#The challenge
Years of ad-hoc use had left the CRM cluttered: over ten thousand contacts carrying duplicate company records, hundreds of stale lists, hundreds of custom properties that were almost entirely empty, and workflows nobody remembered turning on. The team was too lean to audit any of it themselves — and too lean to absorb the damage if a cleanup deleted something they actually needed.
#The approach
Embedded RevOps in the customer's own channel
Ran as a fractional revenue-operations team on roughly forty hours a month, taking CRM architecture and system requests directly in chat: parent/child company associations, a company-to-deal channel-partner field to drive partner compensation, deal-pipeline defaults, attachment permissions, and workflows syncing tasks and deal dates to calendars.
Investigate the integration before assuming
Investigated the sync between the CRM and the other business system in use, so the audit accounted for records arriving from elsewhere rather than treating everything as local mess.
An audit app instead of a slide deck
Delivered a self-serve hygiene audit covering deal pipeline, lifecycle stage, dashboards, integrations and dependencies, and user permissions — with every finding shown alongside its underlying records, so the customer could check each recommendation rather than take it on trust.
Approval before action, item by item
The customer marked up the delete-and-keep lists line by line, and only the approved items were executed. Nothing was cleaned up on the consultancy's own authority.
Reversible-first cleanup
Lists were archived — recoverable for about ninety days — rather than deleted; no contacts or companies were deleted at all; and duplicates were merged with no data loss. The cleanup was sequenced so every step had a way back.
Document what is left behind
Produced enablement documentation and a full integration and dependency map so the lean internal team could run the system independently after handoff.
#Outcomes
Full contact base audited, duplicates merged safely
Roughly 10,700 contacts were reviewed, with fifteen duplicate pairs merged and no data loss.
Silent automation removed
Workflows were cut from roughly 95 to roughly 75 — twenty removed and one disabled — so no automation ran that nobody could explain.
Stale lists archived reversibly
Roughly 60 of about 240 lists were archived, recoverable for about ninety days, with no contacts or companies deleted.
Schema simplified
Roughly 150 unused custom properties were archived, out of about 480 properties sitting under a ten-percent fill rate in a schema of roughly 760.
Stale pipeline surfaced
Roughly 155 stale deals were flagged for the team to close out or re-date.
Documented, independent handoff
Enablement documentation and an integration and dependency map were left behind so a lean internal team could operate the system without the consultancy.