Sealing CRM Cracks:How to Prevent Bad Data From Slipping into the Lead Cycle
There's nothing more valuable to a business than a new lead. They can be costly to acquire and don't always convert—but when nurtured properly, leads can drive long-term business growth and profitability.
As part of a go-to-market team, it's your job to help those leads travel smoothly through the sales and marketing funnel.
But bad data can infiltrate your CRM through the smallest openings—and the consequences of poor data quality are impossible to ignore. . Thirty-one percent of CRM professionals reported at least 20 percent annual revenue loss due to poor-quality data.
You know the steps of lead generation, from capture to conversion—but are you prepared to handle potential cracks?
In the infographic below, we've mapped the lead journey and exposed the most common cracks where bad data sneaks in. Use it to spot vulnerabilities and seal them before your CRM is corrupted.
Weak Point
Form Fill Errors
Not every name that enters your database is a quality lead. Simple form-fill errors (like typos) open the door for invalid contacts, affecting your outreach and frustrating sales teams with false leads. In more severe cases, forms might be sabotaged by cybercriminals or bots, causing major security compromises and brand damage.
Seal the cracks
Stop bad contacts before they enter your CRM by using proactive verification at the point of lead capture. CAPTCHA checks and honeypots (invisible fields that only bots can see) help filter out fake submissions. For added protection, switch from free-text inputs on forms to predefined picklists to reduce data entry errors. No matter which protection method you use, validate your data every 3–6 months—and after major lead generation campaigns—to keep your data clean in the long term.
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Validity BriteVerify provides real-time contact validation to prevent form-fill errors and thwart bad actors before they enter your system.
Weak Point
Purchased lists
When contacts come from third-party sources, dirty data can easily infiltrate your CRM. Purchased lists might contain incomplete, incorrect, or even fake contacts.
Seal the cracks
If you're working with purchased lists, it's crucial to invest in a contact validation solution to ensure the data entering your CRM is legitimate and actionable. In the future, we recommend steering away from third-party list purchases and relying on zero-party data capture.
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This is another area where Validity BriteVerify can help. While the real-time validation mentioned above is helpful, users can also can perform bulk validation on larger data sets and remove any invalid contacts before adding them to a database.
Weak Point
Manual Data Imports
Manually importing new records can come with costly mistakes. Before gearing up for a large list upload, ask yourself:
- Have you already imported this contact before?
- Do you have all of the information needed for all CRM fields?
- Are your fields formatted properly for your CRM?
A quick slip in the import process can lead to duplicate records, incomplete data, and unstandardized data, all of which make effective sales outreach that much harder.
Seal the cracks
Staying on top of imports can feel overwhelming—but developing a go-to import template can be a lifesaver. It takes some work, but defining and standardizing your import process will bring much-needed consistency across teams working with data. For best results, create a template that matches the destination fields in your CRM while keeping the end user and use case in mind.
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Validity DemandTools can seal cracks in this process by automate ongoing imports. The Import module eliminates import prep steps while maintaining standardization across all incoming records. It also has built-in duplicate-matching and prevention measures, so your data is ready to go the moment it enters Salesforce.
Weak Point
Data decay
The moment data enters your CRM, it starts to decay. Things change!
- People change jobs
- People update contact information
- People join and leave companies
- Companies merge with others
That's why it's crucial to stay on top of your regular data maintenance processes.
Seal the cracks
Retaining old, outdated records can violate data privacy laws, slow down processing speeds, and increase CRM storage costs, not to mention adding friction to regular sales and marketing outreach. The easiest fix is to automate parts of your data cleansing process to help keep your data fresh.
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With Validity DemandTools, you can run cleaning jobs in the background for ultimate data management automation. Using the Delete module, users can remove old records and even run automated delete scenarios. Deleted something you shouldn't have? Simply undelete records in the Salesforce recycle bin to recover the information.
Weak Point
CRM Integrations
Chances are you have multiple tools in your tech stack that deal with CRM data. For these relationships to work, you'll need airtight CRM integrations. Without them, your data can end up in siloes, or worse, all in one place, completely unstandardized.
Seal the cracks
CRMs often pull data from multiple sources via integrations, like marketing platforms, ESPs, and support tools. A standardized import process ensures that data is mapped correctly between systems, field names and structures align, and automated syncing or updates won’t break workflows or create data mismatches.
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With the DemandTools Match module, you can easily identify records that exist in both Salesforce and other systems, and extract information from the matching records. The Convert module goes a step further by discovering leads that match existing accounts and giving you the option to link them. Get your tools on the same page and talking to each other!
Full speed ahead!
Data quality issues can be sneaky—so stay vigilant throughout the entire lead cycle to ensure your leads cross the finish line correctly.
The best place to start is by Assessing your data to find the problem areas. From there, you can build a plan of action to smooth out your path. All-in-one data management tools like Validity DemandTools can help by empowering organizations to clean and and maintain CRM records in less time.
Want to see DemandTools in action? Get a free demo today and learn how you can efficiently and accurately manage your data.