What is your approach to prospect data hygiene and duplicate management?

Prevention first. Since email address is the unique identifier, most duplicates come in through imports and integrations rather than forms. I standardise imports — a defined template, validated picklist values, cleaned before upload — and I keep the number of write paths into the database small and documented.

For existing data I would profile it: how many prospects have never engaged, how many have invalid or role-based addresses, how many are missing the fields that scoring and grading depend on. That tells you whether you have a duplicate problem or a completeness problem, which need different fixes.

Ongoing, I use automation to normalise values as records arrive rather than cleaning up quarterly, and I keep an eye on the sync error queue, since Salesforce duplicate rules will surface many of these.

I would also agree a retention position with the business: prospects who have not engaged in years are not an asset, they are a deliverability liability.