If two reports give different answers to the same question, trust drops quickly. The cause is nearly always the data behind them.
Common causes
Most disagreements come from a few sources.
- The same customer entered under different spellings
- Missing or incomplete fields
- Different people using different definitions
- Old records that were never cleaned up
Agree the definitions
Write down what counts as a sale, a lead or a customer, and use that everywhere. Many arguments about numbers are really arguments about definitions.
Build clean habits
Use drop down lists instead of free text, make key fields required and review a sample of records each month. Small checks stop small errors becoming big ones.