Which Restaurants in Your CRM Have Already Closed?
A restaurant technology company shared a slice of its CRM with us: 392 accounts across two zip codes, 80501 in Longmont, Colorado and 01801 in Woburn, Massachusetts. Their CRM listed these as new openings for reps to work.
We asked two questions. Which of these restaurants have already closed? And which restaurants in the same two zip codes are missing from the list entirely?
What they sent
392 rows, two columns: restaurant name and a street address. No other fields left their system.
What we found
| Verdict | Rows | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Sent | 392 | 100% |
| Unique, open locations | 236 | 60% |
| Duplicate rows | 38 | 10% |
| Closed | 25 | 6% |
| Unverifiable | 93 | 24% |
Four in ten rows could be removed from their CRM. This saves time for the reps working their territories and thousands in enrichment costs for the Rev Ops team.
Even the 236 open, unique rows were not all restaurants. 14 were social clubs, a church, a golf course, a sign company, a senior living facility, and an office building.
What was missing
Then we looked at the same two zip codes from the other direction. Every food business that is open today and was not in the CRM at all.
| Zip code | Open businesses not in the CRM | Of which strict restaurants |
|---|---|---|
| 80501, Longmont, CO | 235 | 134 |
| 01801, Woburn, MA | 114 | 55 |
| Total | 349 | 189 |
Put the two tables side by side. The CRM had 236 open, unique locations in these ZIP codes. There were 349 more open food businesses in the same zips that it had never seen. The missing list is bigger than the working list.
The missing businesses skew toward the formats a sales team would want:
| Category | Missing from CRM | In CRM |
|---|---|---|
| Fast food | 63 | 7 |
| Cafes | 57 | 26 |
| Takeaway | 55 | 14 |
| Coffee shops | 50 | 17 |
| Caterers | 49 | 19 |
| Bakeries | 46 | 15 |
| American | 37 | 21 |
| Breakfast | 34 | 13 |
| Mexican | 33 | 21 |
| Sandwich shops | 28 | 10 |
| Pizza | 20 | 17 |
| Bars | 29 | 35 |
A location can carry more than one category, so the columns do not sum to the totals above. The pattern is clear anyway. Of these formats, bars were the only one where the CRM knew more locations than it was missing. For fast food, the CRM had 7 and was missing 63.
Why this happens
None of this is a knock on the team. It is what a CRM does when it is filled by hand.
Reps upload duplicates. A rep pulls a list, another rep pulls a similar list a quarter later, and both get imported. Slightly different names or addresses defeat the dedupe rule. Now the same taqueria is three accounts owned by two people.
Restaurants churn. Thousands of restaurants open and close in the US every month. A list built in the spring is missing every opening since and still carrying every closure since. We wrote about why restaurant data goes stale faster than any other category.
Nobody re-checks the file. Once a row is in the CRM it stays there. The enrichment budget gets spent on it every cycle whether it is a live restaurant, a copy of one, or a parking lot.
How Sync works
Sync is the check we ran above, run on your whole CRM.
- You send us a CSV with two columns: restaurant name and address. Nothing else leaves your systems.
- We verify every row against the live map and check the rows against each other.
- You get your file back with a verdict on every row:
| Column | What it is |
|---|---|
| row_id | Your row, unchanged |
| status | open, closed, duplicate, or unverifiable |
| duplicate_of | The surviving row for each duplicate group |
| verified_name, verified_address | The canonical name and physical address for every open location |
- You also get a second file: every open restaurant in the geographies your file covers that is not in your CRM today. Name, address, category, and the same verification.
If you want the check to keep running, Daily Snapshot is the same verification every morning: send us your list and we flag what changed.
Sync puts every downstream dollar on a real, open, unique restaurant, and puts the restaurants that opened in your backyard onto the list before your competitors call them. Talk to us if you want to keep your CRM up-to-date forever.