Data hygiene is blocking your growth (here’s the fix)

Bad data doesn’t just clog your CRM, it quietly caps your revenue potential. Discover the hidden cost of dirty data, why it persists in scaling SaaS companies, and how a five-minute audit and the right habits can put you back on track.

You’re not missing targets because your team’s underperforming.

You’re missing targets because your data is.

We speak to B2B SaaS leaders every week who’ve built strong teams, sharp playbooks, and solid forecasts. But when the numbers fall short, it’s rarely a strategy problem, it’s a data problem.

This is not the kind of data that shows up neatly in a dashboard. These are the easy-to-miss, human error data hygiene issues: Stakeholders aren’t linked to opportunities, deals are being pushed too fast through stages, deal values aren’t accurate, emails aren’t syncing to HubSpot or Salesforce. Very quickly, these discrepancies snowball into major issues.

Still, most companies treat it like background noise. Something for Sales to sort out later. This usually continues until a noticeable problem occurs, such as a key renewal gets missed or reps spend 30% of their week chasing leads that don’t exist anymore. At this point, bad data becomes a growth problem.

How bad data manifests

So, what’s the impact of bad data?

• Pipeline reviews with invisible blockers
• Sales managers flying blind on what’s actually been done
• Marketing campaigns that hit expired contacts
• CS teams chasing renewals with missing or inaccurate stakeholder data

According to IBM, poor data quality costs the U.S. economy $3.1 trillion every year. In high-growth SaaS companies, that cost shows up in lost revenue, wasted rep time and inaccurate forecasts, and it compounds as the company scales.

Why it happens (even if you “care about data”)

Most revenue teams would say they’re data-driven. They check dashboards. Measure KPIs. Run QBRs. However, none of that matters if the underlying data is broken. Here’s why it usually is:

1. Data decays fast

In B2B, up to 40% of CRM data becomes outdated each year. Stakeholders move roles, deal values shift, and opportunities progress or slip back. Even if your CRM looked clean last quarter, the data tied to your live opportunities may already be wrong, and that directly skews forecasts and coaching.

2. Breakdowns happen at the point of entry

A rep forgets to link a stakeholder. Or skips a qualification step and moves a deal forward anyway. Or their email integration fails and no activity is captured. Small things, but they result in inaccurate data capture which impacts forecasting and buyer experience.

3. No one owns it

Marketing blames Sales. Sales blames Rev Ops. Everyone agrees it’s a problem, but no one is truly accountable and therefore not willing to fix these mistakes if they don’t feel responsible for them.

What it looks like in real life

Let’s say your pipeline looks pretty good at first glance. Then you dig in and find:

• Half the opportunities at “negotiation” stage haven’t had a proposal sent
• One rep hasn’t synced their email for weeks, so their opps show no activity
• A renewal slipped through because the stakeholder wasn’t linked and no follow-up was tracked
• A campaign flops because the list was riddled with outdated contacts

And suddenly, the entire Go-To-Market motion feels broken, not because the strategy’s wrong, but because the inputs are flawed.

What happens when you clean it up

Take Ignite Reading. As the company scaled, their HubSpot CRM became cluttered with duplicates, uncategorised records, and inconsistent field completion. Nearly 20% of their company records had no clear owner, and cross-team reporting was unreliable. By auditing over 28,000 records, standardising inputs, and enforcing data hygiene across functions, they transformed HubSpot from a liability into a growth engine. Sales and marketing finally shared the same source of truth, reporting accuracy improved, and reps could spend their time on live opportunities instead of chasing errors.

The lesson here is that clean data doesn’t just save admin time. It restores confidence in the entire revenue process, from pipeline reviews to coaching to forecasting.

Start here: a 5-minute pipeline audit

You don’t need to hire a whole data team. A quick audit can surface the gaps fast.

Ask yourself:

• Are key contact fields, like job title, phone number and company, consistently filled out?
• Are reps syncing emails, or is activity stuck in inboxes?
• Are actions clearly logged, or are deals moving without qualification steps being completed?
• Are stakeholders linked to opportunities? Are they real and engaged?
• Is formatting consistent across systems (e.g. "UK" vs "United Kingdom")?

These are the small things that turn into big problems later if there’s no consistency.

How Hive Perform helps

This is exactly where Hive Perform fits in.

It doesn’t just track what happened, it shows what’s missing:

1. Action visibility: Hive Perform aligns actions to each individual opportunity. Leaders can instantly see where a deal is stalled, why and what to do about it.
2. Email insights: If a rep’s inbox isn’t connected, Hive flags the lack of email data. Once they reconnect, Hive automatically pulls in the insights they were missing and helps your reps understand what to do next to get the opportunity moving along faster.
3. Qualification clarity: Hive shows when key steps haven’t been completed, like proposals not sent or negotiation stages triggered too early. No more ghost-stage deals.
4. Stakeholder clarity: Hive’s contacts feature makes it easy to see when key people are missing from an opportunity, so your team always knows whether the right stakeholders are engaged.

Instead of relying on memory, spreadsheets, or CRM workarounds, Hive makes the invisible visible, and because it pulls this information automatically, you can stop worrying about human error cluttering your CRM.

If you want to read more about good business practices and how Hive Perform can bring value to your company, check out one of our other blogs here: 👉 https://hiveperform.com/resource-hub