Clean up duplicate CRM records
CRM deduplication is an Agent Skill: a written method your AI applies on demand, in Zealos or in any client that reads SKILL.md.
CRM deduplication is an Agent Skill: a written method your AI applies on demand, in Zealos or in any client that reads SKILL.md.
Deduplication goes wrong when merging is treated as the goal: the safe operation is to propose a merge with the evidence for it, because an incorrect merge is materially harder to undo than a duplicate.
| name | crm-field-conventions |
|---|---|
| description | What belongs in each CRM field, and what to leave blank rather than guess. Use whenever writing to a contact, company or deal record, or logging activity after a call or email. |
| allowed-tools | none — this skill adds judgement, not reach |
| compatibility | Zealos, Claude Code, Cursor, Codex and any client that reads SKILL.md |
| license | Free to use and edit |
--- name: crm-field-conventions description: What belongs in each CRM field, and what to leave blank rather than guess. Use whenever writing to a contact, company or deal record, or logging activity after a call or email. --- # CRM field conventions ## The rule that matters most **Leave a field blank rather than infer it.** A blank field is a known unknown. A guessed field is an unknown unknown, and it will be reported on, forecast against, and used to route a lead. If a value was not stated by the customer or recorded in a source you can cite, do not write it — say what is missing and why. Never infer: budget, headcount, timeline, decision maker, competitor, industry from a company name, seniority from a title alone. ## Fields - **Next step** — one action, with an owner and a date. "Follow up" is not a next step. If there is no agreed next step, leave it empty; that emptiness is the most useful signal in the pipeline. - **Close date** — what the buyer said, not what the quarter needs. If they have not said, leave it and note that it is unset. - **Amount** — the discussed figure. If it is a range, take the low end and note the range in the deal notes. - **Stage** — moved by evidence, not by optimism. Every stage has an exit criterion; if you cannot name the evidence, do not advance it. - **Notes** — what was said, attributed. Quote where the wording matters. Separate observation from interpretation. - **Contact role** — only from a stated org relationship, never from a title. ## After a call or email Write the recap first, then extract fields from it. Extracting straight from memory is where invented values come from.
Dedup becomes a reviewable queue instead of a script somebody ran once and everybody is now afraid of.
Reporting stops double-counting the accounts that were entered twice with slightly different names.
You stop discovering mid-call that a colleague has been working the same company under a different record.
No. Propose with evidence and let a human confirm. A wrong merge destroys history in a way a duplicate never does.
Email domain for companies and a verified email or LinkedIn URL for people. Company name similarity produces false positives constantly.
Within each system, yes. Reconciling across two systems is a different problem: without a shared identifier that both sides agree on, cross-system matching produces confident merges of records that were never the same company.
Continuously as a proposal queue rather than periodically as a sweep. A quarterly cleanup means a quarter of reporting was already wrong, and it batches the review into a job nobody wants.
Post-call automation turns a recorded conversation into the three things that outlive it: the commitments each side made, the fields that changed, and the follow-up that has to go out today.
/call-recap-formatAn AI SDR agent is only as good as the definition of a good customer it is working from, which is why the fit criteria belong in a written skill rather than buried in a prompt nobody can find.
/our-icpCRM data hygiene survives AI only if one rule is written down first: a field left blank is a known unknown, while a field filled in by inference is an unknown unknown that will be reported on as fact.
/crm-field-conventionsQualification is a claim about evidence, not a score: a deal is qualified when every criterion has a source you can quote, and unevidenced criteria are named rather than filled in optimistically.
/meddiccA pipeline review is useful in proportion to how uncomfortable it is: the job is to find the deals that are slipping quietly, not to narrate the ones everybody already knows about.
/meddiccAn account plan is worth the hour only if it names the one unknown that would most change your approach — everything else in a plan template is decoration you will never re-read.
/our-icp