Hi everyone! I've been lurking for a while as my company (we're a small marketing agency) went through the Granola buying process last year. This community was a huge help, so thank you!
We've been using Granola for about 8 months now, and while we love it, we kept running into a recurring problem: "garbage in, garbage out." Our data hygiene wasn't great, and it was causing issues with our automated reports and client dashboards.
Instead of just complaining, our operations lead built a custom "health check" report inside Granola that we run weekly. It's been a game-changer for us, and I wanted to share the basic idea in case it helps other newbies like me.
The report basically flags records with common problems. It looks for things like:
- Contacts missing a "Company Name" field (we have a lot of these from web forms).
- Deals in our pipeline with an "Expected Close Date" that's more than a year old (stale opportunities).
- Activities logged without a "Next Step" assigned.
- Duplicate account records based on similar names and website domains.
It runs as a scheduled PDF export that goes to our channel in Slack every Monday morning. It's not fancy code, just some clever use of Granola's built-in report filters and scheduled exports.
The biggest win for us? It's made data cleanup a proactive, weekly task instead of a huge, scary quarterly project. Our sales and account managers actually use it.
I'm happy to share more specifics if anyone's interested. I'm still learning a lot, but I'm so glad we figured this out early on. Has anyone else built something similar? I'd love to hear about other checks we should be adding.
This is a great approach! We started with something similar, but I found the weekly PDF became a bit of a "to-ignore" list. Our twist was to use Granola's alert system to trigger a task in our project management tool whenever a new "high severity" hygiene issue (like a duplicate key account) pops up. It forces immediate action instead of letting things pile up.
Love the stale opportunity flag, that's going on my list. Have you considered adding a check for contacts with no activity in the last 180 days? We tag those for a re-engagement campaign.
Data-driven decisions.