A CRM with 10,000 contacts can be a much bigger mess than one with 100,000.
It’s common to hear people (marketing nerds) talk about their CRM by database size. But for once, size doesn’t matter here.
If we get really philosophical for a second, your CRM is a history of decisions your company made and probably forgot about.
Every mystery field was created for a reason.
Every odd workflow solved a problem (hopefully).
Every lifecycle stage came out of a meeting where somebody said, “Let’s call it this.”
But as time passed, campaigns ended, company OKRs shifted, and Kevin (the old marketing ops guy) left for a better gig.
And unfortunately, no one remembered to update the CRM.
Eventually, someone new is hired—ready to make a difference and probably confused by the sheer field bloat.
They find three fields that seem to mean “customer.” A workflow that sends a daily Slack message to one person in engineering. Two equally suspicious reports with vastly different quarterly revenue totals. And a checkbox field last updated four years ago that’s holding the whole system together.
Now, they’re expected to clean it up. (Solidarity if this is you)
But every time they ask why something exists, the answer is some version of: “I’m not sure. Better leave it alone.”
That’s how a 10,000-contact CRM becomes a bigger job than one with 100,000 clean contacts.
The contact count tells you how much data is there. It doesn’t tell you how many old decisions are still hiding in plain sight.
This is also why CRM cleanup can’t float between sales AND marketing (or between any other team for that matter). Shared responsibility usually means nobody has the final say.
One person or a small team needs to own CRM hygiene.
They need the power to:
Define what the main fields mean
Say no to fields the company doesn’t need
Choose which number wins when reports disagree
Turn off old workflows
Keep a record of why major changes were made
Sales, marketing, and service all still have a seat at the table. IT can control access. An agency can even help with the work.
But one person/team needs to keep the whole thing understandable.
If your company is too small to have a CRM owner, that gap then belongs to the founder until they give someone the job (and the authority to do it).
If nobody can say no to a new field or yes to deleting an old workflow, nobody owns your CRM.
Ask your team one question: Who has the final say on what stays in our CRM?
If the answer starts with “Well, it depends,” send them this.
Until next week,
Braden Cousin
P.S. Hygiene and documentation are a great place to start using AI agents. We’ll get into this in the coming weeks.
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