How to audit your own CRM in an afternoon

The short answerRun the counts below before you talk to any consultant, including us. They take an afternoon, they need no special access beyond a reporting seat, and they turn a vague feeling that something is wrong into a list you can prioritise.

One, duplicate rate

Count accounts that share a domain. Then count accounts created in the last ninety days with no domain at all. Anything over about five percent on the first and you have a creation problem rather than a cleanup problem.

Two, ownership

Count records with no owner, and records owned by somebody who has left. Both are invisible in day to day use and both quietly corrupt every report that groups by owner.

Three, source

Count closed-won deals in the last year where the source field is blank or set to a default value. That percentage is the ceiling on how much of your revenue you can attribute to anything.

Four, stage discipline

Count open deals whose close date is in the past. Then count deals that have sat in the same stage for more than ninety days. The first tells you whether close dates mean anything, the second tells you whether the pipeline number is real.

Five, required fields

List every required field on an opportunity and write down which report or decision consumes it. Any field without a named consumer is a tax on your sales team.

Six, automation

List active workflows and when each last fired. Automations that have not fired in six months are either dead or waiting to do something surprising.

What to do with the answers

Anything above ten percent goes on the fix list, everything else waits
Fix what lets bad data in before cleaning what is already there
Assign one owner per item, even if that owner is you
Re-run the same six counts in ninety days and compare

Questions

Can I audit my CRM myself?

Yes. The six counts on this page need a reporting seat and an afternoon, and they cover most of what a paid audit would surface first.

What should a CRM audit produce?

A written list of findings ranked by what each one costs to leave alone. If it produces a proposal and a slide deck instead, it was a sales call.

How often should we audit the CRM?

Quarterly for the counts, annually for the deeper structure. The counts take an afternoon once you have built them.

When is it worth paying someone?

When the list you produce is longer than the time you have, or when fixing it means changing the object model, the routing and the reporting at the same time.