Cookbook
Find out what your CRM is missing
Everybody audits their CRM for what is wrong in it. Almost nobody audits it for what is simply not there, which is the half that quietly decides whether a number can be defended.
The situation
A CRM does not usually fail by holding something false. It fails by holding nothing at all in the places you assumed were filled: the accounts with no owner, the deals with no close date, the customers nobody has spoken to since spring. None of it looks wrong on the screen, because empty never does.
This is the pass that turns absence into a list. It takes ten minutes and it is the same ten minutes every month.
What must be true when you are done
- You know how many records have no owner, by type.
- You know what that unowned work is worth, rather than how many rows it is.
- You know which accounts have gone quiet, and for how long.
- You have an order to fix them in, rather than a wall of exceptions.
Ask for the gaps, one type at a time
Ask for records where a field you rely on is empty. The workspace answers per type, so ask about the three that matter and stop.
You
Agent
Three companies is a morning's work. Eighteen contacts is a different kind of problem and probably not one worth solving by hand, which is the judgment the counts let you make before you start.
Ask what the gap is worth, not how big it is
Two unowned deals sounds like nothing. This is the question that decides whether it is:
You
Agent
The unowned row is not an error state and it is not hidden. It is a row, with a total, sitting in the same report as everybody else. That is the number that gets the gap fixed, because sixty thousand dollars on nobody's list is a sentence a sales manager reacts to and "two records" is not.
Every owner gets their own row, labelled with whoever that owner is. The run above was driven by API credentials rather than by people, so each row says so; where a person owns the account, the row carries their name.
Ask what has gone quiet
The other kind of absence is time. Nothing is missing from the record; it is just that nothing has happened to it.
You
Agent
Zero is the right answer for a workspace a week old, and it is worth running anyway on your first pass. A report you have never seen return nothing is a report you cannot read: when it comes back with fourteen accounts in March you will want to already know what the shape of it looks like when things are fine.
What you can and cannot ask this way
Gap questions work against the fields the workspace keeps ready to answer on: owner, lifecycle, stage, amount, close date, when it last changed. Ask about something outside that set and you get told so, along with the list of what you could have asked instead. That refusal is the fastest way to learn the shape of the question, so it is worth triggering deliberately once rather than reading a reference page.
Verify it
- The counts should move between runs. If the unowned count is identical next month, nothing you did last month stuck, which is a more useful thing to learn than the count itself.
- Check the unowned total against the pipeline total. If unowned is a meaningful fraction of your quarter, this pass is not housekeeping and should not be scheduled like it.
- Run it before a forecast, not after. A forecast that silently excludes unowned deals and one that silently includes them are different numbers, and you should know which you are about to say out loud.
Run it again
Monthly, and once more the day before any number goes to somebody who will remember it. The fix for most of what it finds is one pass that sets an owner on everything at once, which is the next recipe rather than a different afternoon.