Most CRM optimization projects fail before they start — because the team skips the audit. They jump straight into building new workflows, redesigning dashboards, or migrating data without understanding what's actually in the system. Two months later, they've built new processes on top of broken foundations.
I run this audit on every new portal I work with. It takes a day, sometimes two. It saves weeks of rework later. Here are 50 things to check, organized into five sections. Each item is a single question with a brief explanation of why it matters.
Section 1: Data quality
1. What percentage of contacts have a valid email address? Contacts without emails can't receive marketing, can't be enrolled in sequences, and inflate your database count. If more than 15% of contacts lack a valid email, you have an ingestion problem.
2. How many duplicate contacts exist? HubSpot's dedupe tool shows this, but most teams never run it. Duplicates fragment your timeline, split engagement data, and cause contacts to receive the same email twice — or not at all.
3. Are company records associated with their contacts? Orphaned contacts with no company association break account-based reporting and make it impossible to see the full picture of a deal.
4. When was the last data cleanup? If nobody can answer this, it's been too long. Stale data compounds. A contact list that was 90% accurate a year ago is probably 70% accurate now — job changes, company acquisitions, and email bounces erode quality constantly.
5. Are there contacts with no activity in 12+ months? These are dead weight. They hurt your email deliverability, skew your engagement metrics, and cost you money if you're on a contact-tier pricing model.
6. Is there a standardized format for phone numbers? Inconsistent phone formats break calling integrations, SMS workflows, and any automation that relies on phone data. Pick a format and enforce it with validation rules.
7. Are lifecycle stages populated and accurate? If 40% of contacts are stuck at "Subscriber" when they should be "MQL" or "Customer," your funnel reporting is fiction. Check that lifecycle stages reflect reality, not just the stage assigned at creation. For a complete framework on lifecycle alignment, see the buyer journey mapping guide.
8. Do deal amounts reflect actual revenue? Deals with $0 amounts, placeholder values, or wildly inflated numbers make pipeline forecasting useless. Spot-check your top 20 deals against actual contracts.
9. Are there contacts from purchased lists? Purchased lists poison your deliverability and violate GDPR. If they exist, quarantine and delete them. No exceptions.
10. Is there a process for handling bounced emails? Hard bounces should trigger automatic cleanup. If bounced contacts just sit in your database, your sender reputation degrades over time.
Section 2: Properties and objects
11. How many custom properties exist? Portals with 200+ custom properties almost always have redundancy. Every unused property is clutter that slows down forms, confuses reps, and makes reporting harder.
12. Which properties have less than 10% fill rate? A property that's empty for 90% of records either isn't being collected, isn't relevant, or was created for a one-time project and never cleaned up.
13. Are property naming conventions consistent? When you see "lead_source," "Lead Source," and "leadSource" in the same portal, you know there's no governance. Inconsistent naming makes automation brittle and search impossible.
14. Are dropdown property options up to date? Old product lines, deprecated service tiers, and former employee names sitting in dropdown options create dirty data every time someone fills out a form.
15. Are custom objects being used correctly? Custom objects are powerful but often misused. If a custom object has fewer than 50 records, ask whether it should be a property group or association label instead.
16. Are association labels defined and meaningful? Default associations don't tell you the nature of the relationship. "Primary contact" vs. "billing contact" vs. "decision maker" — these labels drive workflow logic and reporting accuracy.
17. Do deal pipeline stages match your actual sales process? A pipeline with 12 stages when your sales process has 5 meaningful steps creates friction. Each stage should represent a distinct, verifiable milestone. My sales pipeline guide covers how to design stages that match your actual sales process.
18. Are ticket statuses and pipelines reflecting support reality? If most tickets skip three statuses and jump from "New" to "Closed," your pipeline needs simplifying. For a full ticketing structure framework, read the Service Hub ticketing guide.
19. Are calculated properties still valid? Calculated properties that reference deleted or renamed fields silently break. Review them quarterly.
20. Is there a property creation approval process? Without one, every team creates their own properties, leading to the 200+ property mess from point 11. Someone should own the data model.
Section 3: Workflows and automation
21. How many active workflows exist? More isn't better. Portals with 100+ active workflows almost always have conflicts, redundancies, and workflows that fight each other.
22. Are there workflows with zero enrollments in the last 90 days? A workflow that hasn't enrolled anyone in three months is either obsolete or broken. Either fix it or turn it off.
23. Do any workflows conflict with each other? Two workflows that set the same property based on different criteria create race conditions. The result depends on which one fires first — that's not automation, it's a coin flip.
24. Are workflows documented? If the person who built the workflow left the company and nobody knows what it does, you have a maintenance risk. Every workflow should have a clear naming convention and an internal description.
25. Are there workflows that should be simple rules instead? A workflow that does one thing — like setting a property when a form is submitted — can often be replaced with a form field mapping or a simple automation rule. Don't use a workflow when a setting will do.
26. Are lead scoring models active and calibrated? A lead score that was set up two years ago with arbitrary point values is probably creating false positives. Compare your highest-scored leads against actual conversion rates.
27. Are nurture sequences still relevant? Check the content in your active sequences. If the emails reference outdated products, old pricing, or events from last year, they're hurting more than helping.
28. Do workflows have proper error handling? What happens when a workflow action fails? If there's no fallback or notification, failures go unnoticed until someone asks why leads aren't being assigned.
29. Are suppression lists up to date? Suppression lists that include former competitors, old test contacts, or outdated domains need regular review. Over-suppression means missing legitimate leads.
30. Is there a workflow for lead assignment? Manual lead assignment is slow and inconsistent. If your best leads wait in a queue until someone notices them, you're losing deals. Automated assignment based on territory, round-robin, or lead score is table stakes.
Section 4: Reporting and dashboards
31. Do dashboards answer specific business questions? A dashboard titled "Marketing Overview" with 15 unrelated charts helps nobody. Each dashboard should answer one question: "How is pipeline this quarter?" or "What's our email performance?"
32. How many reports are unused? Check which reports haven't been viewed in 90 days. Delete them. Report clutter makes it harder to find the reports that matter.
33. Are attribution reports configured? If you can't answer "which channel drives the most revenue," your attribution model is either missing or misconfigured. This is the foundation of marketing budget decisions.
34. Do sales reports reflect actual pipeline health? A pipeline report that shows $2M in deals but doesn't account for deal age, stage velocity, or probability weighting gives a dangerously optimistic view.
35. Are custom report filters accurate? Filters referencing deprecated properties or old team structures return wrong data silently. Review filters on your top 10 reports.
36. Is there a single source of truth for key metrics? If marketing, sales, and leadership each have their own dashboard showing different revenue numbers, trust in the CRM collapses. Agree on definitions and build from one dataset.
37. Are campaign tracking UTMs consistent? Inconsistent UTM parameters create fragmented analytics. "spring-campaign," "Spring_Campaign," and "springcampaign2026" are three separate line items in your reports when they should be one.
38. Are goals set up and tracked? HubSpot's goal tool is underused. Without defined goals, there's no benchmark for performance — every metric is just a number without context.
39. Is funnel reporting configured correctly? A funnel report that shows contacts moving from "Subscriber" to "Customer" without the stages in between hides where you're actually losing people.
40. Do reports load in under 10 seconds? Reports that take 30+ seconds to load don't get used. If your reports are slow, the underlying data queries are probably too broad. Add date filters and narrow the scope.
Section 5: Governance and compliance
41. Who has admin access? If more than 3-4 people have super admin rights, you have a governance problem. Every admin can delete data, change settings, and break workflows — intentionally or by accident.
42. Are user roles and permissions configured? Default permissions give too much access. Sales reps don't need to edit global settings. Marketers don't need to delete contacts. Configure roles that match actual job functions.
43. Is GDPR consent being tracked? If you're marketing to EU contacts, every record needs a documented legal basis for communication. Check that your forms collect consent properly and that consent data is stored on the contact record.
44. Are data retention policies defined? How long do you keep inactive contacts? Closed-lost deals? Old tickets? Without a policy, data accumulates indefinitely — increasing storage costs and compliance risk.
45. Is there an audit trail for critical changes? When someone deletes a workflow or changes a deal stage requirement, can you see who did it and when? HubSpot's audit logs exist but most teams never check them.
46. Are integrations documented and monitored? Every active integration is a potential point of failure. List them, document what they sync, and check for sync errors monthly. The integration nobody remembers installing is usually the one that breaks.
47. Is there an onboarding process for new CRM users? New hires who learn HubSpot by trial and error create bad data from day one. A documented onboarding process — even a 30-minute training video — prevents months of cleanup.
48. Are connected email accounts active and synced? Reps who disconnected their email months ago aren't logging conversations. Your timeline is incomplete, and you don't know it.
49. Is there a change management process? When someone wants to add a pipeline stage, create a new workflow, or change a property — is there a process? Or does everyone just do it? A simple approval flow prevents the chaos that makes audits necessary in the first place.
50. When is the next audit scheduled? An audit isn't a one-time event. CRM entropy is constant — data degrades, processes drift, and teams evolve. Schedule a quarterly check against this list. The first audit finds the problems. The recurring audits prevent them from coming back.
How to use this checklist
Don't try to fix everything at once. Run through all 50 items and score each one: green (fine), yellow (needs attention), red (broken). Prioritize reds first, then work through yellows over the next quarter. Some items take five minutes to check. Others will uncover projects that take weeks. That's normal — better to know now than to discover it mid-optimization when the cost of change is ten times higher.
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