A system full of data nobody trusts

You open the report and find four companies with the same name, a hundred deals with no source, and fifty contacts with no phone number. So you send a message: "Please fill in the data." Nothing changes, because the problem is not willingness.

Three real causes

1) Fields required but never used. If a field appears in no report and changes no decision, the team is right to ignore it. Delete it. Every field you remove raises the quality of what remains.

2) Asking at the wrong moment. Asking for "budget" when a deal is created is a question with no answer yet, so it gets filled with anything. Ask it when moving to "Proposal", by then it is known.

3) Nothing prevents the error. Reminders do not work; blocks do: a deal cannot advance to the next stage until its fields are complete.

Duplicates: prevent them at entry

Most duplication happens because a rep types an existing name in a different form. The fix is at the moment of typing, not in a monthly cleanup: suggest the existing company while they type, and attach the deal to it rather than creating a second.

For today's cleanup: start with companies, not contacts, merging a company drags everything beneath it.

Four fields are enough (anything more needs a reason)

Make entry a side effect, not a task

Teams enter what helps them. If the call is logged from the same screen, and email and WhatsApp attach to the deal automatically, the data builds itself. Anything that must be typed manually is a candidate for being forgotten.

Measuring cleanliness

One metric, reviewed monthly: the share of open deals with all four fields complete. Below 80%, trust no report built on them, including the forecast you show management.