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Reviving a stale CRM for marketing and sales

Problem

Marketing wanted to run vertical campaigns. CRM territory fields were free text from 2014. Contacts were duplicated across subsidiaries; job titles were “CEO / janitor / ???”. Every list pull required a spreadsheet triage session. Sales did not trust marketing sends because a partner had once emailed a client’s competitor by mistake.

Constraints

No budget for a net-new customer data platform. IT allowed one enrichment vendor. GDPR and state privacy rules applied to some contacts. Partners expected to approve any client-facing mention. The cleanup could not block quarter-end forecasting.

Approach

We started with three segments that leadership agreed actually mattered: industry, company size band, and relationship stage. We defined “minimum viable record” rules: what had to be true before a contact entered any automated program. Duplicate merging rules were conservative—better to leave a duplicate than merge wrong. We trained admins on a weekly hygiene ritual instead of a one-time purge.

Rollout

Phase A: static lists for a single webinar to prove the process. Phase B: dynamic lists for a monthly newsletter with hard exclusion rules for active opportunities. Phase C: light scoring only after ninety days of stable deliverability and bounce rates within tolerance.

Risks mitigated

• Wrong-industry sends: dual validation on industry picklist vs. account keyword
• Partner alarm: pre-approved mention list and manual gate for “household” accounts
• Rep sabotage: visible audit log of who changed segment fields

Outcomes (illustrative)

Campaign build time dropped from days to hours. Unsubscribe and complaint rates fell. Sales stopped asking for CSV exports for every send because the in-system lists were finally believable.

Lessons

Data projects fail when they chase perfection. We shipped “good enough to not embarrass us” first, then iterated where volume justified deeper cleanup.