Salesforce data health: a practical audit checklist

Salesforce is the backbone of most B2B revenue operations. It's also where data quality problems quietly accumulate. Duplicate leads. Contacts with no activity in 18 months. Accounts with missing industry codes. Opportunities linked to the wrong contacts.

We run Salesforce health audits regularly, and the pattern is consistent across companies of all sizes: roughly 15-25% of records have at least one critical data quality issue. Here is the checklist we use.

Check for duplicate contacts. Count records where first name, last name, and email match another record. Most orgs have 10-15% duplication. Deduplicate before you do anything else.

Verify email validity. Run a syntax check on all email fields. Flag addresses with typos, missing domains, or format errors. Then run deliverability checks on a sample. Invalid emails aren't just useless — they hurt your sender reputation every time someone sends to them.

Check for orphaned records. Contacts without accounts. Opportunities without contacts. Tasks assigned to deactivated users. These create noise in reports and make it hard for reps to know what to prioritize.

Review field completeness. What percentage of your contacts have job titles? Phone numbers? Industry codes? If more than 30% of any critical field is blank, you need appending or a data capture process fix.

Check recency. When was the last activity on each contact? If a contact hasn't been touched in 18 months, flag it for review. People change jobs. Your data about them is probably wrong.

Validate picklist values. Industry, lead source, and status fields often accumulate junk values over time. Standardize them or your reports will be meaningless.

Check account-contact relationships. Are your key decision-makers linked to the right accounts? Nothing frustrates an AE more than calling a contact who left the company six months ago.

Run a bounce report. Pull your last 90 days of email sends and check bounce rates by list, by rep, and by data source. Patterns here tell you where bad data is entering your system.

If you score below 80% on any of these checks, don't panic. That's normal. But fix the worst offenders first — duplicates and invalid emails — because those compound the fastest.