A CRM audit is a structured review of your pipeline stages, lead sources, data quality and hand-offs that shows where leads leak before you automate anything. Ours takes two days, covers twelve checks and ends with one prioritised fix list. Most teams ask us to automate their CRM. What they usually need first is an honest look at what the CRM is already doing to their pipeline. Automation on top of a broken data model just moves bad records around faster. So every engagement starts the same way: a two-day audit, twelve checks, one prioritised fix list.
Start with the pipeline, not the tooling
A pipeline should describe what the buyer has done, not what your rep intends to do. Stages named 'Following up' or 'Nurture' are activity labels — they tell you nothing about whether the deal moved, so forecasting collapses and automation has nothing reliable to trigger on.
We rewrite every stage as an observable buyer event: booked a call, attended the call, received a proposal, agreed commercials. Once stages are events, exit criteria become obvious and a deal can no longer sit in one column for six weeks without anyone noticing.
- Every stage has a written entry and exit condition
- No more than seven stages in a primary sales pipeline
- Lost reasons are a fixed list, not a free-text box
- One pipeline per motion — new business and onboarding stay separate
Trace where a lead actually enters
We map every genuine entry point: website forms, calendar bookings, paid landing pages, inbound calls, live chat, referral intros, and the spreadsheet someone still keeps for events. Each one gets tested with a real submission that we follow all the way through to a CRM record.
This is where most leaks show up. Forms writing to a mailbox nobody owns. Calendar bookings that create a contact but no deal. Ad campaigns landing without source data, so paid spend can never be tied to revenue. You cannot automate a route you have not proven exists.
Audit the data before you trust it
Duplicate contacts, inconsistent phone formats, missing owner fields and half-populated custom properties will each break an automation in a different way. We measure fill rates on the fields that workflows depend on and treat anything under 90% as a blocker rather than a nice-to-have.
The fix is usually structural: fewer required fields, stricter input validation at the form layer, deduplication rules on email plus phone, and a single owner field that every downstream rule reads from.
- Duplicate rate across contacts and companies
- Fill rate on source, owner, lifecycle stage and deal value
- Consistency of phone, country and currency formats
- Records with no activity in the last 90 days
Time the hand-offs
Speed-to-lead is the single metric most correlated with close rate in the accounts we work on, and it is almost always worse than the team believes. We pull the timestamp gap between enquiry creation and first genuine human contact, then break it down by source and by hour of day.
The pattern repeats: fast on weekday mornings, hours slower in the evening, effectively dead at weekends. That is not a discipline problem, it is a routing problem — and it is the first thing worth automating.
What comes out of the audit
You get a twelve-point scorecard, a ranked list of fixes with the effort and expected impact of each, and a build order. Roughly a third of the items are usually configuration changes your own team can make in an afternoon. We are explicit about which those are.
Only after that do we start building workflows — on a pipeline that reflects reality, with data clean enough to trigger on, and hand-off rules that hold up at 9pm on a Sunday.
Frequently asked questions
What is a CRM audit?
A CRM audit is a structured review of how your CRM is set up and used: the pipeline stages, where leads enter, the quality of the data and how quickly enquiries reach a person. It ends with a ranked list of fixes so you know what to repair before building any automation.
Why should you audit your CRM before automating it?
Automation built on a broken pipeline or messy data only moves bad records around faster. An audit finds the leaks, duplicates and missing fields first, so the workflows you build afterwards trigger on data you can trust.
What does a CRM audit check?
Ours covers twelve checks across four areas: pipeline stages and exit criteria, every lead entry point, data health such as duplicates and field fill rates, and the time between an enquiry arriving and the first human contact.
How long does a CRM audit take?
We run it in two days for most small and mid-sized teams. The output is a twelve-point scorecard, a ranked fix list with effort and impact for each item, and a build order for the automation that follows.
How do you clean up CRM data?
Start with structural fixes rather than manual tidying: fewer required fields, validation on forms, deduplication rules on email and phone, and one owner field every rule reads from. We treat any field that automations depend on as a blocker if fewer than 90 percent of records have it filled in.