Does your CRM database look like a two-year-old's bedroom? This is the state of most of the customer databases I see at established (mid and large) IT companies.  These databases are big (sometimes huge) but the data quality is often shockingly poor.

When you start to realize that one of the key ways to become efficient in your sales and marketing is to stay-in-touch with your prospects (a.k.a. "lead nurturing") then it becomes obvious that maintaining a "clean" database of your prospects' information is critical.

Not only should your database contain clean data on such obvious items as name, address, email and phone (many do not even contain clean data at this basic level) but the database should strive to profile your targets in ways that will help your business development efforts.  Data you will want to collect for profiling will include: the prospect's title (and what they really do, i.e. not just "Vice President"), what industry they are in, what subset of the industry they are in (i.e. "asset management" not just "financial services"), some of their key interests, who are their customers etc. (for the ultimate in profiling see Harvey Mackay's "Mackay 66" in his book Swim with the Sharks.  This profiling information will be critical to implementing marketing campaigns that are targeted sufficiently to be intelligent and produce ROI.

Over time databases tend towards chaos. Chaotic databases are useless for intelligent marketing and sales programs.  It is critical that clean data is input into your CRM database and that this data is avidly maintained.  IT companies need to take this work seriously and invest in it, so they can reap significant ROI from their marketing and sales programs. 

So, if you CRM database looks like a two-year old's bedroom...Clean it up, before you trip over something!