The Dirty Data Problem: How a One-Week Fix Can Save Your Reporting

You can’t run a business on bad data.
Yet, every week, I meet leadership teams making big decisions from HubSpot dashboards they don’t fully trust.

Maybe this sounds familiar: you walk into a quarterly review, and the first slide is full of pipeline metrics. But within 60 seconds, someone says:

“Those numbers don’t look right.”

Cue the awkward explanations - “Marketing says the source is wrong”, “Sales says half those deals are dead”, “Ops says we’ve had duplicate records for months.”

The conversation turns into a forensic debate about data quality instead of a discussion about performance.
And just like that, your growth decisions are built on sand.

 

The real cost of dirty data

Bad data doesn’t just make your dashboards ugly - it makes them wrong.
And when you can’t trust the numbers, everything slows down.

  • Missed opportunities – Leads that could convert get ignored because their records are incomplete or incorrectly scored.
  • Misaligned priorities – Sales and marketing waste resources chasing the wrong accounts or reporting on the wrong KPIs.
  • Forecasting failures – You can’t predict revenue if deal stages are wrong or closed-won deals are still marked as open.
  • Credibility loss – Every “the numbers aren’t quite right” moment in a boardroom chips away at trust in your leadership.

 

Symptom checklist: Is this your HubSpot?

If you’re nodding at more than two of these, you’ve got a data hygiene problem:

  • Duplicates of the same contact or company (sometimes with contradictory info).
  • Missing or inconsistent job titles, industries, or regions.
  • Deals in the wrong stages or with no close date.
  • Reports that “don’t look right” - and everyone has their own “version of the truth”.
  • Reps or marketers exporting to Excel to “make the numbers work”.

 

Why the problem gets worse over time

CRM data doesn’t usually collapse overnight - it erodes slowly.

  • Imports: Lists from events, webinars, or purchased databases introduce inconsistent fields.
  • Manual edits: Reps updating records “just to get it logged” without following naming standards.
  • Forms: Unvalidated inputs (like free-text job titles) create reporting chaos.
  • Integrations: External tools pushing partial or mismatched data into HubSpot.

Each small inaccuracy on its own doesn’t seem critical. But multiplied over months, your CRM becomes bloated, contradictory, and unreliable.

And the scary part? Bad data compounds. The longer you leave it, the harder it becomes to fix - and the more people build workarounds outside HubSpot, further undermining adoption.

 

Why a one-week fix works

Some businesses think they need a massive “data transformation project” to fix their CRM. In reality, most of what’s broken can be cleaned, standardised, and locked down in five working days — if you know exactly what to look for and have the right rules in place.

That’s the difference between a “data clean-up” and our Data Hygiene Fix:

  • We don’t just tidy up what’s there - we set the rules so it stays clean.
  • We rebuild associations so your CRM relationships make sense.
  • We enrich the missing information from trusted sources so you can make decisions with confidence.

 

What’s included in the Data Hygiene Fix

In one week, we will:

  • Audit your data health - property map, data sources, and quality scoring.
  • Remove duplicates - using match rules and manual checks where needed.
  • Repair associations - ensuring contacts, companies, and deals are correctly linked.
  • Standardise key properties - dropdowns, validation rules, and consistent naming.
  • Enrich missing fields - pulling in firmographic and contact info automatically.
  • Create a Data Quality Dashboard - so you can monitor hygiene without a detective hat.

 

Case in point: Frontier Medical Group

When Frontier Medical Group came to us, they had a great product and a strong sales team - but their HubSpot reporting was all over the place.

The leadership team couldn’t get a clear read on lead quality or marketing ROI because data was duplicated, incomplete, and inconsistently entered.

One of our first steps was a structured data hygiene process. Within weeks:

  • Qualified leads increased by 94%
  • Revenue attributable to HubSpot jumped 483%
  • Forecasting accuracy improved dramatically

You can read the full Frontier Medical Group transformation here.

 

Our 5-day delivery process

  • Day 1: Data audit and agreement on rules and standards.
  • Day 2: Duplicate removal and association repairs.
  • Day 3: Property clean-up and standardisation applied.
  • Day 4: Enrichment connected and Data Quality Dashboard built.
  • Day 5: Training session, before/after metrics, and handover.

 

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Your dashboards are only as good as your data.

Book your Data Clean Sweep  Fix today - we’ll clean, enrich, and protect your HubSpot data in just one week

[Book Data Clean Sweep Fix]

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

What happens if you don’t fix it

The consequences aren’t just messy reports - they’re strategic:

  • Your sales pipeline becomes unreliable.
  • Marketing can’t prove ROI or prioritise campaigns.
  • The board loses faith in CRM-driven decision-making.

Worse, the longer you wait, the more cleanup work compounds - and the harder it is to get teams back inside HubSpot once they’ve built their own off-platform workarounds.

 

The result of a clean CRM

When you fix your data:

  • Reports become decision tools, not debate starters.
  • Sales and marketing align around the same definitions.
  • You get forecasting you can stand behind in front of the board.

And because we set governance rules and build monitoring dashboards, your CRM stays that way long after the week is over.

 

Stop letting bad data slow your growth.
With our Data Clean Sweep Fix, you’ll go from messy, unreliable reporting to a clean, trusted HubSpot in just 5 days — for a fixed price, with measurable results.

[Book Data Clean Sweep Fix]

 

Mark Hullin

Closing the gaps that stall business growth #CRMIsNotaStrategy