Most CRMs don’t fail in one go. They drift. A field added here, a workflow bolted on there, a new platform connected for one campaign and never removed. Two years later the pipeline report says one thing, finance says another, and the team keeps its real numbers in a spreadsheet.
This is the health check we run at the start of a marketing systems consulting engagement. Score one point for every “yes”. It takes about an hour with whoever runs your CRM.
Data
1. Do fewer than 1 in 10 contact records have missing or out-of-date key fields?
Pick 50 records at random and check job title, company, email and owner. If more than five are wrong or empty, every segment, campaign and report built on that data is skewed.
2. Is there one record per company and per person?
Duplicates split activity history across records, so nobody sees the full picture and the same prospect gets emailed twice. Search for your five biggest clients – if any appear more than once, you have a duplicate problem.
3. Does every deal have an owner, a value and a close date?
Deals without these can’t be forecast. They are also usually the deals nobody is working.
Pipeline
4. Do your pipeline stages describe what the buyer has done, not what you have done?
“Proposal sent” tells you about your activity. “Budget confirmed” tells you about the deal. Stages tied to buyer commitments make forecasts far more honest.
5. Would two people put the same deal in the same stage?
If stage definitions live in people’s heads, the pipeline report is an average of opinions. Write down the exit criteria for each stage and put them in the CRM itself.
6. Are deals that have stalled for 30+ days flagged automatically?
Old deals inflate the pipeline and make the forecast look healthier than it is. A simple rule that flags or closes stale deals keeps the numbers real.
Automation
7. Can someone explain what every active workflow does?
Export the list of active automations. Anything nobody can explain should be paused and checked – unknown workflows are where duplicate emails, wrong owners and overwritten fields come from.
8. Do marketing leads reach sales within one working day?
Submit a test enquiry through your own website form and time how long it takes to land with a named salesperson. Many teams are surprised by the answer.
Reporting and stack
9. Can leadership see pipeline, conversion and revenue without anyone building a report by hand?
If the Monday numbers depend on someone exporting and merging spreadsheets, they will be late, inconsistent and eventually ignored. Reporting should compile itself from the CRM.
10. Does every platform in your stack have a clear job that nothing else does?
List every marketing and sales platform you pay for, what it does and who owns it. Overlaps cost money twice: once in licences, and again in the time spent keeping data in sync between them.
What your score means
- 8-10: your CRM is in good shape. Focus on reporting and using the data you have.
- 5-7: the foundations work, but drift is costing you time and accuracy. Fix data and stage definitions first.
- 0-4: the CRM is working against you. Reports can’t be trusted, so decisions built on them can’t be either. Start with a structured review before changing anything.
Where to start
Whatever your score, fix data before automation and automation before reporting – each layer depends on the one beneath it. And don’t switch platforms to escape a messy CRM; the mess usually moves with you.
If you’d like a second pair of eyes, our marketing systems and CRM consulting starts with exactly this review, across Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive and others. Once the data is clean, the Pulse+ performance dashboard gives leadership one live view without the manual scramble. Book a 20-minute call to talk it through.
