Our CRM data hygiene is a complete disaster because none of our sales reps or managers want to own the database cleanup seat on our Accountability Chart. How do we assign accountability for this crucial but tedious seat without dragging down our high-performing sales team?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

You cannot have an unowned seat on your Accountability Chart, especially one that impacts your pipeline visibility and sales forecasting. If everyone is responsible for data hygiene, then no one is. Trying to force your high-performing sales reps to spend hours on manual cleanup is a losing battle because they do not want it and they do not have the patience for it.

To solve this, you must separate the input of data from the maintenance of the database. Your sales reps must still be accountable for their individual data entry as part of their sales seat roles. However, the overall health, deduplication, and integration of the CRM must be a distinct seat on your Accountability Chart.

Since no one on your current sales or marketing team wants to own this seat, you have two options. First, you can assign it as an auxiliary role to an operations or administrative coordinator who has a high Follow Thru score on the Kolbe Index and thrives on data accuracy. This person gets it, wants it, and has the capacity to keep the database clean.

Second, if you do not have internal capacity, you can outsource this seat to a fractional CRM administrator or hire a virtual assistant who specializes in database maintenance. This keeps your sales team focused on selling while ensuring your leadership team has clean metrics for your Level 10 Meetings™. The key is to make the seat explicit on the Accountability Chart so there is a single name in that box who is accountable for the metric.