How we clean the crm before we send a single email

Hey there,

Matteo here from Kinetyca.

We open a lot of CRMs. Almost every time, the same sentence arrives first, usually in the last five minutes of a call, usually with a small laugh attached.

"It is relatively clean, right?"

It is never said defensively, and nobody has misled us. The person saying it genuinely does not know, because nothing in a CRM breaks loudly. It just quietly stops being worth trusting, and you find out on the day you need a number you can defend.

01What we actually find

Half the records in one system, half in a spreadsheet someone still updates by hand, and the two disagree about which is current.

The same company sitting in there several times over, once for each subsidiary, so any count anyone runs is wrong before it starts.

Thousands of records labelled leads that were never leads. They were names on a list somebody imported two years ago.

And custom fields nobody has written to since the person who created them left.

None of that looks like a problem on a Tuesday. It looks like a problem the first time someone asks how many companies of a given size you have, or what your stage to stage conversion actually is, and nobody can give a straight answer.

02The order we build in

This is the sequence we run before a client sends anything. It works the same on HubSpot, Attio or anything else, because none of it is a feature. It is a set of decisions.

• Decide what a record is allowed to be. A prospect is not a lead. Prospects belong in the list you are working. Only the person who raises a hand gets written to the CRM, and into Slack so sales can act that day. This one rule prevents most of the mess below.
• Stamp the date a record enters each stage. Pick the stage to stage rates you will report on, then make sure the dates exist to calculate them. Without those timestamps you can never measure how long anything takes, and no cleanup afterwards gets that history back.
• Qualify and score before you import, not after. Research the company, check it against the ICP, score it A, B or C, and work A and B. This is the one that changes the most. Cleanup gets treated as a pass over what is already in there. It is far cheaper as a gate on what goes in.
• Fix duplicates and hierarchy together. Dedupe on domain rather than company name, then fix the parenting. Find the right parent for each subsidiary, recheck the ones already linked, and confirm the parent exists at all.
• Audit the fields nobody fills in. List every custom field and when it was last written to, then backfill it or delete it. An empty field is worse than no field, because someone will eventually filter on it and believe the answer.

03Why it has to happen first

This is the part that is easy to argue with and expensive to get wrong.

Outbound into a CRM you have not cleaned still produces activity. Emails go out, replies come back, records get touched. What it does not produce is anything you can report on. You cannot tell a stage that converts badly from a stage that is simply recorded badly, and when the cleanup eventually happens, every report built on those weeks gets rebuilt with it.

So the work does not disappear if you skip it. It moves somewhere worse, where it costs more and you have lost the history in the meantime.

04Where this actually matters

Cold outbound rarely needs to touch your CRM at all, and these two get conflated more than they should. If you are sending to a cold list you bought or built this month, most of the above matters far less.

Where it matters is when the list is one you already own. Your existing customers. Old opportunities that went quiet. The export somebody made two years ago and never looked at again. That is when your CRM is the list, and everything above sits upstream of whether the campaign works at all.

05Before you send anything

We run this for every client before a single email goes out. It is usually the least glamorous month of the engagement, and the one that decides what every number after it is worth.

I am curious where you sit. Of the five above, which one would your CRM fail today? Hit reply and tell me, I read every one.

PS. Want to know what is actually in your CRM? Book a call and we will show you