Dirty Data Is Expensive
There is a rule in data management called the 1-10-100 rule. It costs £1 to verify a record when it enters your CRM. It costs £10 to clean it later. And it costs £100 - in wasted rep time, lost deals, and broken reporting - if you do nothing at all.
Most teams are firmly in the £100 category. Emails bouncing at 10%+. Reps calling people who left the company months ago. Territory reports that show three variations of the same company name. Forecasts built on contacts that no longer exist. This is not an admin problem. It is a revenue problem, and the cost of dirty data compounds every month you wait.
What We Clean
We run five operations across your entire database - HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, or any CRM that exports to CSV.
Deduplication
We identify and merge duplicate contacts and companies using fuzzy matching. "John Smith at IBM" and "J. Smith at International Business Machines" get resolved to a single, correct record. We determine which version has the best data and merge accordingly.
Data standardisation
Company names, job titles, addresses, and country codes get normalised to a single format. No more "USA", "U.S.A.", "United States", and "US" breaking your territory routing and segment reports.
Validation
Every email address gets verified via SMTP ping - not just a syntax check, but actual deliverability confirmation. Phone numbers get format-checked. Company status gets verified against Companies House: active, dissolved, or dormant.
Enrichment
Where records are incomplete, we append missing fields: direct dial numbers, LinkedIn profile URLs, company headcount, revenue bands, tech stack data. We pull from 16 sources per record.
Purging
Dissolved companies, retired contacts, hard bounces, and records with no legitimate interest basis get flagged for deletion. Holding onto dead data is not just useless - under UK GDPR, it is a storage limitation violation.
Our Process
- Ingest. You export your CRM data. We provide instructions for HubSpot, Salesforce, or CSV. No admin access required.
- Profile. We run automated data quality scoring across every field - completeness, accuracy, formatting consistency, duplicate density, and bounce rates. This gives us a baseline.
- Clean. Deduplication, standardisation, validation, and enrichment run in sequence. Automated tools handle the bulk; human reviewers handle edge cases and high-value records where judgement is required.
- Review. A QA pass catches anything the automation missed. Records with conflicting data get flagged for your input rather than resolved by assumption.
- Deliver. You receive a CRM-ready import file with a full change log showing every modification made. Nothing changes in your CRM until you import it.
Timeline: 5-7 business days for up to 10,000 records. Larger datasets scoped on the call.
What You Get
- Clean, CRM-ready import file - formatted for direct import into your CRM
- Change log - every modification documented (duplicates merged, fields standardised, records purged)
- Data quality score - before vs. after comparison across all key fields
- Recommendations - what to do next to prevent the data from decaying again
Not sure where your data stands? Start with a CRM Quality Audit to get the full picture before committing to a cleanup.
Book a scoping call - we will assess your CRM data situation and scope the cleanup in a 15-minute conversation.
Before and After
This is what a typical cleanup looks like for a UK B2B scale-up with 12,000 records:
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Total records | 12,400 | 9,800 unique |
| Duplicates | 2,100 (17%) | 0 |
| Valid email | 66% | 97% |
| Bounced email | 18% | 0% |
| Country format variations | 5 | 1 standardised |
| Missing phone number | 71% | 34% |
| Companies House verified | 0% | 100% |
The record count goes down because duplicates and dead records are removed. The quality of every remaining record goes up.
GDPR and Compliance
Every cleanup includes compliance screening as standard:
- TPS/CTPS screening - telephone numbers checked against the UK preference registers
- Lawful basis review - records without a documented legitimate interest basis get flagged
- Storage limitation - stale records with no business justification are identified for deletion under Article 5 of UK GDPR
- All work performed in the UK by a UK-based team
Frequently Asked Questions
How many records can you process?
Typically up to 50,000 in a single engagement. Larger datasets are handled in batches.
Will you change data in our CRM directly?
No. We deliver a file. You control the import. Nothing in your CRM changes until you decide.
How do you handle duplicates with conflicting data?
We use recency and source reliability to determine the master record. Conflicts that require judgement get flagged for your review rather than resolved by assumption.
Can you clean our data on an ongoing basis?
Yes - that is our Pipeline Retainer. Monthly hygiene, enrichment, and reporting so the CRM stays clean permanently.
Is this GDPR compliant?
Yes. We screen against TPS/CTPS, review lawful basis, and flag records that violate storage limitation rules.
Can I do this myself?
You can. We have a DIY CRM cleanup guide that walks through the process step by step. For 5,000+ records, most teams find the manual effort is not worth the time investment.
