We built a CRM decay calculator because teams kept asking "how bad is our data?" The answer is always worse than they think. Typical decay rates: 2-3% of contacts go stale per month through job changes alone. Add bounces, acquisitions, and rebrands and you are at 25-35% annual decay.
Decay is not a cleanup project. It is a physics problem. The fix is guardrails: scheduled re-enrichment, bounce invalidation, decay scores, and quarantine rules that keep stale records out of outbound.
Measure decay monthly. If the rate is climbing, your guardrails are failing.