CRM adoption health check

Why run this

What this checklist is for

A CRM that fee earners experience as administration will be filled in at the last possible moment with the least possible thought, and the forecast will be built on that.

Every question below is answerable by watching somebody use the system for twenty minutes. Most firms have never done that.

Run it with

Managing partner or sales director

And with

CRM administrator

And with

Three or four fee earners who use it daily

The checklist

20 checks, in the order we would run them

Tick only what you can genuinely evidence today. An item you intend to do is not an item you have done, and scoring yourself generously here only produces a comfortable number and an uncomfortable project.

Section 1

Data quality

What determines whether anything downstream is worth reading.

Opportunities are updated within a week of something actually changingCheck the modified dates against real events. Batch updates the day before a pipeline meeting are the tell.
Close dates move for genuine reasons, not to avoid a red flagA date pushed a month at a time, repeatedly, is a deal nobody wants to declare lost.
Fewer than eight fields are mandatory on an opportunityEvery mandatory field is a tax on accuracy. We routinely reduce firms from nineteen to six.
Contact records are deduplicated and currentThree records for the same person means three partial relationship histories and no complete one.
Lost opportunities carry a recorded reasonLoss reasons are the most useful data in a CRM and the least often captured.

Section 2

Usability

The half that decides whether people use it at all.

Activity is captured automatically from Outlook and TeamsIf somebody has to retype what they already did, they will do it selectively or not at all.
A seller can update an opportunity from a phone in under a minuteTime it. If it takes three, updates happen on Friday afternoon from memory.
The sales process configured matches how the firm genuinely sellsA process imported from a template describes somebody else's business and will be worked around.
Fee earners can find what they need without trainingWatch somebody look for a client's history. If they open three screens, the design is wrong.
Practice-specific differences are accommodated rather than overriddenLitigation and corporate do not sell the same way. Forcing one process produces compliance in one practice and abandonment in the other.

Section 3

Management use

Manager behaviour predicts adoption better than any configuration choice.

Pipeline reviews are run from the CRM, not from a spreadsheetIf leadership works from a spreadsheet, sellers correctly conclude the CRM does not matter.
Forecast is derived from data rather than agreed in a meetingA negotiated number cannot produce explainable variance, which is why nobody can explain the variance.
Stage probabilities reflect historic conversion, not optimismDerive them from four quarters of actual conversion. Probabilities set by feel are systematically wrong in one direction.
Managers coach from the data rather than only inspecting itInspection produces defensive data entry. Coaching produces useful data entry.
Reports somebody actually reads exist, and unused ones have been retiredCheck usage metrics. Most CRM estates carry a long tail of reports nobody has opened in a year.

Section 4

Connection to delivery

The professional services difference most firms never instrument.

Opportunities carry the roles and dates they will requirePipeline is a resource demand forecast as well as a revenue forecast. Treating it as only the second is why sales commits to dates delivery cannot meet.
Resourcing can see probable work, not only confirmed workSoft booking against weighted pipeline is what lets a firm plan rather than react.
Won opportunities flow into delivery without re-keyingRe-keying a won deal is both a waste and a source of divergence between what was sold and what is delivered.
Sales and resourcing meet weekly from the same viewThe tooling only enables the conversation. Without the meeting nothing changes.
Client relationships are visible across the firm, not owned by individualsA relationship recorded only in one partner's memory is a risk on the day they leave.

What your score means

Read this against the number above

These bands are deliberately blunt. The middle band is where most organizations honestly sit, and it is a perfectly reasonable place to proceed from — provided the gaps are written down with owners rather than carried as optimism.

0–59%Significant gaps

Do not proceed yet. More than four in ten items are unaddressed, and the ones that fail here are usually the foundational ones that make everything after them harder.

60–84%Mostly ready, with known gaps

Proceed on a defined scope, with the outstanding items written into the plan as risks with owners and dates. This is the most common honest position.

85–100%Ready

The remaining gaps are small enough to handle during delivery rather than before it. Confirm the unticked items are genuinely minor rather than simply unexamined.

Your score highlights automatically as you tick items above. Nothing is saved, sent or tracked — refreshing the page clears it.

Closing the gaps

If you could not tick these, start here

The four items below are the ones whose absence causes the most trouble downstream. If your unticked items include any of these, they are worth addressing before the rest.

Too many mandatory fields

Justify each one individually and remove the rest. This single change usually improves data quality more than any training programme.

Reviews run from a spreadsheet

Change this first. It is a management behaviour, it costs nothing, and it determines whether everything else works.

No Outlook integration

It is the highest-value configuration available and the most commonly skipped. Fee earners will not switch applications.

Pipeline carries no resource demand

Add role and expected start to the opportunity. It is a small change that typically produces more value than the forecast improvement it comes with.

Want a second opinion on your score?

We will run this health check with your sellers rather than about them, and tell you which two or three changes would actually move adoption.

Talk through your result Read the related guides We reply to every message within one business day.

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What this checklist is for

Run it with

And with

And with

20 checks, in the order we would run them

Data quality

Usability

Management use

Connection to delivery

Read this against the number above

If you could not tick these, start here

Too many mandatory fields

Reviews run from a spreadsheet

No Outlook integration

Pipeline carries no resource demand

Want a second opinion on your score?

Related checklists

Semantic model health check

Cloud operating model readiness

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