TIL getting our CRM data clean took 8 months not 2

We had this big push to unify our sales and marketing data in Salesforce. Thought it'd be a quick 2 month project. 8 months later we finally had clean records. The issue was duplicates and outdated contact info from like 3 different systems we'd merged over the years. My boss kept asking why it wasn't done yet and I was like 'because John from 2017 still has 4 entries with different emails'. Anyone else run into a data cleanup that took way longer than you planned?

3 comments

3 Comments

caleb_thomas931mo ago

Oh man, did you try matching by email domain or something first? I feel your pain so hard because we had this nightmare with our old donor database at a nonprofit I volunteered for. Turns out someone thought it was fine to manually type in "Jon Smith" vs "John Smith" and "J Smith" across like 5 different spreadsheets they kept in a shared drive. We spent 9 months total and I swear half that time was just finding the same person with their name spelled wrong and a different email that bounced. The dedup script idea is solid but even then you gotta feed it the right rules or it merges people who just share a last name and it gets worse.

olivia_harris191mo ago

because John from 2017 still has 4 entries with different emails" - that's painfully relatable. A friend of mine spent over a year cleaning up a legacy database because they kept finding "ghost accounts" from interns who'd left years ago (each with like 5 misspelled versions of their name).

joelwells1mo ago

Build a quick dedup script right at the start before you touch ANY data. It saves you MONTHS of manual hunting later.