A CRM degrades a little every week. This playbook is the repeatable routine that keeps routing, scoring, and reporting honest.

What this isA repeatable playbook to dedupe and standardize your CRM so reporting and routing stop breaking.

You give itAccess to your CRM and a sample export.

You get backFormat standards, dedupe and merge rules, guardrails, and a monthly cadence with an owner.

The steps

  1. Audit: pull a sample and measure the damage. Count duplicates, blank critical fields, and inconsistent values. You cannot fix what you have not sized.
  2. Standardize formats: pick one format for country, state, phone, and job-title grouping, and enforce it with picklists instead of free text.
  3. Set dedupe rules: define what makes two records a duplicate (email, or name plus company) and which record wins a merge. Write it down.
  4. Merge carefully: merge in batches, preserve activity history, and never auto-merge across different companies.
  5. Enrich the gaps: fill missing critical fields from a trusted source, not guesses, and only the fields routing and scoring need.
  6. Automate the guardrails: required fields on entry, validation rules, and a dedupe check at create time so the same mess does not return.
  7. Set a cadence and an owner: a monthly review with one accountable person. Hygiene without an owner decays.

Template to start from

Start a one-page standard: the canonical format for each key field, the dedupe and merge rules, and the monthly review owner. Everything else follows from that page.