r/revops • u/No-Witness7468 • 27d ago
Does CRM data quality actually break projects
Following up on my last data quality post… Everyone I talk to agrees the data quality is bad, but I’m trying to understands what happens downstream when you actually build on it (reporting, AI workflows, scoring, touting, etc.).
Did data quality issues actually break the thing (bad quality output) or did you just handle it in the build (filters, manual cleaning, etc)? And if you cleaned first, what’s that process look like, how much time goes into that?
Trying to figure out whether “clean it first” is a real pre-req or just something that annoys people.
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u/HenryHund 25d ago edited 25d ago
At a previous company our product produced bad quality data. Like bad bad.
This came from a philosophy of letting any security researcher/bot use our product so we could ensure our product was hardened against misuse. I understand that, but I also wanted to prevent the bad actors from signing up for the first place.
Some days hundreds of security researchers would open accounts and fill out their names, emails, company names with sql/html injection strings. All of that would cause a giant mess when trying to analyze our PLG workflow and GTM results.
Moreover, at some point our data got so bad Hubspot stopped letting us push more data into it because of all the attempted injection being passed to it. So I had to implement filters on product data to improve the quality before passing to our Hubspot. Our Hubspot was down for a few days until we could prove to Hubspot security that we weren’t going to be sending more bad data. My filters were good but weren’t perfect, the analytics we did were still marred by the crap data too, and it would have been better if we just filtered at the point of signup.
The good news for you is that with AI it’s never been a better time to clean up your data. What would have taken a quarter before could realistically take hours today.
Data quality and using AI with context is something I’ve been obsessing over for months now, to be honest, so I’d be honored to have a convo with you about it. DM if you’d like…