM. Reducing errors at the source and ensuring that your CRM is always up to date doesn’t have to mean manual checking all the time.

For example:

• Automatically format phone/website/email address as they are entered
• Trigger deduplication rules when importing new Contacts
• Use a Phone number validation tool such as Landline Remover or others that integrate with most CRMs making it a breeze

Automated data cleaning solutions save time for your staff, improve campaign performance, and help make sure your CRM is in peak condition 24/7.

8. Schedule Regular CRM Data Clean Up Cycles

Cleaning your data once is not enough. Regularly cleaning your data is vital to a reliable CRM.  As a best practice, regularly review your CRM monthly or quarterly to identify issues such as outdated contacts, duplicate contacts, or unauthorized use of your CRM phone numbers. Define a process and assign team members to the process or you could always utilize a CRM data cleaning service if your team has limited time or resources.

Conclusion:

Maintaining your CRM database is important now more than ever. If your company relies on data accuracy to be able to grow, cleaning your CRM is vital.  These 8 best practices will help you remove garbage data, improve message deliverability, stay compliant, and make better decisions based on trustworthy insights.

From validating phone numbers and automating workflows, CRM data cleaning increases the accuracy of your outreach and the effectiveness of your campaigns.

Start simplifying your crm data clean-up with tools like LandlineRemover to increase ROI and connect with customers more efficiently.