Your CRM Is Rotting. Here Are the Numbers.
22.5% of B2B contact records go stale every year. That's the average. Some data types decay at over 70% annually.
CRM data decay is not a minor inconvenience. It costs U.S. businesses $3.1 trillion per year. Sales teams waste over 500 hours chasing leads that no longer exist. 75% of CRM users say bad data has already cost them customers.
The causes are straightforward. 70.8% of business contacts change roles or companies within 12 months. 42.9% of phone numbers go invalid within a year. 37.3% of email addresses change or go inactive.
What good CRM hygiene looks like in practice:
→ Quarterly data refreshes as a minimum standard
→ 90-day freshness windows on contact records
→ Real-time verification, not batch-only updates
→ Automated enrichment to catch decay before it hits campaigns
