// Audit
Free CRM Audit
You pay for your CRM every month. This is a free 45-minute call. You share your screen, walk us through your CRM, and we talk you through what's actually in it: how much of the database is dead weight, whether the pipeline reflects anything real, how much selling never makes it into the system at all, and how many seats you're buying for people who don't open it.
Ahoy runs these, and they're delivered by one of our founders. There's nothing to sign, availability is limited, and the written summary is yours either way.
Start with your system
The specifics differ enough by platform that it's worth going straight to the right one.
| Your CRM | What the audit focuses on |
|---|---|
| HubSpot audit | Seat and tier fit against real logins, credit-metered AI usage, workflow debt, and how much activity is genuinely being captured. |
| Salesforce audit | Configuration sprawl, custom fields and objects nothing writes to, license fit, and the admin or agency work the configuration is generating. |
| Something else | Pipedrive, Attio, Folk, Close, or a spreadsheet that outgrew itself. Book the same slot and tell us which system you're on. |
What a CRM data and pipeline audit covers
Whatever you're running, the problems land in the same five buckets.
| Area | The question it answers |
|---|---|
| Data hygiene | How many duplicate, unowned, and long-dormant records are in there, and how much of the database is effectively dead weight. |
| Pipeline integrity | Whether the pipeline reflects reality - deals with no next step, close dates in the past, and stages nothing moves through. |
| Capture and adoption | What share of real selling activity ever reaches the CRM, and which people are carrying the logging burden. |
| Automation debt | What is still running that nobody remembers building, and what it is doing to records today. |
| Cost fit | What you are paying for against what is being used - seats, licenses, and tier features. |
Everyone expects the data hygiene findings. Cost fit is the one that tends to change the conversation, because few teams have added up the seats belonging to people who never open the system.
CRM audit checklist
If you would rather run a first pass yourself, this is the order we work in on the call. Each item is a count or a list you can pull from reports or an export in an afternoon. Write the number down before you look at the next one; the point is to compare what the system says with what the team believes.
- Duplicates. Export contacts and companies and count records sharing an email address or a domain. Note which ones have activity on both copies, because those are the merges that will hurt.
- Unowned records. Filter for contacts, companies, and open deals with no owner, or owned by someone who has left. Every one is a relationship nobody is responsible for.
- Dormant records. Count records untouched in 90, 180, and 365 days. You are not deleting anything yet, only finding out how much of the database anyone still uses.
- Deals with no next step. List open deals with no scheduled task, meeting, or next-step field filled in. This is usually the fastest way to find the pipeline that is not really there.
- Close dates in the past. Count open deals whose expected close date has already gone by. Each one is either lost, late, or unloved, and the forecast is counting all three as live.
- Stages nothing moves through. For each stage, check when a deal last entered it. A stage no deal has entered this quarter is a definition the team stopped using.
- Captured versus actual activity. Take one rep's calendar and sent mail for a week and compare it with what the CRM shows for the same week. The gap is the part of your selling the system cannot see.
- Automations nobody owns. List every workflow, sequence, and integration that writes to records, with who built it and when it last ran. Anything that fires without an owner is changing your data unsupervised.
- Seats against logins. Put the paid seat count next to the list of people who signed in during the last 30 days. Then check the tier: which paid features does anyone actually use?
- The question the data cannot answer. Ask one real question, say "which deals over a certain size have gone quiet this month," and time how long the CRM takes to answer it. If the answer is a spreadsheet, that is a finding too.
Any one of these will tell you something. Run all ten and you have most of the audit; book the call if you want a second pair of eyes on what the numbers mean.
What you get
A written summary afterwards: what we found, what it's costing, and what we'd address first. It's just as useful if you act on it with your existing admin, or not at all.
An honest note on who is offering this
Ahoy is an AI-native CRM. It captures email, calls and meetings automatically instead of asking reps to log them, then prepares the next moves for one-tap approval. That is the product we sell, so we are not a neutral party here and will not pretend to be. Two things follow from that, and both work in your favor.
We don't sell clean-up work, so there's no project at the end to inflate the findings into. And a lot of what turns up is fixable where you already are, which we'll say plainly when it's true.
If you're weighing an actual move and not a clean-up, the switching guide and the comparisons get at that more directly than an audit would.
Frequently asked questions
What is a CRM audit? A review of what's actually in your CRM instead of what it was set up to hold. Five areas: data hygiene (duplicates, unowned records, anything dormant), pipeline integrity (deals with no next step, close dates already in the past), capture (how much selling never reaches the system), automation debt (what's still running that nobody remembers building), and cost fit (seats and licenses against real usage).
Who does CRM audits? Three kinds of people, and they differ mostly in what comes after. RevOps consultancies and CRM implementation partners run the deepest audits and bill for them, and the findings usually become a clean-up project they quote for. Your CRM vendor's own services team knows the platform best, but its advice stays inside that product. And some vendors, us included, run short free audits because a clear view of your CRM is a good start to a conversation about ours; the note above says what that means for how you read the findings.
How do I do a CRM health check? Count things instead of relying on impressions. Duplicate and unowned records. Records untouched in 90, 180 and 365 days. Deals with no next step or a close date in the past. Stages nothing moves through. Automations that haven't fired in months. Paid seats against who actually logs in. The numbers usually disagree with what the team believes about the system.
How much does a CRM audit cost? Consultancies charge for one, because the audit is how they sell you the clean-up project afterwards. Ours is free and takes 45 minutes, and you get it written up. We don't do clean-up work, so there's nothing to sell you into.
What's the most common thing an audit finds? Most teams expect the data hygiene problems, and they're usually right. Cost fit is the one that tends to change the conversation: seats and licenses belonging to people who rarely or never sign in, plus tier features being paid for and not used.
Do I have to switch CRM afterwards? No. Most of what an audit turns up is fixable in the system you already have, and taking the list to your admin or your implementation partner is a perfectly good outcome. It's a diagnostic, not a commitment.
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