Every sales and marketing leader has experienced it: a rep dials a prospect, only to find the number disconnected. A carefully crafted email bounces. A champion who was progressing an opportunity suddenly vanishes from LinkedIn.
This isn’t bad luck. It’s data decay — and it’s costing companies billions.
The Hard Truth: Contact Data Has an Expiration Date
B2B contact data is perishable. On average, 30% of CRM contacts decay every year. Think about that: nearly a third of the people in your Salesforce instance today will be gone, unreachable, or misclassified by this time next year.
Why?
- Job changes: Professionals switch roles and employers more frequently than ever. One study found 65% of contacts had a change in title or role within a year.
- Company churn: Roughly 3 in 10 contacts switch employers annually.
- Contact detail shifts: In one year, 37% of emails and 43% of phone numbers change.
- Address changes: Over 40% of business addresses shift within a year, impacting direct mail and event invites.
In other words, your CRM is slowly filling up with ghosts.
The Hidden Costs of Dead Data
It’s not just inconvenient — it’s expensive.
- Sales productivity: Reps lose hours every week calling numbers that no longer work and emailing inboxes that no longer exist. One report estimated 550 hours per rep, per year wasted on bad data — worth $32,000 in lost productivity.
- Marketing ROI: Campaigns underperform because a significant chunk of the audience simply doesn’t exist anymore. If even 20% of a 100,000-contact email list is invalid, that’s $2,000 in wasted spend on one campaign — before you even count damaged sender reputation.
- Forecasting & planning: Inflated pipelines (opportunities tied to departed champions) create false confidence, while missed contacts mean hidden risks. Executives end up making strategic bets on bad information.
Bad data isn’t just an admin issue — it’s a revenue leak.
How to Stop the Decay: A 90-Day Data Health Plan
You can’t stop people from changing jobs. But you can keep your CRM fresh enough to support growth. Here’s a practical 90-day plan:
Days 1–15: Baseline
- Audit % of contacts verified in the last 12 months.
- Measure bounce rate across last 3 campaigns.
- Identify opportunities without an active primary contact.
Days 16–45: Refresh
- Enrich stale records with updated titles, phone numbers, and company info.
- Deduplicate contacts and accounts.
- Set alerts for champion job changes so reps can pivot quickly.
Days 46–90: Prevent
- Add Salesforce validation rules: no new contact without email/phone; no opportunity advanced without an active contact.
- Implement a quarterly enrichment cadence for your top accounts.
- Add a “Last Verified” field so reps can instantly see data freshness.
ICP-Specific Takeaways
- Sales Leaders: Require active contact attached for every opportunity ≥ Proposal.
- Marketing Leaders: Refresh core campaign lists before launch; expect immediate deliverability and CTR lift.
- RevOps/CRM Admins: Enforce duplicate rules, required fields, and enrichment logs.
- Data Leaders: Establish ownership of “golden records” and maintain taxonomies (industry, segment, region).
The Payoff
Teams that invest in continuous enrichment report:
- +15–30% lift in response rates
- −20–30% pipeline inflation
- More accurate forecasts
Light tie-in: Salesforce-native enrichment (like Datatrip.ai) keeps >95% of key contacts reachable by auto-updating job changes and direct dials every week — no extra clicks for reps.
What can you do today?
Run a 15-minute CRM decay check today: filter contacts last verified >12 months and see how many tie to open opportunities. Chances are, you’ll find revenue at risk.
Clean data isn’t a luxury — it’s the foundation for reliable marketing, efficient sales, accurate forecasts, and AI that works. The question isn’t whether your contacts will decay — it’s what you’ll do about it.
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