A CRM should be one of the most valuable tools a sales or marketing team has. In practice, a lot of CRMs are something closer to a graveyard of contacts that may or may not still be accurate, mixed in with active prospects that are hard to identify because the data around them is incomplete.
The problem is not just inconvenience. Outdated contact data has a measurable cost.
What Inaccurate Data Actually Costs You
Gartner estimates that poor data quality costs organisations an average of $12.9 million per year, though this varies significantly by size and industry. The costs come from multiple directions: marketing campaigns that reach the wrong people, sales time spent on contacts who have changed roles or companies, emails that bounce and damage sender reputation, and decisions made on the basis of flawed reporting.
For sales teams specifically, the time spent verifying and correcting contact information before outreach is time not spent actually selling. When that friction is embedded across hundreds of records, the cumulative impact is significant.
How Data Decays
Contact data decays faster than most businesses account for. People change jobs, companies get acquired, email addresses change when businesses rebrand, and phone numbers go out of service. IBM's research suggests that data quality degrades at around 2% per month, which means a database that has not been actively maintained for a year could have nearly a quarter of its records containing at least one inaccuracy.
The challenge is that decay is invisible until you hit it. A contact looks fine in the CRM right up until the email bounces or the LinkedIn search shows them at a different company.
What Database Enrichment and Cleansing Looks Like in Practice
Addressing this involves two main activities. Data cleansing removes or corrects records that are inaccurate, duplicated, or incomplete. Data enrichment adds missing information to existing records, such as direct contact details, company size, industry classification, or verified email addresses.
Done well, this work transforms a CRM from a storage problem into a usable asset. Sales teams can prioritise their outreach based on accurate information, marketing campaigns reach real people in real roles, and reporting reflects what is actually happening in the pipeline.
Apeiro Solutions and Database Management
Our database management and administration services help businesses get their contact data into a state they can actually rely on, and then keep it that way. If your team is spending time working around bad data rather than using good data, that is a process worth looking at.
Get in Touch
If you would like to learn more about how Apeiro Solutions can support your business, reach out to us at info@apeirosolutions.com. Our team is ready to understand your goals and work with you to find the right approach.