If your CRM feels more like a digital junk drawer than a system of record, you’re not alone.
Account and contact data management is one of the most overlooked—but high-impact—areas in revenue operations. And while it’s tempting to push data quality expectations onto your end users, that’s not where the real responsibility lies. Your AEs didn’t sign up to be data janitors.
You did. (Sorry.)
Let’s break down a few key ways RevOps can step up its data game without drowning in manual clean-up work.
One of the biggest mistakes we see? No clear data owner. Sure, everyone should update their own records—but when everyone owns the data, no one owns the data.
RevOps should take full responsibility for:
It’s also critical to establish clear rules, logic, and ownership for data like whether or not an account is an active customer, contract data necessary to properly support the account, and and which data source to prioritize when user-entered data conflicts with enrichment feeds.
Want to know which fields you should care about? Check out our ICP Data Management Checklist.
If you’re asking reps to manually update things like industry, company size, revenue, or HQ location… stop. You’re wasting their time and setting yourself up for inconsistency.
Use third-party enrichment tools to automatically populate (and regularly refresh) ICP-defining data points at the account level, like:
Build in logic to determine which enrichment source wins—and when.
Which data vendor you use will be largely dependent on the industry(ies) you sell to – and it’s not uncommon to need multiple sources for different fields. For example, Clay, ZoomInfo, and Apollo are all strong B2B data sources, but they’re not always great at populating technographic (which technologies) that company uses. D&B and Crunchbase are good sources when it comes to earnings and fundraising data. Then there are niche data sources like Definitive Healthcare.
Do your research. Read the contracts—some vendors revoke access to enriched data if you cancel, which can blow up your automations. And always ask for a 'bake off.” A bake off is standard practice across data vendors where you provide a spreadsheet with partially populated data and they return it populated with what is in their database. Comparing vendors will give you a sense of which fields they get right and what you may need to find elsewhere.
Automation is great—until it overwrites the good stuff.
If a rep updates an email address or phone number manually, that field should be locked to enrichment unless flagged as invalid. This is a simple fix that prevents you from overwriting a direct dial with a vendor-supplied switchboard number.
This can be managed in multiple ways, including adding custom fields to determine when the field was last updated and by whom (or what). We mentioned that it’s important to develop a list of fields that are important to your company - this list will help keep custom fields and workflows as lean as possible.
Set field update hierarchies in your CRM so your best data survives.
Let’s talk about what happens when a contact leaves a company.
Most teams do one of three things:
Here’s the better way:
These are high-leverage signals that most RevOps teams still haven’t operationalized. Fix that.
If you’re still thinking about data management as “CRM stuff,” you’re behind. It’s about systems architecture and workflow design.
Here are a few advanced ways RevOps can lead:
Too few companies leverage product usage data to fuel their account engagement and expansion efforts. Now’s the time to test which usage signals predict expansion—or churn.
You can’t delegate your way to a clean CRM. But you can build the automations, processes, and system guardrails that keep account and contact data actionable at scale.
Start by owning the problem, documenting your approach, and making sure your stack does as much of the work as possible. Your future self—and your GTM team—will thank you.
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