How accurate do you think your CRM data really is?

Probably worse than the dashboard tells you. Every CRM I've ever audited looked fine at a glance and fell apart the moment I actually checked records by hand.

I ran a real spot check on our own CRM last year, pulled 100 random contact records, and called or emailed each one to confirm title, company, and current employment.

What I found:

– About a third had a title that no longer matched the person's actual role

– A handful had already left the company entirely, record still marked active

– The domain and company name fields matched fine almost every time, that part decays slowest

The fields that look the cleanest in a CRM report, name, company, domain, are also the ones that change the least. The fields that actually drive a sale, title, seniority, current employer, are the ones rotting quietest in the background because nothing flags them until a rep gets a bounce or an awkward call.

Nobody's CRM accuracy number is really 95% unless someone recently sat down and manually checked a real sample. Most of us are just trusting whatever it said the day the record got created.

Has anyone actually run a manual spot check like this, and what did it turn up?